[SOLVED] Audacity no sound on playback

[Passiday]

Hello,

I get no sound, when trying to playback any file in Audacity (1.3.9). No error messages, nothing, the output level meters jumping happily as if I'm deaf. Amarok plays audio files just fine.

In Edit/Preferences, there are the following settings in Devices section:

Inferface:
 Host: ALSA
 Using: PortAudio V19-devel (built Oct 26 2009 02:21:30)
Playback:
 Device: HDA Intel: STAC92xx Digital (hw:0,1)
Recording:
 Device: HDA Intel: STAC92xx Analog (hw:0,0)
 Channels: 2 (Stereo)

My Kubuntu version: 9.10, Kernel version: 2.6.31-20-generic

I'd be very happy to learn from where to start in order to fix this. I've headr that Audacity is very picky, etc, and that it might be that other application is using the sound device at the same time. Well, I tried to run it as a very first thing afer rebooting, but no success.

[dibl]

Re: Audacity no sound on playback

On my system, I've never seen the STAC92xx Digital channel make a sound -- I think "playback" needs to be STAC92xx Analog.

Pulseaudio is working well on my rig, which is an Intel motherboard with the HDA STAC chip. If you are using only ALSA, and not Pulseaudio, then you need to install alsamixergui and probably disable the STAC92xx Digital channel, and change the playback to STAC92xx Analog.

But, if you are using (or want to try) Pulseaudio, then do these things:

1.

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install pulseaudio pavucontrol paman

2. Open pavucontrol and take a look at the "sinks" -- make sure the tiny "mute" indicator is showing the channels unmuted.

3. Open Kmenu > System Settings > Multimedia and set Pulseaudio as the first (top) device. Use the "test" button to confirm it plays sound. Then put the STAC92xx Analog device in second position and test it. The STAC92xx Digital device can safely be at the bottom of the list.

On audacity, I always found it "picky" about having any other audio players active, including a browser. So, try audacity with nothing else running that would use sound, until you've got it working. With audacity running and working, you might then be able to open a browser and audacity will continue to function. Or not ....

Hope this helps.

[Passiday]

[SOLVED] Re: Audacity no sound on playback

Hey,

You're right! There's no sound in the Digital channel whatsoever. I was just under impression that it's the only I've got, as there was no other normal playback device in the list. But it turns out that some other software (perhaps VirtualBox with active virtual machine) has hijacked the sound device so severely that Audacity decided not to include it in the playback device list. Once all the other big running software was closed, the Analog device appeared in the list (after restarting Audacity), I selected it, and voila, it was playing.

Thanks!

Passiday