Audacity, in its configuration for audio devices (Edit → Preferences →
Audio I/O), presents only ALSA and OSS devices. The PulseAudio devices
should also be presented on systems that have PulseAudio working.

This is a problem on systems that *only* have audio working via
PulseAudio. For example, an X desktop running on a remote server,
which must communicate over the network to a workstation running a
PulseAudio server that controls the workstation's audio devices.

Ben Finney <ben+debian@benfinney.id.au> writes:
From http://www.pulseaudio.org/wiki/PerfectSetup#Audacity

Audacity doesn't support PulseAudio, nor Esound for the moment. You'll
have to kill or suspend pulseaudio before you use this
application. Audacity uses the PortAudio cross-platform Audio API which
doesnt support pulseaudio. Some work was started on making portaudio
support PulseAudio but this does not appear to be under active
development currently and does not work in it's current state.

Audacity can use OSS for sound input and sound output. By changing the 2
settings in preferences to /dev/dsp, and running audacity as

padsp audacity

you route OSS sound through pulseaudio and can have successful playback
and recording with audacity. You could also set the sound input to be
ALSA which (for regular users) is less likely to be blocked by another
application, as recording with multiple applications at once is less
commonly done

Using pasuspender to momentarily suspend pulseaudio is another way to
use Audacity.

pasuspender -- audacity <argument>

OTOH upstream seems to be against it:
http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3541

However there seems to be a patch for audacity to actually support this
nevertheless. But unless someone steps forward to examine and discuss
that patch with upstream, I'd vote for setting this bug to
wishlist/wontfix.

Note that this doesn't help for the situation described above, where
pulseaudio is *required* for access to the audio devices.

Perhaps this bug is best applied to portaudio then? I don't know the
answer to that question.

This does work, but could hardly be called a fix for this bug; more a
worksaround.

That discussion also ignores the possibility of the situation
described in this bug report (that pulseaudio is required for access
to some audio setups).

Can I ask that the package manager perform that advocacy on behalf of
package users?

From the same page, dated 01/11/10 (or 2010-01-11):
Audacity has now been packaged with a proper "alsa: pulse" device listed, in a ppa for ubuntu intrepid. See https://launchpad.net/~diwic/+archive

The patch enabling Pulseaudio via ALSA has been in Audacity's portaudio
tree since 1.3.6-1. If the ALSA:pulse device does not show up, it is a
configuration issue.

The following in your .asoundrc should do it:

pcm.pulse {
        type pulse
}

ctl.pulse {
        type pulse
}

In Ubuntu this is enabled by default, but I'm unsure if it does in Debian.

// David

I'm unable to get audacity working on Jessie. :( I've tried to use
'padsp audacity', 'pasuspender -- audacity' and the .asoundrc trick
mentioned in this bug, but none of these tricks get audacity working
with pulseaudio. :(

I get tow python exceptions (press continue) and then it give me a
segfault.

Any hope to get a version working with pulseaudio into Debian?

This is still a problem in testing, almost 10 years after this bug was
originally filed. Audacity can be built with pulse support nowadays, and
not
having it makes it completely unusable under some setups (some sound
devices
simply aren't there, or will have the wrong configuration).

Please build audacity with pulse support enabled, that would solve this
issue
for good.

Hi

Looks like there's some level of pulseaudio support in audacity. Although
taudacity can freeze when used with pulseaudio.

See https://bugzilla.audacityteam.org/show_bug.cgi?id=276

HTH