Audacity on Linux Mint
I used the Linux Mint 17.n Rebecca software manager to find and install Audacity sound editing software. As well as editing music it has some clever signal sampling and analysing features which I want to use to investigate a resonance and howl around feedback issue with something I am working on.
So I installed the package on a powerful desktop machine and launched it. I tested it using a signal generator connected into the line input on the computer sound card and found it to be a bit of a bugger to get running. It didn't consistently do the options selected such as display the incoming signal amplitude, select the correct input socket etc. The system sound settings (mic gain, speaker volume, default sources etc) all affected the Audacity ability to display my signal source and each time I set one to the correct socket something else messed it up.I suspected that other stuff the machine was doing was interfering with it setting the sound card. From time to time it would hang and I had to use the system monitor to kill the process several times.
Yesterday evening I went around the same loop but using a different computer running a later version of Linux Mint 17.n. This behaved in much the same way. I then complicated the issue by trying to use a USB external sound module. The results were a little better in that I got some input signal displayed on the screen and captured it, performed a spectrum analysis and tried the different weighting of signal response graphs. At this point the two stereo input signals were showing 6dB difference in amplitude from each other across the board despite being fed from the same mono signal hard wired at the plug. I guess the external sound module is a bit cheap and nasty. I also found that the gain sliders for the input signals were a bit strange, initially the gain increased as the slider was moved up but as it moved further up the gain stepped back, it was just all glitchy. This setup also crashed repeatedly.
Have any of you successfully used Audacity on Linux Mint?
Or on a Win PC?
Thanks,
Rans6......