For the last couple of weeks I’ve been recording audio from Firefox using PulseAudio. Three days ago Audacity stopped detecting Pulse and I’m not sure why. I didn’t update anything and I can still start Pulse without any problems. But when I bring up the list of recording devices, Pulse isn’t on it.
I removed Audacity and Pulse through the shell and re-installed them, but I’m still not able to pick up Pulse.
When I play a stream from Firefox, Pulse picks it up, but I can’t get Audacity to monitor it using any of the recording devices available to it.
I’ve been searching through posts and can’t seem to find the answer here. If I’ve missed it I apologize. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
“Pulse” (aka “PulseAudio”) is normally installed by default in Ubuntu (and most other distros). It should not be manually removed unless you really know what you are doing - removing it can easily break the sound system and be very difficult to fix.
Pulse should start automatically when you log onto the system. Does it? (reboot, then look in your task manager to see if pulseaudio is running.)
Launch Audacity, then “Help menu > Diagnostics > Audio Device Info”
Copy and paste the full info into your reply. That will tell us what devices Audacity can see.
Thanks, Steve. I’ve tried using default and sysdefault as my recording devices, but Audacity can’t pick up the stream I’m trying to record using either one of them.
When I bring up the Pulse GUI I can see it finds the Firefox stream, but it doesn’t seem to recognize that Audacity is trying to record that stream.
I’ve got two entries for Default. One is default: Line:0 and the other is default: Mic:0
I rebooted, started up Audacity, set Recording to default: Line:0 (default: Mic:0 works through the computer mic and picks up room sounds) and Playback to default, then started montioring. Then I brought up pavucontrol and clicked the Recording tab and went through all the Show selections, but Audacity wasn’t there.
I did. And I played a stream just to see if I could get Audacity to monitor it using any of the recording devices it’s showing, but it couldn’t find the stream on any of them. pavucontrol found the stream, but Audacity doesn’t seem able to find pavucontrol.
I played around with Ubuntu’s sound settings, too, to see if changing the Output and Input devices from Digital (S/PDIF) to the Built-In options, but that doesn’t change whether or not Audacity picks up the stream.
Earlier this week, Audacity had “pulse” as an option for recording and everything worked, but in the last few days “pulse” became unavailable and now it’s just options that don’t seem integrated.
Wrt 910…, it’s not only that pulse isn’t accessible…, but that ANY device access is unpredictable from invocation to invocation…, and often the devices shown don’t work at all. Rebooting doesn’t help.
They both report as 3.0.2, yes.
But notice the size increase in the broken version.
I’m guessing they updated/increased dependencies in the snap…, and didn’t accomplish effective testing of the resulting environment.
I’m guessing that Audacity itself may not be “broken” per se…, but something changed in the packaged dependencies.