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Error while opening sound device in Audacity

I’m running Audacity 1.3.4-beta in Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron). Every time I try to record, I get the following error:

> Error while opening sound device. Please check the input device settings and the project sample rate.

To fix this (and allow me to record) I open the System Monitor, locate the `jackd` process and end it (don’t kill it, otherwise you’ll kill Audacity too). Recording will then work.

You’ll need to do this each time you start Audacity.

Alternatively, you can install 1.3.6 from getdeb which seemed to work for me.

3 replies on “Error while opening sound device in Audacity”

Create this little script and put it in /usr/local/bin . Name it fix-audacity and do chmod 755 /usr/local/bin/fix-audacity.

!/bin/bash

audacity&
sleep 1
killall jackd

Locate the xdg menu for audacity and change Exec=audacity to Exec=fix-audacity.

Now you can start audacity without having to manually kill jackd every time.

Well the !/bin/bash should have a hashmark before, and the command would be: audacity &; sleep 1; killall jackd

The comments mess up the text formatting.

Max,

Hi, welcome to the site. I use Markdown to format text, so to generate a code block you just need to indent each line by 4 spaces. And then use the “Preview” button to check it has worked before publishing.

#!/bin/bash

audacity &;
sleep 1;
killall jackd;

I’m using Ubuntu 8.10 now, which doesn’t have the same problem. I don’t know whether this is because is has Audacity 1.3.5, or because of the whole Pulse Audio think (which is a headache in itself).

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