Audacity Forum

My sanity has taken a bit of a battering trying to make sense of Audacity , I have Ubuntu Linux ,H2 drum program and a Roland gr30 guitar synth , the midi drum track I wrote I have yet to make it play in Audacity , it seems to appear in the sequence window , and even seemed to be playing , but no sound , my guitar synth is making sound through the line in audio feed from the line out on Gr30 , but I can't get it to trigger the metres in Audacity , can't get Audacity to record the synth sound , despite the fact that it is being generated by the computer , an audio sound , and I can not get Audacity to register it anyway I try ? , it is my fault , I have no idea what I am doing , I have wasted so many hours trying to make sens eo f this thing , I have an album ready to if I can just learn how to use Audacity

I've tried reading your post three times and I still don't have a clear picture of what you are doing. Let's break it down a bit.
1) Does your drum track play in Hydrogen and can you hear it?
2) In Audacity, if you import an audio file, or generate a sound (the Generate menu) and press the Play button, does it play and can you hear it?
3) In detail, how is your GR30 connected to your computer?
4) Are you using Jack? (do you understand what this question means?)

Hi thank you for your response , I have used jack before to connect electric piano to Zynsubx sound library , I tried to use jack to connect sound card to Audacity , Audacity did not come up as a option , I can play the drum track in H2 , I have exported it to my documents , under root in unbuntu , it plays fine from Hydrogen , my guitar synth sounds fine in through the sound card line in , from the audio out on my gr30 , so how do I get Audacity to respond to the sounds the computer is making ? , I have just destroyed another copy of unbuntu , about 4 or 5 now , I had what seemed to be the drum trak IMPORTED from Audacity , as aposed to exported from Hydrogen , but no sound as the bar scrolled through what seemd to be the track ? , does Audacity need its own driver , I have had to load the driver for sound card , before the computer would make any noise , Heres what I would like to learn , 1 , how to convert h2 drum track to audio file , record it seems to be the obvious option , and 2 , how do I get Audacity to respond to whatever is playing , any help and headway would be greatly apreciated .

Hi Godfree, could you write future posts in paragraphs or bullet points. It's difficult to read and understand when you write as one long sentence.

Godfree wrote:I can play the drum track in H2 , I have exported it to my documents , under root in unbuntu , it plays fine from Hydrogen

"H2" is "Hydrogen drum machine"?

What did you export to your documents? A WAV file from Hydrogen?

What is "under root in ubuntu"?

Godfree wrote:my guitar synth sounds fine in through the sound card line in

How do you know that? What is connected where? How are you listening to "the sound card line in"?
Imagine that I want to reproduce your exact set-up. What do I need to do?

Hi , ok lets take them one at a time
I have no problem writing drum patterns in Hydrogen , they are a midi file , I have failed to export the file to Audacity and make it play , I try midi , raw data , the result is the same , it does not play
question , how do I record said midi file as audio , something Audacity will play I pressume

What I am thinking at the mo is I need to loop my soundcard out to it;s in ,? , or to another pc , question ,
do I really need to look at two computers and two versions of Ubuntu just to make a copy of an audio sound ,?

can Audacity make a audio copy of Hydrogen playing a midi file , the sound card out is conected to my stereo , but it is an audio signal , why can;t Audacity find it ?

What version of Ubuntu? What version of Audacity? See the pink panel at the top of the page.

Godfree wrote:I have no problem writing drum patterns in Hydrogen , they are a midi file , I have failed to export the file to Audacity and make it play , I try midi , raw data , the result is the same , it does not play
question , how do I record said midi file as audio , something Audacity will play I pressume

Audacity does not play or record MIDI directly. You can convert MIDI to audio using TiMidity++ or if you can hear the MIDI file on your computer you record it playing as audio.

See this page: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Midi for details.

In any case you can export from Hydrogen as WAV according to its manual http://www.hydrogen-music.org/hcms/node/5, so why not do that? Then import the WAV into Audacity.


Gale

Godfree wrote:can Audacity make a audio copy of Hydrogen playing a midi file , the sound card out is conected to my stereo , but it is an audio signal , why can;t Audacity find it ?

"Sound card out" is not an input. You have to use pulseaudio volume control to present the output as a "monitor" input that can be recorded.

I think recording MIDI playback in real time is your worst and slowest option but if you want to know how to record computer playback, see Recording Computer Playback on Linux.


Gale

Godfree wrote:I have no problem writing drum patterns in Hydrogen , they are a midi file , I have failed to export the file to Audacity and make it play , I try midi , raw data , the result is the same , it does not play

From Hydrogen you need to export "Song". This will create a WAV file which can be imported into Audacity using "File menu > Import > Audio".

You are being a greathelp and I appreciate you taking the time , you mentioned if I can hear the drum track I can record it , yes I can make the drum track go in Linux Ubuntu version 3.3 which includes Hydrogen drum program , not machine ? ,

so after I have started H2 drum program , do I then bring up Audacity , and import signal , ? , how please , how do I get Audacity to record what I can hear playing ,

and yes thankyou for the midi conversion thing , never heard of it before I shall try it that way to , as it would seem Audacity will let me drag and drop a audio file into its sequence window ,?

what you have said in these replies is making sense to me , I am stressed and scared to even try most of the time , it is not only copies of Ubuntu I keep killing but the hard drive is also dead , so have copy of last drum track ,
but can;t work out how to import it to Hydrogen