Audacity keeps losing analog audio drivers on output

[Wandering]

Binary package hint: yelp

Audacity 1.3.4 starts and runs fine under 8.04, but once closed and restarted, it cannot find any output devices except digital, so it is functionally mute. I discovered that if I delete the audacity.cfg file prior to running it, it will work again just fine until either I close it and reload a new file, or till I save the current file and then try to play it. In the end, it is virtually useless, and I have to return to Vista running the same version of Audacity with no problems at all.

I had spent the last six weeks working with an install of 7.10, and working around all it's problems - all of which seem to still exist under 8.04 plus new ones like this one. Then I did a clean install of 8.04 on a new partition, but was a bit too hasty in deleting the partition containing 7.10. I could give a list of problems, but this seems clearly a bug in Ubuntu. I believe that because I uninstalled 1.3.4, and installed a deb package with a couple of dependencies from the debian site of the earlier "stable" release of Audacity, and it, which worked fine under 7.10 fails in exactly the same way under 8.04. The system offered to update Audacity, and I finally let it. No changes!

Thanks
Ray

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Tue Apr 29 12:35:54 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 8.04
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/yelp
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Package: yelp 2.22.1-0ubuntu2
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: yelp
Uname: Linux 2.6.24-16-generic i686

[Wandering (ray-clare)]

Since I allowed the update, the version 1.3.4 seems to ignore it's config file entirely, and nothing I can do will allow it to function properly. It always comes up only seeing the digital drivers for output audio. I suppose I only complicated things by trying to run the earlier version. Who knows....

Ray

[Wandering (ray-clare)]

I discovered a work around that clearly points to pulse audio as the culprit. After the upgrade, any install of Audacity could not find any but the digital drivers regardless of what I did with the config folder.

Step one. kill the pulse audio process.
Step two, install Audacity again.
Step three, set it for oss on input and output. No problem picking the driver I wished with pulse audio gone.
Step four. make a series of test recordings which worked just fine, and so did playback through Audacity.

Side effects: No system sounds when I click various things. Totem sound on MP3 playback was weaker and thinner, much poorer fidelity.

Reboot system, and of course pulse audio restarted with it, and all sounds normal. I'm not dumb enough to even try to start Audacity with pulse audio running. So the work around is to kill pulse audio first, and when I am finished using Audacity, close it and reboot.

I hope this helps you fix the problem with pulse audio.