[Sreyan Chakravarty sent the reply directly to me, and apparently not to the list, but I'm moving the discussion back to the list.]
On Sun, 31 May 2020 20:24:12 +0530, Sreyan Chakravarty wrote:
On 5/27/20 11:38 PM, George Avrunin wrote:
I haven't used audacity in a long time, but on my Fedora 32, in Edit -> Preferences -> Devices, the HOST is set to ALSA and there doesn't seem to be a way to change it. But Playback Device and Recording Device both have a "pulse option". Have you tried those?
Well its interesting to say that. These are the playback options I have:
Do you see any PulseAudio ?
On my main desktop machine (a Dell Precision T1700) I don't do very much with sound. In audacity, the Playback Device options I see (with no webcam or headphones plugged in) are several entries of the form "HDA NVidia: HDMI X (hdw:y,z)", for various values of X (0-5), y, and z; "pulse"; and "default". For Recording Device, I see "HDA Intel PCH: ALC3220 Analog (hw:0,0)"; "sysdefault"; "pulse"; and "default".
The Audacity tutorial says (https://ttmanual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tutorial_selecting_your_input.html) that "An audio host is an interface between Audacity and the sound card driver. ... In Linux there is often only one option: ALSA, other options could be OSS and/or Jack Audio Connection Kit (also known as "Jack" or "Jackd")." So HOST is not where you'd make any changes.
Thats interesting, if ALSA is the only option then where does PulseAudio come in ?
My understanding is that pulseaudio is a sound server, which interacts with the applications and with the things that directly talk to the hardware. (See the comment in the text from the audacity tutorial above; it's not pulse that is the direct interface to the soundcard driver.) It seems that you have pulseaudio installed. Is it actually running? What does pavucontrol show?
As I said, I haven't used audacity in a long time and on my system pulseaudio seems to be running and working just fine. But your configuration is clearly very different from mine and I don't know enough to help debug your configuration.