Re: Play button messed up or something..(with screenshot)

[steve]

What exactly is happening? At first glance it appears to be playing

[steve]

PulseAudio may have crashed. I don't know why this should happen, but it occasionally happens to me if I click too rapidly on Play. PulseAudio recovers automatically, but this is too late for Audacity as Audacity is waiting for a connection that's no longer there. You may be able to recover from this if you can open Preferences (Edit > Preferences > Devices) and change the playback device from "default" to the main sound card output (may be listed as <something>(hw:0.0) or just as "front").

If you can't recover from this, Save the project and restart Audacity.
If you can't save the project, just restart Audacity - the project should be automatically recovered when you restart (but unfortunately you will loose the "Undo" history).
If Audacity is completely frozen and you can't do anything, force quit Audacity and restart - again the project should be recovered automatically.
As with all programs,the final option for closing a frozen application is to open a command prompt and uses "killall" followed by the name of the application (without quotes) "killall audacity".

I've been trying to make Audacity produce this problem while I've been writing this so as to check exactly what happens, but of course it won't do it
Audacity 1.3.14 appears to be able to recover automatically if PulseAudio restarts, but 1.3.14 is only an alpha version at the moment. Probably the best thing to do is just go easy on the Play button, and keep regular backups of projects, but if you find that the problem recurs too often it may be worth you trying the 1.3.14 alpha version (I'm using the alpha version and it's working very well).

[steve]

I had the drum machine known as "Hydrogen" running and this is what caused the problem.

Yes, that'll do it.
It is possible to run both Audacity and Hydrogen at the same time if you use Jack audio system for both programs.