[Sreyan Chakravarty sent the reply directly to me, and apparently not to
the list, but I'm moving the discussion back to the list.]
On Sun, 31 May 2020 20:24:12 +0530, Sreyan Chakravarty wrote:
On 5/27/20 11:38 PM, George Avrunin wrote:
> I haven't used audacity in a long time, but on my Fedora 32, in Edit ->
> Preferences -> Devices, the HOST is set to ALSA and there doesn't seem to
> be a way to change it. But Playback Device and Recording Device both have
> a "pulse option". Have you tried those?
Well its interesting to say that. These are the playback options I have:
Do you see any PulseAudio ?
https://imgur.com/a/VPuJyHI
On my main desktop machine (a Dell Precision T1700) I don't do very much
with sound. In audacity, the Playback Device options I see (with no
webcam or headphones plugged in) are several entries of the form
"HDA NVidia: HDMI X (hdw:y,z)", for various values of X (0-5), y, and z;
"pulse"; and "default". For Recording Device, I see "HDA Intel
PCH:
ALC3220 Analog (hw:0,0)"; "sysdefault"; "pulse"; and
"default".
>
> The Audacity tutorial says
> (
https://ttmanual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tutorial_selecting_your_input.html)
> that "An audio host is an interface between Audacity and the sound card
> driver. ... In Linux there is often only one option: ALSA, other options
> could be OSS and/or Jack Audio Connection Kit (also known as "Jack" or
> "Jackd")." So HOST is not where you'd make any changes.
Thats interesting, if ALSA is the only option then where does PulseAudio
come in ?
My understanding is that pulseaudio is a sound server, which interacts
with the applications and with the things that directly talk to the
hardware. (See the comment in the text from the audacity tutorial
above; it's not pulse that is the direct interface to the soundcard
driver.) It seems that you have pulseaudio installed. Is it actually
running? What does pavucontrol show?
As I said, I haven't used audacity in a long time and on my system
pulseaudio seems to be running and working just fine. But your
configuration is clearly very different from mine and I don't know enough
to help debug your configuration.