Audacity Forum

Its been a while since I have used Audacity but with the 1.3.12-beta I have notice two things "strange"

I cannot control the recording volume as on-hover there is a message "cannot control input level; use system mixer" this means I have to load the sound mixer application and adjust volume from here. I am sure it was not like this in the past - Is this a pulse audio thing ? How do I get control back into Audacity ?

The other thing just not working is the playback speed slider - it moves but the speed is not changed - this used to work I know !

I am running Audacity in Linux Mint 9 - Ubuntu 10.4 - and the same appears in Ubuntu studio 10.4 - should I ask the question in the Ubuntu/Mint forums ?

Any help greatly appreciated.

serfcx wrote:I am sure it was not like this in the past

I think you're right about that, but half the time it didn't work.
The sound system in Debian based Linux has been a rapidly moving target over the last few years, but at last it seems to be coming together. I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 which is probably similar to Mint 9 in that loading up the sound mixer application is a bit clunky - but at least it works! From what I've seen of Ubuntu 10.04, PulseAudio is integrated much better into the system and changing the recording settings via the mixer (in the panel) is really easy and convenient - not only that, but configuring the recording source is dead easy too.

serfcx wrote:How do I get control back into Audacity ?

You may be able to put control back in Audacity, but there's no guarantees that it will work and you will loose the added functionality that is provided by PulseAudio (such as being able to record sounds that are playing on your computer). To put the recording level control back into Audacity, go to Edit menu > Preferences > Devices and set the recording input explicitly as your sound card (for example hw:0,0)

serfcx wrote:The other thing just not working is the playback speed slider - it moves but the speed is not changed - this used to work I know !

The behaviour of the "Transcription" slider has been changed as the previous behaviour would cause Audacity to crash on some machines.
To use the Transcription (play at speed) slider:
1) Adjust the slider (while stopped)
2) Press the green play arrow that is next to the slider (not the normal play button).
3) Press the normal Stop button to stop playback.

The speed cannot be changed during playback, because that is what was causing the crashes, so if the playback speed is not what you want, move the slider and then press the green arrow button again.

Thanks very much steve, much appreciated.

stevethefiddle wrote:You may be able to put control back in Audacity, but there's no guarantees that it will work and you will loose the added functionality that is provided by PulseAudio (such as being able to record sounds that are playing on your computer). To put the recording level control back into Audacity, go to Edit menu > Preferences > Devices and set the recording input explicitly as your sound card (for example hw:0,0)

And like you said no guarantees that it will work... On my system I tried that, but it was still grayed out...