Audacity Forum

BTW, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS has just been released - it may be worth trying to fix this before upgrading (it's a very big update).

I've just upgraded to 8.04 and done a "stock install" of Audacity 1.3.4

It seems like the folk at Ubuntu have been working hard to get Audacity working with JACk.

Well it does work with JACK, but not perfectly. My preliminary findings are that it starts JACK when it loads, but there seems to still be a compatibility problem with "Jack Control". Also, as you report, the "Audio Device Info" reports nothing. It seems that there are a few problems with the current build of Audacity in the Ubuntu Repo's, but here's a brief outline of how I've got it to wok on my machine (if I get a better solution I'll post it on this board).

Start "Jack Control" (install with "Synaptic" if you've not got it already).
Set up the "Sample Rate" as required (recommend 44100 or 48000 Hz)
If necessary, adjust the "Buffers" and any other settings required to get JACK running smoothly. (don't be too ambitious with the "latency", you can optimize this later - at the moment we just want it to run, so use a moderately high "Buffers/frame" setting - try the default settings first.

Once "Jack Control" is able to start without errors and without more than a couple of "Xruns" at start-up:

Shut down JACK and close Jack Control

Open Audacity, and in "Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O" set the recording and playback devices to JACK.
In "Edit > Preferences > Quality" st the sample rate to the same as you used in Jack Control set-up.
Close Audacity and restart it from a terminal window (type "audacity" - without quotes)
Check in the terminal window that there are not loads of Xruns - if there are, then you will need to shut down Audacity, go back to Jack Control Set-up, and increase the "Buffers/frame" setting (also, if there are noticeable "drop outs"in playback or recording, the same solution applies).

Audacity should now be working, and you will be able to start it from the normal start menu.

When I import my music, I try to play it back but it just sounds all fuzzy, like when you put on a radio without any signal. I can't play back my music and the programme is beginning to really get on my nerves, as it's not letting me do anything on it, apart from put music in but I just can't play the music back.
But now, I'm experiencing another problem. I can't even import the musc that I try to. A message appears saying " (the music I've tried importing) is an Advanced Audio Coding file. Audacity cannot open this type of file. You need to convert it to a supported audio format".
I don't have a clue what any of that means, and I'm really confused.
Also, when I try to play the music which it won't let me, it says "Error while playing sound device. Please check the output settings and the project sample rate.".
If somebody could help me, I would be so grateful.

What is your set-up Ladybiird10?
What version of Linux? What version of Audacity? Is Audacity a standard install from the repository, or have you installed it by some other means? What Mixer are you using (ALSA?). Does your sound system work with other programs? Can you play MP3's in other programs? Anything else that we need to know?

I hope it's not too late to make a comment here?

I've had a very similar problem (not being able to playback what I have recorded), but without getting any error message. I'm using OpenSuSE 11.0 on an Intel Celeron 2.8GHz mobo, with a Creative Labs SB Live! 24 bit 7.1 PCI sound card. This card is identified by ALSA as a CA0106. I'm using Audacity 1.3.5 beta

Audacity is an important application for me (I don't know of a functionally comparable or more robust application to record music off FM). Because it is important to me, I have invested a lot of time in reading widely, posting to the OpenSuSE forums and trying things out for the past 4 weeks. I can now get recordingds created and played back reliably, but it has been incredibly hard work for somebody new to Linux. It really should not have been necessary - it was a torture. I therefore have experienced many of the frustrations expressed by others in this thread.

The answer appears to be - for the above configuration only I must stress - to stop PulseAudio from running. I had to create a start up 'action' (is that the right word?) to "killall pulseaudio" at startup. I have to set both recording and playback device to "ALSA CA0106: CA0106 (hw:0,0)' - a text string which means nothing to the typical Audacity users, I beleive.

I will probably discover that some other applications that I would like will not now work, but Audacity will have to take priority. This does not seem like a mature or stable system - where 2 applications are mutually exclusive. I don't think I ever found that with Windows.

I hope this design 'characteristic' can be changed, real soon.

XEyedBear wrote:I've had a very similar problem (not being able to playback what I have recorded), but without getting any error message. I'm using OpenSuSE 11.0... The answer appears to be - for the above configuration only I must stress - to stop PulseAudio from running... I will probably discover that some other applications that I would like will not now work, but Audacity will have to take priority. This does not seem like a mature or stable system - where 2 applications are mutually exclusive. I don't think I ever found that with Windows... I hope this design 'characteristic' can be changed, real soon.

It's a limitation imposed by the configuration of your operating system, not an Audacity restriction.
From http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... nux_Issues:
"For normal playback, the correct device to use on out-of-the-box ALSA setups is Dmix . This provides software mixing and resampling of multiple streams as found on other operating systems, and is a good alternative sound server (better for example than ESD ). For ALSA 1.0.9rc2 and higher you don't need to setup Dmix - it is enabled as default for sound cards which don't support hardware mixing."

This should be a solution with Audacity Beta on any Linux distribution.

Gale

I have been getting the errors. "There was an error initializing the audio i/o layer. You will not be able to play or record audio." & "Error while opening sound device. Please check the input device settings and the project sample rate." , but not at the same time. When I examine "Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O", the only device shown id /dev/dsp

This is Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop 5.3 with "Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801H (ICH8 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) Subsystem: Lenovo ThinkPad T61"

Audacity 1.3.0-beta

Anyone have some thoughts.

Do you have ALSA installed and working?

yes ALSA is working.

Can you install a more up to date version of Audacity? The current version is 1.3.7

Do you know how to build from the source code? If so, the current development version is 1.3.8 alpha, and has some additional bug fixes since the 1.3.7 release.

[Edit] Can Fedora packages be installed on Redhat? Just found this: http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/buil ... ldID=94449