I have been unable to get Audacity 1.3.5 to record or playback on my i586 + SuSE 11.0 + Gnome + SB Live! 24 (recognised by ALSA as card type CA0106) configuration. After 7 weeks of bothering other people in this forum, the ALSA email list and various Audacity forums, I have been advised by a member of the Audacity development team to either:
Turn to the OpenSuSE forum (I think I have already done that)
AND
Raise a direct bug with OpenSuSE; their additional comment is “After all it is their product you are using (unless you build from our sources).”
But before I go ahead and create additional work for everybody, could I ask if there is anybody who has Audacity working with this configuration, or at least knows of somebody else who is working with this configuration and who would be willing to share setup information with me?
Could I also get some advice whether or not this is, in general, the correct process to follow?
If something doesn’t works like it should obviously work (and is obvious that Audacity should play sound) it’s something to report in bugzilla.
Perhaps can be fixed with a workaround or perhaps you just selected a wrong output device… but to have this workaround or a working configuration by default is a valid enhancement request to report in bugzilla.
But open good bug reports.
If you have a problem with an app. Say exactly what version it is. And this always means to give the output of “rpm -q <app>”. In my case it is “audacity-1.3.5-0.pm.2”. And in my case it’s a Packman package, don’t report it to Novell if you aren’t using an official package.
In general, any output you obtain from executing the app from console.
Because of PulseAudio, it’s very important to say if you are using Gnome or KDE with any audio problem.
From a quick look at Audacity. You should report:
a) Audio I/O -> Playback/Recording Device and “Using:” (in my case Portaudio v19).
b) Quality -> Sample Rate/Format.
From “Using:” output… I should also report “rpm -q portaudio” output.
I much appreciate this sound advice and completely agree with it. I have found it far too easy to moan about something not working than to give accurate, precise, relevant and reproducible ‘error’ information that can be effectively used to isolate, identify and fix a validated problem.
I also much appreciate the specific guidance about reporting Audacity information. I had not thought about the (now obvious) necessity to only report bugs on Novell products to Novell. At this time I cannot be sure if the version of Audacity that I am running with is the version contained in the OpenSuSE 11.0 package. How do I check that?
Finally, at last I found it was a user-error (Typical. You just can’t get the right quality of users these days, can you?): there was an obscure hardware error on the equipment I was using to generate input to Audacity. The software was working to specification all along.
Sure, if you can’t get this working after asking for help here, raise a bug report: Submitting Bug Reports - openSUSE
provide as MUCH information as you can in the bug report on your audio setup in the bug report. … perhaps provide the output URL from running the audio diagnostic scripts: openSUSE - Scripts_to_run_to_obtain_detailed_information
and info on your openSUSE vesion, your desktop version … etc …
To check, in Yast2->Install Software, enter the package name (e.g. audacity) into
the search field, and search. When audacity and other-related show up, click on
audacity (to highlight it), then down below click on version-tab: You should now
see in the selected radio-button, both the version# and which repository
it came from. (In this case, you could click on the other radio-button, and
install THAT version, since there is a choice)
[If you installed something from SOURCE, by compiling it, it normally will NOT show
up in Yast2->Install Software at all (unless you build it into an .RPM and then install
that).]
