Audacity: solving "Error: Host error." on Ubuntu.

[reddragdiva]

arkady got a new microphone today and so wanted to use it on her Thinkpad T23 with Audacity, a ridiculously usable sound editor that's available for Windows, Mac and Unix. But she couldn't beat it into working on Ubuntu. Because Linux sound is cretinously fucked up in all sorts of ways, her laptop was getting the good old "Error: host error.", which obviously means it can't find your sound card. My Compaq N410c did the same.

(She didn't use the Macintosh because the Quicksilver is the one model of G4 workstation that has no microphone or line-in at all. What on earth.)

The recommended solution on Ubuntu is to disable just about all the GNOME system sounds. This didn't work for her, and I'm running KDE. We did find Audacity would work if X was started into a failsafe session so that nothing was running except a terminal, a window manager and Audacity. (And now I'm contemplating adapting this method to get Rosegarden to work.)

What worked? Uninstalling and reinstalling the application from apt-get or Synaptic. It was the same version before and after, so what on earth? But hey, if it keeps working ...

Arkady is now recording herself singing and some guitar and mandolin. I told her I expected at least one finished MP3 or Ogg by tomorrow evening ... and she's just put up "She Moved Through The Fair" (445 kilobytes, 43 seconds, Ogg Vorbis, unaccompanied voice with echo). I think the hard part will be getting her to go to bed tonight rather than record until dawn.

Update: And it's being arsey again. All software sucks.

Comments

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

Can I just point out that I'm sorry? Really, genuinely sorry? Not quite sorry enough to chop my fingers off to make up for the state of things, but still quite sorry.

[reddragdiva]

I blame Audacity for still being frickin' GTK1/OSS, unless you want to use the crash-in-the-middle-of-the-best-session-ever beta version. You are welcome to threaten the Audacity devs with chopping their fingers off. Besides, if there's any finger-chopping energy, you need to duplicate the entirety of Debian package support without the suicidally fucked-up politics, and rotsa ruck!

(What confuses me is why uninstalling and reinstalling worked at all. What the frigging arse.)

Unless you meant the singing, in which case you haven't long to live.

[mjg59.livejournal.com]

If it fails again, running it under aoss might help - it does really evil shit to redirect OSS calls to alsa.

[reddragdiva]

I think I'd rather run it under failsafe kthx.

[reddragdiva]

Or, since it just started being arsey again, under a bus.

[loosechanj.livejournal.com]

What confuses me is why uninstalling and reinstalling worked at all. What the frigging arse.

If I had to guess, it's something like a file being named shit.so.3 vs. shit.so.7.23

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

If there's anatomy to be lopped today, it belongs to the authors of PHP.

[reddragdiva]

I'm pretty sure they wrote it by bashing the keyboard with their foreheads.

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

Nah, I think that was the documentation; the code itself probably involved a hairy arse-cheek or two.

[reddragdiva]

"MUMMY MUMMY! I JUST WROTE PHP ALL BY MYSELF!"
"That's wonderful, darling. Well done. And you only left a little bit of MySQL on the floor around the toilet."

[shamus9999.livejournal.com]

Uninstall/reinstall? Whisky Tango Foxtrot? Does this mean that Microsoft will be suing Leenoox for including proprietary Winders code?

[aidan-skinner.livejournal.com]

It turns out that only Gonzo Programming by those well steeped in gin produces quality code. Anything else is for the birds.

[blarglefiend.livejournal.com]

The Quicksilver does indeed lack an audio input, but that can be corrected easily through application of a USB sound doover. I've been using a Griffin iMic for ages and ages.

[reddragdiva]

Arkady has the model before (Yukon? Yosemite?) which does have audio inputs, but it's in storage at present.

[redcountess]

I think her G4 is a Gigabit Ethernet, but I won't know until it's living with us :-)

[pir.livejournal.com]

Seconded. Audio on Macs is far easier than most anything else and USB sound inputs are pretty cheap these days.

That reminds me, I need the digital optical out cables for my powerbook...

[redcountess]

I'm not a musician, but just the idea of a USB mic sounds wr0ng!

[pir.livejournal.com]

Well, it's more a USB sound card than mic :)

It's actually a fairly good idea as long as ou can get the data in from USB fast enough because it gets the sensitive analog sections of the electronics away from most of the high frequency digital crap in a computer.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

There are actually quite a few good quality USB mics around these days if thats what you want -- the Snowball from BLUE mics for example.

The Griffin iMic is definitely the cheap and dirty solution. I'm a bit of an audio/mic snob myself these days, but they sure are a cheap and useful way to add an extra sound input.

You lot should feel free to bug me about Mac sound questions should you have any.

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

The other advantage of external sound widgets, or so I'm told, is that it's much harder to have audible crosstalk between the analog sound lines and, say, the hard disk(s). As some systems manage to achieve with the onboard stuff.

Unrelatedly, I like how ubuntu-minimal includes ALSA. Because that's so necessary for, say, a server with nothing resembling audio hardware.