Pass Through Sound

[Gale Andrews]

I am running Mint16 and the latest Audacity.

I think you may mean that you are running the latest Audacity version that Mint 16 distro provides. What version does Help > About Audacity say?

You can change many playback and recording choices more conveniently by using the Transport Menu.

Does Audacity for Windows run on Mint under WINE fail with software playthrough enabled?

It's a simple change if you want to recompile Audacity and turn off the PortAudio latency settings for software playthrough, but we don't know for sure that is the issue.

If you launch Audacity from the terminal then try to record with software playthrough enabled, what messages appear in the terminal?


Gale

[retnev]

If that was only the singular problem. It sometimes hard freezes my pc. Something software hasn't done to Linux around here since advent of USB 1 so that version is pretty screwed up.

Ok, I used the latest 2.x from apt and that is not the latest stable it seems.
I looked at Audacity website for a stable repository URL but could only get a repository for the latest unstable.
Any idea if there is a stable version repository ?

Also, Ardour uses jack properly on the same machine, but Audacity does not even have jack available in the device dropdowns.
Ardour is just too heavy and convoluted. I like Audacity, due to it's simplicity and flat idiot-proof menu rather than the Protools like touchy-feely spoof interface of Ardour which intentionally tries to intelectualize the obvious. Audacity is the greatest for simple tasks, but this sound-through code needs to be rewritten. Someone knows little about devices and device-drivers it seems.

[steve]

Ok, I used the latest 2.x from apt and that is not the latest stable it seems.

The Audacity version in Mint 16 is 2.0.3 (by coincidence I installed Mint for someone earlier today).
The current version of Audacity is 2.0.5.
There is no official repository version for Mint with Audacity 2.0.5.

It sometimes hard freezes my pc.

That must be more than an Audacity problem. As I said, I've had Audacity freeze up due to its problems with PulseAudio, but I've never had a system freeze when running release versions of Audacity on Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, or any other distribution.

Audacity does not even have jack available in the device dropdowns.

Jack should be running before you open Audacity (recommended) or if you open Audacity first you will need to use "Transport > Rescan Audio Devices". "Jack Audio System" will then be available in the "Host" settings of the device toolbar.

In order to record from a USB device using Jack you need the USB device as the "Input device" for Jack and your sound card as the playback device. In Audacity set both input and output devices to "system".

Note that there is a bug open for Audacity with Jack which is that if you click on the recording meter before doing any recording, Audacity will probably crash. This is noted in the wiki (though this page is rather out of date, this issue with Jack is still present: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Linux_Issues#JACK)

I agree that Audacity on Linux would greatly benefit from some expert attention to handling the sound system (either by Audacity or Portaudio developers, or both, but the problems that you appear to be experiencing seem to go far beyond the limitations experienced by other Linux users, so I strongly suspect that there is some other underlying problem with the machine.

[Gale Andrews]

Ok, I used the latest 2.x from apt and that is not the latest stable it seems.
I looked at Audacity website for a stable repository URL but could only get a repository for the latest unstable.
Any idea if there is a stable version repository ?

Audacity no longer has "stable" and "unstable" distinctions for released versions.

We only release what we consider to be "as good as a stable" version. If the distro does not offer the latest released version, then the user can uninstall the repository version and compile the release source tarball (2.0.5 at present):
http://audacityteam.org/download/source .

Optionally a user can compile Audacity from the SVN development code: http://audacityteam.org/community/developers#svn . This latest code is not "released", although compiled binaries therefrom for Windows and Mac are made available by volunteers for those who do not wish to compile code. Ubuntu make compiled "Daily Builds" available in a similar way.

Builds or binaries from latest code are designated as "alpha" in "About Audacity" in the program. You can regard them as "unstable" but they are potentially more "unstable" than builds from a project that was releasing "stable" and "unstable" versions.

Someone knows little about devices and device-drivers it seems.

I've already given one possible reason why software playthrough fails on Linux. If you want to compile Audacity I'll tell you what to change. If the Windows build of Audacity under WINE records with software playthrough on, then I think the PortAudio latencies are quite likely the cause.

You haven't clearly stated what happens when you record with Software Playthrough on. Do you see "error opening sound device" or does the recording cursor stall, or does it record but you don't get playthrough? What are the terminal messages that you see?

Can you record from the built-in sound device (choosing the (hw) input) with Software Playthrough on?

I agree that Audacity on Linux would greatly benefit from some expert attention to handling the sound system

Can Ardour play a one second tone completely without adding silence to the end of it?


Gale

[steve]

Can Ardour play a one second tone completely without adding silence to the end of it?

Yes, but so does Audacity when using Jack.
The most obvious difference between the two is that the audio sockets in Ardour are persistent whereas for Audacity they appear on play/record then disappear on stop. So Ardour connects to the sound system once (at the start of the session), then disconnects on quit, whereas Audacity is repeatedly connecting/disconnecting then connecting again (with new sockets) every time the audio stream starts/stops.