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......

Using Ubuntu Cinnamon, so pretty close to Mint. I just downloaded Audacity and some test files from the audiocheck website and ran some tests and generators and it all worked fine.

Some of the software in the Mint software center is quite out of date so perhaps you would be better totally removing what you have installed and downloading directly the latest version from the Audacity website.

I am not too confident with command line stuff and so I am a little hesitant to get a download from the Audacity site. Unless there is a self installing version there?

I have had a further play today, if I boot the machine from OFF and don't run up anything that makes noise, Youtube, music files, any website that has streaming video or noisy adverts, then running Audacity is OK. One thing that still messes it up is to make more than one sample recording without saving the file to hard drive and then trying to analyse causes things to get unpredictable. If I close the recording display by clicking the X in the trace window it stays happy. It still doesn't like the external sound adaptor but that is not a problem as the adaptor itself is pretty rubbish. Having said that, my internal sound card has a pretty rubbish spec and huge background noise levels.

I might have to bite the bullet and buy a PicoScope which has the bonus of a comprehensive suite of software allowing all manner of manipulation of the readings captured.

Rans6........