New Audacity on Kubuntu, does not work

Audacity 3 Help Forum
1

I have used Audacity for some years but now it won’t work. I work
under Kubuntu Linux. There are four menus, the left one gives
me one choice, ALSA. There used to be a choice of Codec, no
longer. So when I try to record, nothing happens. I record via
a Behringer digitiser gadget that plugs into a USB socket.
I tried uninstalling Audacity and re-installing it, no difference.
What can I do to make it work?

2

I do not understand the real question - however:

Connect (and switch on) the audio device(s) you want to use before starting Audacity - or use the “re-scan audio devices” command if you didn’t.

USB-connected devices usually identify themselves with mentioning “USB” in their name.

Uninstall/reinstall does nothing to your settings, they are stored elsewhere. On Windows somewhere in the %appdata% folder, on macOS in ~/Library/Application Support/audacity - Linux is probably similar.

3

I tried that, same thing. There are four input menu windows for
settings. The left-most one only has ALSA as choice. The next
one has a numbered list

  1. recording mono
  2. recording stereo
    followed by 3, 4, 5, … only the numbers.
    The next one is the same.
    The last one gives four choices:
    upmix
    vdownmix
    dmix
    default

None of these mention Codec, which I used to be able to choose.
Is this normal?

4

I should add, that the sound I am trying to record is from
the laptop itself, playing a Youtube piece of music. Can
that be the problem?

5

I’m a Window guy, but…

I should add, that the sound I am trying to record is from
the laptop itself, playing a Youtube piece of music. Can
that be the problem?

That does make a difference. It’s “normal” to record/digitize the analog input to your soundcard but capturing what’s coming out of the soundcard requires some “tricks”.

There is information here about recording what’s playing on the computer. There are sections for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

6

I use Linux Mint myself and my plan B is to use Ocenaudio sometimes instead of Audacity. You could try that.
Mark B

7

That was the problem. I played the music, which came from
Youtube, on my phone, through an amplifier and digitaliser
and into the laptop via USB, and Audacity then worked fine.

8

Another suggestion is to install Clipgrab on your PC. With it you can download videos etc from YouTube. The really clever bit is being able to download only the audio part of a video by changing one setting in a drop-down menu. It’s much faster than recording in real-time.

9

I’m running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Do you have PulseAudio Volume Control? If so, I can record from a web browser with these settings:

In PulseAudio I set the playback device to my web browser, the recording device to Pipewire ALSA from Monitor of Built-in Audio Analogue Stereo, and you MUST turn down Pipewire ALSA playback to zero, else you’ll have a howl-round. You need to be actually recording in Audacity to see and change the recording settings in PulseAudio.

In Audacity, under Audio Setup I have Host: ALSA, Playback device: pipewire, Recording Device: pipewire.

Hope this helps.

10

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