[PLUG] Recording with audacity

[Dale Snell]

On Wed, 10 Aug 2011 22:33:47 -0700
Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com> wrote:

> Rather than make a practice cassette for my next slide show,
> I used Audacity to make a CD.  Much hair pulling and gnashing
> of teeth.  Three versions of Audacity, two operating systems
> on 3 laptops, different bugs on each, including:
> 
> 1) Breaking the window manager on exit, requiring a ctrl-alt-bs
>    on Ubuntu 10.4 (Audacity 1.3.12b)
> 2) Not picking up the audio input channel on my T60 (RHEL5
> clone) 3) Not labelling tracks properly under the RHEL5
> (Audacity 1.3.4b) version. 
> 
> And don't get me started on attempts to compile from source.
> 
> Is there a non-beta version of Audacity, or a beta version, that
> is not too buggy? 
> 
> Or is there something better for simple recording from single
> channel microphone to tracks on a CD?  I'm willing to record
> the tracks (1 per slide, 69 for this 40 minute talk) separately,
> as long as they play without gaps.
> 
> Keith

How are you trying to get the signal into Audacity?  If you've got
PulseAudio running on your system, you're probably best using it
to feed your microphone signal into Audacity.  I don't have a mike
to experiment with, but I was able to record an FM radio stream
off of my music player program and play it back successfully.  But
for Audacity to see it to record, and to play it back, I had to
connect through Pulse.  Trying to bypass Pulse is probably going to
lead to trouble.

Someone else suggested Ardour, which should also work.  Ardour
looks lovely; unfortunately, I've had about as much luck with
Ardour as you have with Audacity.  Ardour depends on Jack, and
I've NEVER gotten Jack to work on any system.  (Hm, that didn't
come out quite the way I intended.  :-)  Oh well.)  By all
accounts, if you are looking for high-quality sound, using Jack is
the way to go.  PulseAudio is not meant for professional audio
work and Jack is.

The version of Audacity that I've got is 1.3.13beta, running on a
Fedora 14 box.

--Dale

--
Ivanova:  Always finding the good in any situation, eh Captain?
Sheridan:  Absolutely.  If I didn't, I might end up like you.