Audacity Forum

Posted: **Tue Mar 17, 2009 7:43 pm**

Hello.
I'd like to use Audacity for microphone recording and them mixing it with music. I am using openSuSE 10.3, where Audacity 1.3.3 was pre-installed. There is no problem with recording many separate tracks, as this version is using OSS (/dev/dsp) as default playback and recording device. However, for some stupid legal reasons, this bundled version doesn't have support for MP3 importing. So I downloaded Audacity 1.3.7 full source and compiled it with ordinary

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./configure
make
make install

as root. When I launched this version and try to record something, I received a warning message:

Error while opening sound device. Please check the input device settings and the project sample rate.

I did some searching on the Internet and found, that I should choose ALSA:default as the input and output devices instead of OSS (/dev/dsp). I did so and this is strange what happened. I was able to record one stereo track with no problem. But when trying to record the second one, the entire program was slowed down, it lasted about 12 seconds to record 5-second-long audio and even so, there were lags in the second track.

I noticed, that when I disable Software Playthrough and Play other tracks when recording new one, the problem is fixed. Nevertheless, I would really like to make use of the latter function. It may seem that my computer is too old to do these two things in one time, but in fact, I have Intel Core2Duo E8400 @ 3GHz, 4 gigabytes of RAM and Creative SB Live!.

Could you please advise me how to make this new version with MP3 support accept OSS devices for record and playback?
Thanks in advance.

Posted: **Wed Mar 18, 2009 3:58 pm**

OK, problem solved. Downloaded the latest unstable CVS (Audacity ® 1.3.8-alpha) and compiled it with

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 ./configure --with-portaudio=v18 --disable-nyquist
make
make install

as root and voila, the OSS device works and the Overdub function as well. The --disable-nyquist was necessary, because else, make would return:

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../lib-src/libnyquist.a(sndwritepa.o): In function `prepare_audio':
sndwritepa.c:(.text+0xdc): undefined reference to `Pa_GetDefaultOutputDevice'
sndwritepa.c:(.text+0x104): undefined reference to `Pa_GetDeviceCount'
sndwritepa.c:(.text+0x12c): undefined reference to `Pa_GetHostApiInfo'
../lib-src/libnyquist.a(sndwritepa.o): In function `finish_audio':
sndwritepa.c:(.text+0x275): undefined reference to `Pa_WriteStream'
../lib-src/libnyquist.a(sndwritepa.o): In function `sound_save_sound':
sndwritepa.c:(.text+0x124c): undefined reference to `Pa_WriteStream'
../lib-src/libnyquist.a(sndwritepa.o): In function `sound_save_array':
sndwritepa.c:(.text+0x19d8): undefined reference to `Pa_WriteStream'
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[1]: *** [../audacity] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/home/jan386/audacity/src'
make: *** [audacity] Error 2

But it is not necessary for me so it doesn't matter. Just if you wanted to fix this . . .

Thanks to all for developing such quality software.

Posted: **Sat Mar 21, 2009 4:51 pm**

I've no idea if this is relevant, but on Ubuntu I compiled using a later version of portaudio (v1.9) and nyquist enabled and "make" worked fine.

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