Getting Audacity to play nice with other sound applications

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briwood
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Getting Audacity to play nice with other sound applications

Post by briwood »

(The answer might be to use ReZound and abandon Audacity...)

Spent some time trying to get Audacity to use JACK. Searches suggest that you have to compile your own Audacity with JACK support, and even then many report JACK crashing.

I can live with out JACK support. Presently I can't run Audacity and JACK at the same time. If I have Audacity up and working (with Prefs > Audio I/O > Playback Device = ALSA (default)) and then I start JACK, Audacity will start giving me "error opening sound device when I try to play something. I've read suggestions of invoking Audacity with

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aoss audacity
to avoid this, but I still have the same problem when JACK is started.

I think that there is a similar conflict with Rhythmbox and other applications.

Is there a workaround that I haven't found?

Thanks for any thoughts.
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Re: Getting Audacity to play nice with other sound applicati

Post by Pablo »

I have Audacity with jack support, and I didn't need to compile it. It's packaged, at least in 64Studio. My audio I/O is JACK:alsa.
No problems with crashes. Only be careful your "poject rate" (bottom left corner) is the same as Jack. Also, it's weird that "Port Audio" only appears in the jack connections window when you press play or record.
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Post by zettberlin »

It is somewhat distracting that the jack-ports of audacity only show up in qjackctl if you actually hit the play-button...
Thus many think, that audacity does not work with jack, while it does, as soon as you start the audioengine with play.
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briwood
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Post by briwood »

Thanks for the thoughts guys. I just tried again and it Audacity just won't play through JACK for me. I think that my problem is specific to the audacity that I installed from the Ubuntu Gutsy repositories. Other people report similar problems. That's why I think that compiling from source might fix it for me.

I think I'll just wait for my 64Studio DVD :-)
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Re: Getting Audacity to play nice with other sound applicati

Post by raboof »

briwood wrote:Presently I can't run Audacity and JACK at the same time.
This is probably because both applications (audacity and jack) try to get exclusive control over the sound card.

Alsa is capable of mixing 2 inputs, but needs to be configured in that way. Personally, I prefer having JACK do the mixing, and giving JACK exclusive control over the sound card via alsa.

Can you set 'jack' to be the output device for audacity? this report seems to suggest audacity in ubuntu has jack support, though I haven't checked.
invoking Audacity with

Code: Select all

aoss audacity
This is only useful if you have an audacity without support for alsa and want it to play though alsa anyway. It looks like your audacity supports alsa fine, so you probably don't need this.
Is there a workaround that I haven't found?
Getting an audacity with support for JACK would probably be best. Alternatively, you could convince alsa to support multiple applications (in this case: jack and audacity) to use the sound card at once: look into 'dmix'. A third option might be to install the alsa jack plugin, though that one is currently not in ubuntu.
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