Recording with an Audigy 2 ZS in Linux

[jpod]

I am trying to record using a Creative Audigy 2 ZS Notebook PCMCIA card on Ubuntu.
I know, its quite a mouth full, but I'm almost there.
The sound card installs fine, ALSA recognizes it, and I can even successfully playback projects through the Audigy card. I am running 1.2.6 on Ubuntu Feisty.
But when I try to record, setting the device to "ALSA: Audigy ... Mic Capture", I immediately get the following error: "Error while opening sound device. Please check the input device settings and the project sample rate."
If I choose other devices for the input, some will return the same error, while others will record a very loud, distorted machine noise.
So does anyone have any advice on how I can get this working properly? I'm thinking the solution will have nothing to do with Audacity, but I wanted to ask.

Many thanks,
Justin

[jpod]

Thought I'd resurrect this to see if anyone had any ideas.
-Justin

[kozikowski]

Audio in a Linux machine is considered serious black magic. Last time I called the help desk with failed Linux audio , I couldn't get an answer. I went down to the office and there wasn't anybody in the room. The coffee cups were still warm and the cursors were still flashing, and the papers were just settling to the floor, but it's as if a saucer came down and scooped them all up with a sparkly beam of light.

Maybe somebody tipped them off.

"Koz has a Linux Audio Question. Flee, Flee!"

I know one or two things about kmix, but past that, it's gray haze. Last time one of the Linux artists wanted to make a live audio recording it took four of us three hours to get it to work reliably. She'll never do that again.

Sorry.

Koz

[jawrat]

hahaha, if anyone ever gets this straight, i think i'll run outside and check for airborne swine....

[jpod]

Ok, Well thanks for the replies.
I guess I'll hack away at it a little more, but I know it's just prolonging the inevitable Windows.

I'll try to warn you about the flying pigs.

[eightinches]

I too have not had any luck (and I've been trying to do this for a long time).

If anyone has any suggestions or important info I should know, I would love to hear them.

Thanks

Alex
http://techno.fm

[richardash1981]

Most sound cards will work fine out of the box on Linux (at least, the last 6 machines I installed, all with consumer cards, did). You do need a mixer application that works and understands all the features on your card. The only one I've found that really does is alsamixer from the alsa-utils package (which ought to, given as it's the same people as write the drivers!).

This won't directly solve the problem when recording though. I presume you mean that you set the Recording Device (in the Audacity Preferences) to ALSA: Audigy Mic Capture. This implies the card has a separate ADC for the mic input, which is quite plausible. In that case, it's likely to be mono (assuming the mic input is mono), and possibly only support a limitted range of sample rates.

So I would try swapping between 1 and 2 channel recording, and try the common native sample rates (44.1kHz, 48kHz, 92kHz) to see if any of them work - it's likely at least one combination will. If this is a pain, the you can in principal configure ALSA to resample the audio on the fly to enable you to record apparently at other sample rates and numbers of channels. It does this on the ALSA: default device automatically, but can be made to for others via ~/.asoundrc.

[alatham]

I, too, have had GNU/Linux audio trouble in the past. The only way I was able to get my sound card to work right was by getting JACK up and running (and that was a nightmare).