I recently bought an Alesis iO4, a 4 microphone USB input device, which, according to this site works under Linux "completely", and was tested using Ubuntu 9.04. So I thought it was a good bet it would work with my 12.10 Ubuntu laptop.
When I connect it by USB to my laptop, it is recognized under the sound settings, and if I speak into the microphones I can see a response:
So far so good. However, in Audacity, when I press "record", I see no response whatsoever. My main concern is Audacity, but I tried also using Ubuntu's "Sound Recorder" utility, and it also showed no response in its level meter when I spoke into the mike, so I think this isn't just an Audacity problem.
I looked into Audacity's preferences, and under Host
in the Interface
section, the only option is ALSA
. Under Device
in the Recording
section, there are four options. HDA:Intel
is my on-board sound card. I'm not sure what the difference between pulse
, default
, and sysdefault
is, but in any case, selecting any of them does not seem to change anything.
Why is my sound device seen by the OS but not by Audacity (or any other software)?
How do I set it up so that Audacity takes input from this device?
Update: According to a very helpful person on the Audacity forums, the problem I'm reporting here is most likely caused by a bug in ALSA. The current version of ALSA in the Ubuntu repositories does not seem to contain the necessary patch, so I'm hoping it will be updated soon.