Hi, I’ve recently started using Audacity and encountered some issues that appear to be caused by a bug.
I use a Presonus Firebox audio interface; it’s a bit old and I’ve used it for a number of years now. For reasons I’m not aware of, installing the interface back in the day created several input and output devices on my machine that have identical names. It’s just always been that way and it’s never led to any problems before now.
The issue I had was when trying to select the appropriate devices in Audacity, it would list all the devices on my machine but when I tried to select the correct one from the identically named ones, Audacity appears to have actually only selected the first one that appears. Thus, I couldn’t get it working on the correct device(s).
The basis for this assumption is that when I went into the device manager in Windows and disabled all the other “clones” besides the correct ones that I use, Audacity started working properly through the correct devices. This solves my problem, but I wanted to report the bug in case it wasn’t known.
Thanks for the report - useful information, and glad to hear that you’ve found a solution.
I doubt that this is something that the Audacity developers can fix, as it sounds like it’s a problem with the Presonus Firebox Windows 7 drivers (each port should be uniquely identified). Perhaps a driver update would fix it, but given that you are using an obsolete version of Windows, and have an effective workaround, I don’t think it’s worth the risk - if it’s not broken, don’t fix it
I’m not sure whether or not that is the case. What I can say is I haven’t had problems with other applications (i.e. I can select the appropriate devices and they work), and also it just so happens that the Firebox isn’t the only driver in my system creating identically named audio devices.
This is from a GTX 970. I haven’t tested these with Audacity to see if the same issue occurs (or ever used these outputs actually).
As far as updating drivers, I agree with what you’re saying, but also you should know that the hardware is more obsolete than Windows 7. In fact I have the latest drivers and they don’t have drivers for this device for any version of Windows later than 7.
One more thing I think I should mention. I found another post while searching for solutions where someone had mentioned doing a similar fix to what I did. At the time I didn’t think their problem was the same as mine but I think seeing this is what led me to try it. This might suggest it’s not ONLY me who’s encountered this issue, old hardware or not.
It’s also possible the actual nature of the problem isn’t what I supposed it to be (identically named devices). That was just a logical conclusion I made.
Although each of the highlighted devices are “HDA Intel PCH: HDMI”, they are enumerated so that they all have unique identities.
Windows GUI may just be showing the base name and not the full name.
In general, if you see the same device appearing several times on the devices list on the device manager of your OS, it clearly means that it is not an Audacity issue. It can also happen with the HDMI ports which can also transmit sound, they appear cloned in the sound devices list, until you disable the whole device from the device manager of Windows, and there is no way to manage that behavior from Audacity.
