How to troubleshoot recording stops after five minutes

Audacity 3 Help Forum GNU/Linux
1

I have a problem where audacity will stop recording after 5 or 6 minutes.
I’ve read through the FAQ but haven’t seen anything that applies to me.

The directory configured for temporary files has 7 GB of available space.

Is there a log to see what error occurred that stopped the recording?
I looked in Help > Diagnostics > Show Log but this doesn’t have any errors.

I’m running Kubuntu 18.04.4 and Audacity v2.2.1.

2

What is your recording device?

3

It is audio line in on a Dell PC. My choices are “default”, “pulse” or “HDA Intel PCH: ALC3220 Analog (hw: 1,0)”. My only choice for audio host is ALSA.
I just tried specifying HDA Intel but when I try to record most of the time it doesn’t start.
I did notice that when I went to change the volume on KDE mixer that the recording stopped.

To fill in more standard information, I installed Ubuntu’s version of Audacity.

4

Is there no “(hw: 0,0)” option?

If you shut down all audio applications,
then kill the KDE mixer,
then run:

pulseaudio -k

and then start Audacity,
do you get a “(hw: 0,0)” option?

5

No, there is no “(hw: 0,0)” option

Couldn’t find a kmix process to kill.
Tried killing pulseaudio (pulseaudio -k) but it kept restarting.

6

What do you get from the command

aplay -l

(that’s a lower case “L” at the end)

7

aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC3220 Analog [ALC3220 Analog]
Subdevices: 0/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

8

From your “aplay -l”

card 0: HDMI ...
card 1: PCH

Your default device is the HDMI device. Do you use HDMI audio? Do you use HDMI audio as your default audio out?

Have you customised your audio system in some way?

9

aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: HDMI [HDA Intel HDMI], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC3220 Analog [ALC3220 Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

10

Your default device is the HDMI device. Do you use HDMI audio? Do you use HDMI audio as your default audio out?

I don’t use HDMI audio. The only connection is the analog line out (on of the back the PC) out to speakers and analog mic in (on the front of the PC).
My monitor connection is currently VGA but otherwise I use DisplayPort (which I think is video only).

Have you customised your audio system in some way?

No. I don’t think so. How can I tell?

11

I was just checking that you hadn’t deliberately created a custom configuration for your audio devices. Clearly you haven’t :slight_smile:


I’m not sure exactly what is going on with your setup, but compare this (below). This is my laptop’s setting, which is a default configuration in Xubuntu 18.04 LTS.

$ aplay -l
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC269VC Analog [ALC269VC Analog]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 7: HDMI 1 [HDMI 1]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 8: HDMI 2 [HDMI 2]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 9: HDMI 3 [HDMI 3]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 10: HDMI 4 [HDMI 4]
Subdevices: 1/1
Subdevice #0: subdevice #0

Notice that it shows that I have similar hardware, but that on my machine the default device is:
card 0: PCH [HDA Intel PCH], device 0: ALC269VC Analog [ALC269VC Analog]

The key word is “Analog”. That’s the normal audio in/out of the laptop and it is the default device.
HDMI audio is connected to the laptop’s HDMI port, which is only used if I connect a second monitor that has built-in speakers.

I don’t know why your default device is not the analog audio in / out, but the fact that it isn’t looks wrong to me.



I found this post via a Google search: [SOLVED] Sound stops working after a few minutes / Multimedia and Games / Arch Linux Forums
I don’t know if their steps to fix the issue will be appropriate for your machine, so don’t blindly follow those steps. I’m just mentioning as there are some clear similarities:

  1. Their default card appeared to be set as HDMI.
  2. Their system appeared to work correctly for a few minutes and then stopped.
  3. The problem appears to have been fixed by changing the default device from HDMI to the analog device.

Unfortunately I don’t know enough about the sound system on KDE to guide you through this. I’d suggest that you see what you can find out about this via Google, and perhaps try asking on the Ubuntu forum.

One thing that you could try - see if the same problem occurs with kWave (https://docs.kde.org/trunk5/en/kdemultimedia/kwave/recording.html)
I expect that it will, but post back and let us know either way.