audacity does not play a sound since Gutsy upgrade

Check if anything else has the sound device file open.
less /proc/asound/card0/pcm0p/info
and look at subdevices_avail (at the end of the file)
If avail is 0, then something already has your sound card open. (This might not be a problem, depending on the drivers/hardware; e.g. My Intel HDA, w/ Sigmatel STAC9271D codec, shows 1 subdevice, and 0 avail when anything is playing. It allows apparently unlimited stereo output streams (at 48kHz only), or a single multichannel stream at any sample rate.)

You can check what processes have the card open, with
lsof /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p

 I found audacity kept switching to using the digital output of my sound card, which isn't hooked up. But you did say you set it to Alsa (default), which should work.

 Other ALSA programs work for you, right? e.g. aplay, or mplayer -ao alsa, or whatever.
(check with lsof while the programs running to make sure it's opened the sound device directly instead of starting artsd or something)

I have had the same problem, many games also stopped working (No sound - could not open device etc)
A productivity killer that gives OS's a bad name - I don't have time to fiddle
I tried the steps above with no success

Peter

AFAIK, Ubuntu wants everything that outputs sound to go through pulseaudio. (a software mixing daemon). Not everything supports pulse, though, and will find the audio device unavailable if something else already has it open through pulse.

sudo lsof /dev/snd/*

will almost always tell you what process you need to stop to free up the audio device, if you don't want to convert everything to pulseaudio.

 Or I think it's appropriate to report bugs on any program that doesn't/can't use pulseaudio by default.

Same in intrepid.

Hello,

It works using audacity 1.3.6 getdeb.net package.

Please update it in repositories.

Regards

this is now fixed in jaunty (for both audacity and PulseAudio)

This problem appears fixed according to the bug comments, settings status accordingly. If the bug can be reproduced on Jaunty, please open a new bug.