Re: Alsa Problem or Audacity Problem?
On Sat, Sep 19, 2009 at 08:00:51AM +0100, Tim Beauregard wrote:
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> Thomas H. George wrote:
> > Question: Should Audacity have a switch to select between input sources
> > or rely on Alsamixer to make the selection?
>
> My (Debian unstable) Audacity 1.3.9 has input selection capabilities as
> has every version I've used since 2001.
> Edit..Preferences..Devices..Recording..Device. hw:0,0 is default, and
> I've played around with 0,1 and 1,0 when I was using a SoundBlaster
> Creative Live breakout box.
My misunderstanding. In the past I had a version of Audacity which had
a pulldown selection listing line_in, cd, mic and other choices for the
input. I thought the current pulldowns were just to select the
soundcard. From you comment below I understand that the sound card is using
the input from all these sources simaltaneously and so the ones not
needed must be muted.
This new understanding does not help as I have already experimented with
all the Alsamixer settings without Audacity seeing any signal to record.
I have tried using line_in from my tape deck and lp turntable with the
same negative result.
What did help was the comment about other software. I found arecord
works flawlessly capturing the input from the tape deck and the
turntable and writing it to .wav files on the hard disk. Audacity can
load these files so I can edit them before writing them to cd's. This
is what I wanted to accomplish so mission accomplished.
Thank you for clarifying the operations for me.
Tom
>
> As far as I'm aware alsamixer (1.0.20 on my system) always uses 0,0
> unless you tell it to use an alternative device with the switch -D.
> Each device will have a separate Capture control for the individual
> inputs available on that interface. I believe Audacity is dependant on
> the settings you use here, so unmute everything and set volumes to ~72%.
>
> > Problem: On two Squeeze systems I have found two distinctly different
> > versions of Alsamixer both labeled version 1.0.20. One is capable of
> > selecting an input source which Audacity can record, the other cannot.
>
> Do the two systems have identical hardware? If so, maybe one has inputs
> disconnected or there is a hardware fault.
>
> > sources. While playing a cd I tried selecting capture from cd with no
> > effect. When I switched to capture mix the vumeter bars on Audacity
>
> Maybe you do not have the small wire from the optical drive connected to
> the soundcard required for direct audio monitoring when playing CDs. I
> presume you were trying to do this purely for testing purposes.
>
> If you believe Audacity is not functioning correctly there are plenty of
> other capture tools available: ecasound, arecord (part of the alsa-utils
> package) and rec (part of the sox package) are three examples, which
> work beautifully off the command line.
>
> > space bar. There are also three labels input source with no volume
> > bars, just a text entry in place of the volume bar. The text entries
>
> These are switches to mute the various inputs.
>
> Have you tried alsamixergui? This may help to understand the available
> functions of the chosen device.
>
> If this all doesn't help, maybe tell us what sound device(s) exist is on
> the PC you are using.
>
> Tim
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