Audacity Forum

I've read and tried this tutorial, but it doesn't work

Here's screenshot of my ALSA configuration:


And here's a screenshot of my Audacity device options:


My audio is Realtek ALC883.

There are a lot of variations on Linux.
Which distribution/version of Linux are you using?

I'm running PCLinuxOS, the latest version - 2010.10

Do you know if the computer uses pulseaudio as the default sound service?
I've seen on Google that pulseaudio is available, but I've not found if it is the default or an optional extra. The instructions that you were following should work for a straight ALSA setup but if you have pulseaudio its a bit different.

If you have pulseaudio installed as the default sound service then you will need PulseAudio Volume Control and PulseAudio Device Chooser.

As far as I can tell (and my sound configuration setup), ALSA is my default audio engine. Here it is:

You may be best to ask about this on the PCLinuxOS forum as that set-up looks like it is specific to PCLinuxOS.

If you are not able to get help from there, you could try installing PulseAudio Device Chooser and PulseAudio Volume Control.
Then select "Enable Pulse Audio" in the screen that posted.
Open Audacity and in "Edit menu > Preferences > Devices" set the "Host" to ALSA and the Recording and Playback devices to "default".
Check that Audacity works.

Open the PulseAudio Volume Control and while Audacity is in "Recording mode" (a quick way to activate the Audacity recording input is to click on the Recording meter) and Audacity should appear in the Recording tab of the PulseAudio Volume Control, where you can set it to record from the "Monitor" option. This should enable recording sounds that are playing on the computer.

I've installed those from the synaptic package manager, but unfortunately I get errors when I try to start them:

while opening dev chooser:


and while opening volume control:


and lets just say that I'm totally lost now

That's a shame. I'd rather not try and pursue trying to get this working with PulseAudio as it appears that PulseAudio is not running, and reconfiguring your system to use PulseAudio is likely to be quite involved, and I don't have a PCLinuxOS installation to refer to (I'm using Ubuntu 10.10 and the sound configuration looks completely different).

If you want to "undo" the installation of those packages you should be able to remove them with Synaptic.

The set-up for PCLinuxOS appears to be customised specifically for PCLinuxOS, so I don't think that I will be able to help you very much, but I'm willing to try.
If any other users of this forum use PCLinuxOS, hopefully they will step in.

Do you have a volume control in the Desktop Panel?
Does that offer any configuration options? If so, could you post some screenshots.

First of all - thanks a lot for your help! I appreciate it!

Here's a screenshot of my desktop volume control:

Can we backtrack a few steps.

Regarding your sound system, what works and what doesn't work?