[LAU] Gutsy problems with Audacity opening sound device

Bob van der Poel bob at mellowood.ca
Wed May 14 22:39:44 EDT 2008


Not 100% sure if this is correct on my part ... but if some other 
process is using the audio driver, then Audacity can't. So, stop the 
other process using the driver :)

In my Gusty I run KDE and have set the Auto-Suspend after idle in System 
Settings -> Sound. I run this with a 30 second timeout. So, if I have a 
mp3 player running I just stop it; wait 30 seconds, then run audacity 
and it all works.

It appears your friend has the correct audio drivers.

hope this helps.

Christian Einfeldt wrote:
> hi
> 
> I and a friend are both having problems using Audacity to edit music 
> files.  In my case, I am trying to edit an .ogg vorbis file, and in his 
> case, he is trying to edit a file that he recorded with Audacity.  He is 
> a 69 year-old man, and I am trying to assist him over the phone, so it 
> is kind of hard to get complete details from him, but, fortunately, I am 
> having the same problem on my Gutsy install with Audacity 1.3.3-beta.  
> Here is the exact error message that we are getting:
> 
> Error while opening sound device.  Please check the output device 
> settings and the project sample rate.
> 
> I have googled and found that there are a lot of problems with Gutsy 
> getting this error message.  The suggested solutions fall into two 
> camps, neither of which has worked for me.  The first camp is grepping 
> for the jackd process and killing it in the shell; the second involves 
> making sure that you have sound privileges (we do) and that you are 
> using the correct sound device (not sure how to tell about that).  The 
> helpful links on these topics are below:
> 
> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=710881
> 
> https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/26900
> 
> Grepping, I get no responses to jackd at all:
> 
> cje at rb:~$ ps -e|grep jackd
> cje at rb:~$ ps -A | grep jackd
> cje at rb:~$ ps -A | grep jack*
> cje at rb:~$ ps -A | grep jack
> cje at rb:~$ ps -e > jackd_test.txt
> cje at rb:~$
> 
> As you can see, I directed the grep output to a txt file, and I looked 
> at the txt file, and sure enough, no jackd.  So that solution won't seem 
> to work.
> 
> With regard to the potential solution of choosing the "correct" sound 
> device, as suggested by the second link above, I went to
> 
> Edit > preferences > Audio I/O
> 
> and found that these are my choices:  not sure which are right, and I'm 
> not sure I want to go messing around with settings until I know what is up:
> 
> ALSA: HDA ATI SB: ALC883 Digital  (hw:0,1)
> ALSA: default
> ALSA: iec958
> ALSA: spdif
> ALSA: dmix
> 
> Thanks in advance for any help!
> 
> -- 
> Christian Einfeldt,
> Producer, The Digital Tipping Point
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Linux-audio-user mailing list
> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
> http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user

-- 
  **** Listen to my CD at http://www.mellowood.ca/music/cedars ****
Bob van der Poel ** Wynndel, British Columbia, CANADA **
EMAIL: bob at mellowood.ca
WWW:   http://www.mellowood.ca





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