Re: Audacity

[Nigel Henry <cave.dnb@tiscali.fr>]

On Thursday 21 December 2006 20:59, Eeltje wrote:
> If your soundcard works (I suppose it does...) then you should check a few
> things:
>
> 1) Does /dev/dsp exist? Sometimes you have to load extra modules (or so) in
> Alsa.

Yes. I believe audacity is an OSS app so you would need to install the 
alsa-oss package
>
> 2) Are you using KDE or Gnome? Then it could be that a sound server like
> aRts or eSound is running. In such a case Audacity can not use /dev/dsp.
> You should stop all sound servers before using Audacity.

this applies to most soundcards. On one of my machines I have an Audigy2 
soundblaster which is capable of multiple audio streams. I just tried 
audacity on Debian Etch on this machine while listening to TV with Xawtv, and 
Audacity plays back a .wav file with no problems. With other soundcards not 
capable of multiple audio streams you would need to disable, as in my case 
KDE's aRts sound server, otherwise aRts will grab /dev/dsp, and nothing else 
will work. I presume the same if you are using Gnome. You'd have to disable 
esd.
>
> It can also help to start Audacity in a console and see if you can see
> error messages that clarify what is going on.
>
> --
> Eeltje de Vries

Nigel.