Audacity only hears system sounds

Question

Audacity only hears system sounds. It is not capable of receiving microphone input.

In alsamixer, every option is unmuted and set to the maximum.
In PulseAudio Volume Control, the visual indicator clearly corresponds to the audio in my room, indicating that it correctly picks up my microphone.

However, Audacity still only picks up sounds that come from other applications. It does not receive any microphone audio.

I followed the Arch Linux Wiki PulseAudio Troubleshooting Guide for Audacity.

pulseaudio-alsa is installed and configured to work for every application I've tried besides Audacity.
In Audacity, the only microphone selections are pulse and default. Both options only record computer sounds, not any microphone.
In PulseAudio Volume Control, I've tried all 12 permutations of settings from the Input Devices and Configurations tabs. None of these permutations allowed Audacity to pick up sound.
I tried running $ pasuspender -- audacity. This added more options for input devices besides pulse and default, but each option either recorded silence, halted the seeker, or crashed Audacity.

I looked through the post on this forum titled Microphone not showing up in Audacity.

Similar to menfon, PulseAudio Volume Control clearly picked up on my microphone and demonstrated that my microphone works.

Here is my output from $ amixer --card 0:

Simple mixer control 'Master',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pvolume-joined pswitch pswitch-joined
  Playback channels: Mono
  Limits: Playback 0 - 87
  Mono: Playback 87 [100%] [0.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Headphone',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pswitch
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Playback 0 - 87
  Mono:
  Front Left: Playback 87 [100%] [0.00dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 87 [100%] [0.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Speaker',0
  Capabilities: pvolume pswitch
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Playback 0 - 87
  Mono:
  Front Left: Playback 87 [100%] [0.00dB] [on]
  Front Right: Playback 87 [100%] [0.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control 'PCM',0
  Capabilities: pvolume
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Playback 0 - 255
  Mono:
  Front Left: Playback 255 [100%] [0.00dB]
  Front Right: Playback 255 [100%] [0.00dB]
Simple mixer control 'Mic Boost',0
  Capabilities: volume
  Playback channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: 0 - 3
  Front Left: 3 [100%] [30.00dB]
  Front Right: 3 [100%] [30.00dB]
Simple mixer control 'Mic Mute-LED Mode',0
  Capabilities: enum
  Items: 'On' 'Off' 'Follow Capture' 'Follow Mute'
  Item0: 'Off'
Simple mixer control 'Capture',0
  Capabilities: cvolume cswitch
  Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Capture 0 - 63
  Front Left: Capture 63 [100%] [30.00dB] [on]
  Front Right: Capture 63 [100%] [30.00dB] [on]
Simple mixer control 'Auto-Mute Mode',0
  Capabilities: enum
  Items: 'Disabled' 'Enabled'
  Item0: 'Disabled'
Simple mixer control 'Digital',0
  Capabilities: cvolume
  Capture channels: Front Left - Front Right
  Limits: Capture 0 - 120
  Front Left: Capture 60 [50%] [0.00dB]
  Front Right: Capture 60 [50%] [0.00dB]
Simple mixer control 'Mute-LED Mode',0
  Capabilities: enum
  Items: 'On' 'Off' 'Follow Master'
  Item0: 'Off'

I saw no parallels in my output that would allow me to use the same solution as menfon.

I am using:

A Lenovo ThinkPad P14s Gen 1
Arch Linux 5.12.12-arch1-1
Audacity 2.4.1
alsa-lib 1.2.5.1-3
pulseaudio 14.2
pulseaudio-alsa 1:1.2.5-2

Press me for any additional information you need. I greatly appreciate the help!

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 04 '21 at 06:52

Partial answer:

PulseAudio has an ALSA emulation layer. That's why when you run Pulseaudio, the pulse device is available in ALSA-only applications, and that device will connect the application to Pulseaudio.

That's also the reason why you see "more options" with pasuspender, because then Pulseaudio doesn't claim the ALSA devices, so they will show up (or be usable) in ALSA-only applications.

Pulseaudio routes audio connections per application. So if you want to connect an ALSA-only application to a specific Pulseaudio device, you cannot do this inside the application - the application only knows about the pulse emulation device. You need to do that in pavucontrol.

And that's the first thing you should check - run Audacity, run pavucontrol, go to the applications panel, set the right sources and sinks for Audacity.

Pulseaudio will remember those settings, and reconnect Audacity to the same sources and sinks the next time you start it again.

If that doesn't fix it, we'll need to do some more detailed debugging what goes wrong.

Audacity only hears system sounds

1 Answers1