How-to: Get Audacity working after a Hardy upgrade

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How-to: Get Audacity working after a Hardy upgrade

Xubuntu 8.04 comes shipped with PulseAudio, a new sound management system. For the most part, your commonly used programs should work with this new program. For some, however, Audacity may quit being able to play and record sound. (For those who don’t know, Audacity is a sound editor; which means not being able to play and record sound renders it pretty useless!)

This how-to is extremely easy and short, but it helps me work with one of my favourite programs. In short: uninstall jackd.

1) Go to Xfce Menu > Accessories > Terminal, and enter in the following:

sudo apt-get remove jackd

Reopen up Audacity. Hopefully, it should start working again as it should. If not, you may have to quit the jackd program. Go back to the terminal and enter the following:

killall jackd

Now Audacity should be working just as it did before. Good luck!

(Credit goes to http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=4812244&postcount=5.)

16 Comments »

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Thank you for posting this. It resolved my troubles with regular (not Xubuntu) Ubuntu Hardy.

Comment by JohnPaul— May 2, 2008 #

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Remove jack?
Are you insane?

My 8.04 installs are currently broken, so when I get them fixed I’m going to be using other sound apps (Ardour, Fluidsynth, etc.) that rely on jack for low-latency.
How does PulseAudio compare to jack for latency and configurability? Does PA play nice with jack (as in, is this just a temporary hack or do you REALLY have to not run jack)?

If this is the case, I may have to stick with 7.10…

Comment by edvard— May 2, 2008 #

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I understand that a lot of people need jack, but I wasn’t able to get Audacity to work with it in 8.04. Sometimes I need to kill pulseaudio through the System Monitor to get Audacity working too.

What you could do is write a script that kills jackd and pulseaudio, launches audacity and runs them both back up again. In short, it’d look something like this:

#!/bin/sh

killall jackd
killall pulseaudio
audacity
jackd
pulseaudio

Save it as audacity.sh, make it executable (chmod +x ./audacity.sh), and create a launcher that points to this script. This should help you for now. PulseAudio isn’t quite as robust as I’d like it to be, especially for an LTS.

In other words:
If audio editing is really important to you, stick with 7.10.
If not, move right on up.

Comment by xubuntu— May 3, 2008 #

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8.04

sucks

firefox doesn’t work
xfc panel doesn’t work

Comment by uros— May 6, 2008 #

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font sucks

Comment by uros— May 6, 2008 #

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font in 8.04
dont look so good

Comment by uros— May 6, 2008 #

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Dude, re-install.

Comment by edvard— May 12, 2008 #

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Looks like Pulse is not installed by default in my 8.04….
And according to PulseAudio’s website, Audacity doesn’t support PA anyway:

“Audacity

Audacity doesn’t support PulseAudio, nor Esound for the moment. You’ll have to kill pulseaudio before you use this application. However, some work has started on the PortAudio cross-platform Audio API, to support PulseAudio.”

So I’m back where I started… Happy with Jack.
🙂

Comment by edvard— May 13, 2008 #

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Thanks, your advice works for me (Kubuntu Hardy Heron)!

Comment by Florian— May 22, 2008 #

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prelatical says : I absolutely agree with this !

Comment by prelatical— May 28, 2008 #

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well…

Pulseaudio can use Jack as a backend.

so you can have pulseaudio and jackd at the sametime 🙂

h

Comment by mots— June 6, 2008 #

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Seriously?! Uninstall jackd? Really?! This deserved its own little “article?”

I’m sorry to sound crass but… uh…

How about some real help as in assisting folks who — gasp — need to keep jackd (ardour, for one). I would love a little tutorial to help get pulseaudio and jackd to play nicely together so that I can get both ardour AND audacity to work.

Now THAT would be useful. 🙂

Thanks.

Comment by t0dd— June 11, 2008 #

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Are you sure it comes with pulseaudio? My installation didn’t. I didn’t change anything prior to it, just did a default install.

Comment by DkkD— June 25, 2008 #

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thanks I remove jackd and audacity work finaly
a lot of thanks
but I don know what is jackd…

Comment by marijo— April 9, 2009 #

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I had the same problem with audacity.I am using Ubuntu 8.04.
The problem was solved when I removed jackd.
Thanks a lot

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