Hi I am using Audacity 2.0.3 on Kubuntu 13.04. Audacity sometimes play certain songs way too fast, with weird noises, but at other times plays just fine. And the same song sometimes is played nicely and sometimes the weird way. Also I have not detected any pattern whatsoever as to when or why a song may be playing weird. Any help would be welcome… 
Audacity translates compressed music files it doesn’t understand into speed changes. You can usually get around this by installing the FFMpeg software.
You’ll need to pick out the right one yourself. They change with the Linux version.
Koxz
If Audacity was installed from the Ubuntu repository then it should have automatically installed the correct version of ffmpeg (because Libav is listed as a dependency).
What files? Are the files that show this problem all of the same file type?
Do some files consistently play correctly?
What sort of audio device are you playing through?
Something like this is happening to my main box which has Gnome Ubuntu 13.10, when i import any mp3 into Audacity.
Playhead moves at about 5 times speed but i can tell the sound out the speakers is not simply what that would represent.
Hitting the stop button crashes the app requiring a force quit.
I have tried totally removing and reinstalling audacity 2.0.3 and audacity-data and also reinstalling the entire OS without luck.
On my spare box i installed the Unity Desktop version of Ubuntu 13.10 and then switched it to Gnome Desktop and strangely Audacity works fine.
I’d rather avoid this long winded method though.
On both my main and spare box searching the Ubuntu repo using the term ffmpeg gets 65 packages, 3 of which are currently installed :
chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra version 31.0.1650.63-Oubuntu0.13.10.1~20131204.1 on buggy main box
version 30.0.1599.114-Oubuntu0.13.10.2 on stable spare box
gstreamer0.10-ffmpeg version 0.10.13.5
gstreamer1.0-libav version 1.0.10-lubuntu1
Anyone have an idea what should be added to this list, i imagine it is nothing to do with the chromium codecs differences ?
That sounds similar to the problem described here: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/playback-with-pulseaudio-on-ubuntu/31676/1
That problem was finally resolved (see the second page of that topic).
Thanks for the quick response, i’ve tried a couple of things :
- Changing the output device from pulse to one of the hw options or to default.
- As of the thread you linked to, pasting ‘tsched=0’ into what looks like the udev string of /etc/pulse/default.pa
so the relevent bit looks like :
Automatically load driver modules depending on the hardware available
.ifexists module-udev-detect.so
load-module module-udev-detect
.else
tsched=0
however the the problem persists, intermittently as it sometimes briefly plays properly.
There was also an odd error once saying the temporary file could not be found but
i checked and it was there at /var/tmp/audacity-##
I should add that whereas my ordinary player, audacious, works okay, my speakers are generally
suspiciously noisy, particularly if the mouse is moved, although this is true for both the buggy and stable box.
ETA : As of 03 Jan 014 major software updates/bugfixes seems to have Audacity 2.0.3 running normally on my box (Gnome Ubuntu 13.10 X86 64bit on Gigabyte GAMA78G-DS3H mobo, dual core CPU).
After about an hour i got it to work!!
I really don’t know the exact cause but i think it is to do with the fact that the file hast to have 48000 hz or above
So i found this on command on another post which fixed it:env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=1 audacity
If you enter that into a terminal it will open The fixed audacity for you!
To make life easier I made a file in Gedit and put that command in it. I then saved it in my Home folder as audacity.
So when I want to open audacity up i open the terminal and type ./audacity