Audacity mutes other audio sources, can't unmute

[Mountain Man]

Strange problem that I've been wrestling with for a while, but whenever I run Audacity, it mutes other audio sources on my system. I can hear anything played through Audacity but not from anywhere else. Previous workaround was to change the playback settings in Audacity from "sysdefault" to another setting and then back to "sysdefault" which seemed to reset whatever it was that broke, but that doesn't work any more. If I play something from VLC, I can open the KDE volume control and see the meter moving, so I know the source is producing audio, but I can't hear any output. I've looked in alsamixer, and everything that should be turned up appears to be turned up. The only certain solution I've found is to simply reboot my system, but surely there has to be a more elegant way.

Any ideas?

[claydoh]

Mine is set to "Pulse" in the output. but I am not seeing this myself. I think. The option is blank for me until I expand the drop-down, when I do so, ''pulse' is highlighted. I don't have a 'sysdefault' option using 3.0.2 (flatpak). I do have a simple 'default'.

Have you tried dragging an effected application in the tray applet to a different output, if you have one?


Another thing that may or may not be useful to check is the auto-switching settings:



Ok, after deleting the ~/.audacity-data/audacity.cfg, it seems that 'default' is 'default' for me, so I must have set to to 'pulse' at some point in the past., but still not seeing any issue.


Here is my relevant settikngs from that file, if it helps:

[AudioIO]
RecordingDevice=default
Host=ALSA
PlaybackDevice=default
RecordingSourceIndex=0
RecordingSource=Front Mic:0
RecordChannels=2
[SamplingRate]
DefaultProjectSampleRate=44100

[GreyGeek]

You can examine sound controls using "sudo alsamixer".

[claydoh]

I don't think sudo is a good thing to use here.....

[jlittle]

... I've looked in alsamixer..
Any ideas?

alsamixer's weird UI has confused me in the past. If you're not aware of this, run it in a wide window, at least 200 columns, or use the right-arrow a lot.