I am trying to get a friend set up to record and edit music using Audacity. The machine is running Ubuntu Zorn. However, when we try to run the software, we get the message that no audio devices were found.

I installed both the operating system and the editing software using the default settings. Is there something else that I need to do to get the system working?

Thanks,

Tom

Do you have the pulseaudio plugins installed? Also, the alsa audio drivers are required.

Thanks, rubberman. I'll check it out.

Yeah, like rubberman said, to have good audio driver support, beyond the basics, you need pulseaudio and ALSA. Modern versions of Ubuntu or other debian-based distros install those by default, as far as I know, but this is definitely the first place you need to look to solve your problem. Obviously, you also have to make sure to set audacity to hook up to pulseaudio and ALSA (which, again, should be the default behavior). Here is a nice tutorial on this.

I think that you should make sure to install pavucontrol (pulseaudio volume control), because that should pull in any other things that you might be lacking for being able to record audio. Also, on Linux, installing VLC is a very good idea because this be-all-end-all video player pulls in pretty much every conceivable video and audio codecs and drivers (or driver servers, like pulseaudio). You might also want to install alsamixer or other alsa-related tools (just search in the software center for anything related to alsa, and install whatever seems relevant).

Thanks to you to Mike

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