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@rb:~$ ps -e|grep jackd
cje@rb:~$ ps -A | grep jackd
cje@rb:~$ ps -A | grep jack*
cje@rb:~$ ps -A | grep jack
cje@rb:~$ ps -e > jackd_test.txt
cje@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