Unable to Adjust Record Level

[ReesAcheson]

I have been using Audacity 1.3.0-b for several months and love it.
The only serious problem I am having is that I cannot adjust the recording level. The slider next to the micophone icon changes the sound level coming from the speakers but not the level shown on the VU meters nor the size of the wave shown in the music window. (The speaker slide has no effect on anything, it seems.)
I am using RedHat, EL5 and a obtained audacity from an rpm for el5. Realizing that I am using a beta version, I tried to get Audacity 1.2.6 but can not find one for el5 nor was I able to compile one without getting the devel version of wxWidgets, which I could not find.
Is the record level problem I am having a known problem, or is it something peculiar to my setup?

[steve]

I have been using Audacity 1.3.0-b

Wow that's an old version. The current beta version is 1.3.5. The current version for Ubuntu is 1.3.4.
I've had a look on Google, but 1.3.0-b seems to be the most "up-to-date" RPM available for RedHat.

The slider next to the micophone icon changes the sound level coming from the speakers but not the level shown on the VU meters nor the size of the wave shown in the music window. (The speaker slide has no effect on anything, it seems.)

Audacity is a slave to your systems audio settings. On some platforms the sliders in Audacity can allow you to control the system audio properties, but that all depends on whether the audio drivers allow it to do so. Personally I wish the developers would do away with those sliders altogether as the often cause confusion.

Use Alsa Mixer, or whatever your sound system mixer of choice is, to adjust recording and playback levels. I use QAMix which works great with by Sound Blaster card, but the terminal version of Alsa Mixer is also very good and easy to use.

[ReesAcheson]

Thank you for your reply, Steve. I just now again tried alsamixer. Looking a bit further this time, I found that I needed to enter the Capture View. Then it worked famously. Thanks so much.
Rees

[edifyguy]

I figured out what this is by comparing this behaviour against the sgmixer. I discovered that the playback slider, at least on mine, is correctly mapped to the "PCM" channel, but the record slider is incorrectly mapped to the "Line" channel, which is a playback channel. It ought to be mapped to the "Igain" channel instead, where it would have its intended effect. Maybe the developers will fix it soon now that the specific problem has been pointed out.

I'm using Audacity 1.3.5 on an AMD K6/2-450 running Puppy Linux 4.1.2 with anywhere from 384MB to as little as 64MB of RAM! It runs fine on 64MB as long as you don't open more than one thing at a time! An amazingly efficient build. I wanted to see if this old computer could be Linuxed, and if it could be done well enough to use it to record sermons at my church. The answer to both was an astonishing YES! Truly great coding. And Audacity was the only program I considered for recording. Is there anything else? 8^D