Help config/troubleshooting audacity with delta 44

[usernamenumber]

Hello all,

I'm a recording noob who is trying to migrate my audio drama group's recording setup from a (now dead) Windows machine to one of my Linux machines. We are using an M-Audio Delta 44. In Audacity under Edit->Preferences->Audio I/O, I have selected "Alsa: M Audio Delta 44: ICE1712" with 4 channels as my recording device and in the main Audacity interface selected IEC958 Multi:0 from the mic dropdown. However, when I click record, nothing comes up on the visual monitor for the mic levels and no sound gets recorded (waveform just stays flat). I've tried other selections in the preferences and mic dropdowns with no change.

Does anyone know what else I should be doing? I've gone into alsamixer and all of the capture sources seem to be enabled. I'm using Fedora 8, so maybe there's some kind of weird PulseAudio issue?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[richardash1981]

Don't try to do a high dive before you can swim. In other words, get single channel recording working before you try anything complex.

The fact that you have an entry in the audacity preferences means you probably have the right drivers loaded to detect that card. What other options do you have in that drop-down list? On the mixer toolbat (in the main window) I think it's unlikely you want IEC958 selected unless you are trying to use the SPDIF (digital) input on the card, in which case you probably wouldn't get 4 channels of input. According to the ALSA wiki page for the driver module (http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/Ice1712) you need something rather more powerful to configure this card than the standard ALSA mixer commands. The relevant tool is envy24control (http://alsa.opensrc.org/index.php/Envy24control), which is in the alsa-utils package. This should let you find the appropriate input(s) and route them to be recorded.

[usernamenumber]

I blew away audacity's configuration so it would do everything as per defaults and now it wants to use "H/W: Multi 0" when I tell Audacity to use the Delta 44. However, when I start recording, I still get nothing. I've run envy24control and don't see anything on the graphical monitor (any of them) when I tap my mic. I tried fiddling with volume levels and with the patchbay, which connects "H/W Out 1" to "PCM Out 1" and "H/W Out 2" to "PCM Out 2" by default but still no luck.

Any other ideas?

[richardash1981]

In detail, no. I think what you are reporting suggests that the problem is somewhere in envy24control and ALSA rather than audacity. Unfortunately I don't have access to any related sound card, so I can't offer much advice, except that I would expect to be able to get the microphone routed through the sound card to it's meters and out of the outputs (without reference to audacity). I would suggest getting this working before trying to record into audacity.

If the only default routes set up in the patch bay are the ones you describe, then my guess (based on info on the web) would be that you need to route the analogue input you are using to an ADC, and turn up both the analogue gain before the ADC and the digital gain after it to get a signal through.