mixer toolbar does not work

[rwrouns]

have a Gigabyte main board with AMD64 processor and integrated sound. I have installed Ubuntu 7.04 and all available updates, as well as Audacity 1.2.6. I am able to record and playback successfully but I have to use the ALSA mixer that comes with Ubuntu since the mixer toolbar in Audacity does not work. There is no input selector and the sliders do not control volume. Since I am new to Linux, can someone suggest a simple way to get the mixer toolbar working? It's a bit of a nuisance to have to use the other mixer to control source and levels.

There is a second issue FWIW. When I use Audacity to playback a just recorded track, there is random popping suggesting a data drop of some kind. However, if I export the track to a WAV file and use another app to play it back, it sounds fine. Any suggestions?

[steve]

Unfortunately, the mixer control in Audacity is only supported by some audio devices/drivers and it appears that your is not one of them. For all other audio devices/drivers you must use an external mixer application (such as ALSA mixer, QAmix, etc.) This is not really an Audacity bug as such, it is more of a limitation of the hardware/driver combination.

there is random popping suggesting a data drop of some kind.

That is probably what is happening. The standard Linux kernel gives rather low priority to audio and Audacity frequently struggles to run smoothly. For this reason there are Linux kernels that are optimised for audio which perform very much better.

Installing the low-latency kernel will provide substantially improved audio performance (and is very easy to do using Synaptic). If you intend to do a lot of music/audio work, you should consider Ubuntu Studio which uses the rt-kernel and has vastly improved performance with audio apps.

There is a lot of information about both the low-latency and real-time kernels available on the Ubuntu forum.

[rwrouns]

That was very helpful information. Thanks.