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Sound playback in Audacity has never worked for me in recent memory: no sound plays, but the equalizer in the UI throbs. This has been the case for several years across a couple of Ubuntu versions and machines. This obviously basically makes the software unusable.

Audacity shows a bunch of output devices in the UI, and none of them work. There's one called hdmi, and then five more called HDA Intel PCH: HDMI n (hw:0,m) for various values of n and m. I've tried with the built-in laptop speakers, and I've tried with headphones plugged in (via a simple audio jack). Nothing works.

This is very strange to me because this is not a minor problem, and Audacity is not an obscure piece of software, but I don't see a lot of chatter about this problem on the internet. What's going on?

Ubuntu 20.04, Audacity 3.1.3.

Jack M
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1 Answers1

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The problem seems to be that the snap for Audacity has been broken for at least a year. If you have the snap version installed, remove it with snap remove audacity. Then, install the apt version with sudo apt install audacity. The audio output device you want is called "pulse", and it doesn't appear in the snap version (maybe a weird permission issue?). At time of writing this will bring you back to version 2.3.3, but at least it works.

Here's a thread on the Audacity forum with some more information.

Jack M
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