Audacity freezes when pressing record button

I cannot replicate this. Could you please describe your audio path, and input preferences for audacity?

Not sure what audio path means. The "Recording Device" is set as "OSS:
dev/dsp"
Computer is Dell Inspiron 1501.

OK. It sounds like your "audio path" would be OSS -> audacity. Some people have more complex setups. Could you try switching to use ALSA as the "Recording Device"? I'm just curious if this is related to audacity interacting with something arbitrary on your system vs. audacity having difficulties with your OSS stack

I had a similar issue on my Dell Dimension 9150 -- Audacity would freeze when pressing the record button.

I somewhat tracked the problem down to the audio device and the fact that the system was unable to read from /dev/dsp (on my system this happened with any program -- not just Audacity). Overall it appears to be related to a number of issues dealing with the Intel soundcard drivers as they are compiled in the Gutsy default kernel.

Installing linux-backports-modules-generic on my system, followed by a reboot, seems to have solved the problem. Recording in audacity now works fine.

Hope this helps. I can provide more details about my system setup and configuration if anyone is interested.

Pm

Ooops! Looks like I spoke too soon -- it worked once after installing linux-backports-modules-generic, but then failed.

So, I did some more investigating. First, I did a clean reinstall of Kubuntu Gutsy (64-bit, in case that makes a difference). After more experimentation I've determined that the only way I can get Audacity to work is if the "Capture" input in kmix is enabled. If the Capture input is disabled, then Audacity locks up whenever record is attempted.

On this system both playback and record are set to "OSS: /dev/dsp". I'm also able to get it to record if I set the playback and record devices to "ALSA: front" and the input device (by the microphone volume control) to "Capture:0".

But ultimately on my system it seems to come down to the mute setting of the "Capture" input.

Hope this helps,

Pm

Thanks. That's very helpful: I had not tried testing it with the capture input muted (as this would clearly be an inappropriate setting for recording). On the other hand, when started in this configuration, audacity should either complain it cannot record, or record silence (the output of the muted element). Additionally, audacity should default to use the default ALSA input/output at initial startup, to reduce the chance that people may encounter this issue.

I believe this is fixed in Jaunty (alsa:default / alsa:pulse is used as default), please reopen the bug if it isn't.