Cannot Record Sound or Play MIDI
 

My sound card is working perfectly for sound, but I can't record sound, or play MIDI files. My lspci shows this "00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801FB/FBM/FR/FW/FRW (ICH6 Family) High Definition Audio Controller (rev 03)" for my sound card. I'm using Ubuntu 8.04.2, I've tried setting all the settings in "Sound" (using Gnome) to ALSA, but that didn't work. I tested all the settings for recording, most of them said "Failed to construct test pipeline for 'gconfaudiosrc ! audioconvert ! audioresample ! gconfaudiosink profile=chat'". Whenever I try to record, which ever program I am using freezes up, and it must be force quit. I have been told that this is likely to be the fault of Pulse Audio, because it has been the source of a lot of problems for a lot of people, any help is really appreciated.

I know nothing about pulseaudio and can't help with that. I really don't understand what the canonical guys have with pulseudio, since it's something pointless and useless that adds nothing in top of plain ALSA for a desktop user. But just to say that both problems are -probably- unrelated.

I can't help with the part about recording.

But for midi you need to use a software midi synth like timidity or fluidsynth, since 99% of the sound cards produced nowadays do not have a hardware synthesizer.

For recording, what are you using? I have always found sound-recorder to be unintuitive and not very good so always use audacity, which is an excellent sound editor as well as recorder. Give that a try and come back again if it is not working.

I have been using audacity, I think it's a pretty awesome program too, but nothing works. I have upgraded to 8.10, as was suggested to me on the Ubuntu forums, but nothing has changed. Everything freezes, no buttons work, and I have to force quit the program, but everything outside of the program works. It's weird, and annoying. If anyone can help me, it'd be really appreciated.

I know nothing about pulseaudio, as said, but... what are the playback and record devices that audacity has configured on Edit/Preferences?

Okay, so I think I might have gotten it to work, but I don't have a mic or anything handy right now, so I'll have to wait to check for sure. But when I try to record (with audacity) the first attempt doesn't work, the needle just sits there twitching a bit, it doesn't progress down the track bar, and there is no show of actual recording. but when I try this a second time, while the first track is still there, it will go, and it does show some progress and a flat line, I don't know if that flat line will change if I have an input device, but the fact that it doesn't freeze up is a start. And I got all this from looking in the preferences in audacity. thanks a bunch, but I'll be back if I need any further help.