Play while recording Audacity - Ubuntu
Persistance pays off. I tried many things and finally got Audacity to work! Like a few others who tried many things, it is hard to say exactly which ones were required. For ease of reading, I’ll summarize what I tried.
Remove jackd
stop all other devices using ALSA by running lsof | grep ‘/dev/snd/’ in terminal and killing any process found. The alsa mixer (volume control on taskbar) was removed. In my default installation of the Gnome desktop, I can remove the volume control with a right click on the task bar, and add again when I’m done with Audacity. Running the terminal command will make sure there are no other apps using ALSA.
Disable ESD mixing in System >> Sound panel
remove and reinstall
I’m recording through USB with a preamp, so record was set to USB audio.
Output only worked when set to ALSA default. I think this might be OSS emulation, but I’m not sure. I only know it worked! So far, it works in 16 and 24 bit. In the preferences panel, you can correct for the latency that occurs during playback!
There are more “professional” multitrack DAWs (digital audio workstation) out there, but they use jack, and I was unable to get that to work. Audacity is “right sized”. Automatically adds a track when you hit record, adjusts for latency, just the thing for an impulse recording.
- the Muse