Monitoring in Audacity skips and/or stops

[Shane Par-Due]

Binary package hint: audacity

When play-through is enabled and I click "start monitoring", my input (a usb turntable) will play until I minimize the window, change the volume, or even just wait a few seconds. At that point, the audio will skip very frequently. Sometimes it even hard stops.

This bug is not reproducible in the Windows build of Audacity. It does occur in every linux distro I tried.

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

Thanks for reporting this bug. Could you please do the following:

1) Start a terminal
2) execute the following command:
audacity > /tmp/audacitydebug.txt 2>&1
3) do what you have to do to make the bug appear, then close audacity
4) look in the /tmp folder and attach audacitydebug.txt to this bug report.

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

Please also specify your version of Ubuntu and audacity package (apt-cache policy audacity).

[Shane Par-Due (shanepardue)]

audacity:
  Installed: 1.3.8-1~getdeb1
  Candidate: 1.3.8-1~getdeb1
  Version table:
 *** 1.3.8-1~getdeb1 0
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     1.3.7-2ubuntu1 0
        500 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com jaunty/universe Packages

I've used the official build on the last few releases of Ubuntu while getting the same problem.

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

Okay. I'm afraid I can't really help you. The error indicates that you might be able to work around it by using the plughw layer instead of the hw layer, I'm not sure of how to do this though, it might be possible by tweaking alsa configuration files.

Here is a link I found, perhaps it can be helpful:

http://wiki.audacityteam.org/index.php?title=USB_turntables

Also, if somebody else will tackle this problem, they'll probably ask you for

* alsa-info output, see http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingSoundProblems
* output of audacity -> help -> audio device info

[Shane Par-Due (shanepardue)]

I perused that wiki link, but it mostly refers to changing the USB cable and other tactics, but this is an OS-centric issue. I'm sure the hardware is fine, but this device doesn't work in Audacity's Linux version as it does in Windows.

I'll continue to look around and research the plughw layer.

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

Does recording work reliably without software play-through?
Does recording and playback work in other applications?

[Shane Par-Due (shanepardue)]

Recording works perfectly and plays back just as well with play-through disabled.

Recording and playback work in other apps as well. None of the others I've found have real-time monitoring without serious configuration such as Jack implementation.