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

[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.