Input Volume Control

[JWD]

Was using 1.3.11 (Fedora 12) and could not control input volume (it was greyed out and hard to the right). All connections were correct and could record and play back. Finally returned to 1.3.9 and had no problems other than the right and left were no longer balanced (seems to be an ALSA problem). All Audacity versions were Fedora downloads. Does 1.3.12 fix the problem? Great program by the way.
Regards
John

[Gale Andrews]

Was using 1.3.11 (Fedora 12) and could not control input volume (it was greyed out and hard to the right). All connections were correct and could record and play back. Finally returned to 1.3.9 and had no problems other than the right and left were no longer balanced (seems to be an ALSA problem). All Audacity versions were Fedora downloads. Does 1.3.12 fix the problem?

No. In 1.3.10 and later the input volume slider will be disabled (greyed out on maximum volume) if it doesn't have proper control of the system slider. Please read the Mixer Toolbar page in the Manual:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... er_Toolbar

This was done because if Audacity does not have proper control of the system slider, adjusting the Audacity slider won't actually stop clipping if the system slider is set too high. All the Audacity slider will do is scale down the distorted signal - it will be quieter, but still distorted.

Either try another recording device in the Audacity Devices Preferences, or use the input gain control in ALSAMixer instead.

To give Audacity control of the system slider, you could investigate if Linux-specific drivers are available for your sound device:
http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Updat ... ce_Drivers

1.3.12 will have a hover tooltip when the input slider is disabled.

Note you may also see this or other input/output slider problems if your Audacity playback and recording devices are set to the computer inbuilt sound device, and you also have an external audio device connected. That's a bug.



Gale

[bgravato]

There's a multitude of ways sound can be controlled on linux (alsa, oss, jack, esd, pulse, etc...), so things might be a little trickier than in other oses... I think the graying out of the input level meter might be a good thing for the reasons gale explained.

In my case it's grayed out too, but it doesn't bother me, since I'm using an external device which doesn't not have software controllable volume anyways (it's on the external device that I control the input gain). So I never spent anytime trying to figure that out... Nice to have the technical explanation though, thanks Gale.