Audio sample rates using an external hardware mixer and Pulseaudio on Debian SID
 

I have been having a very tough time getting my audio recording set up under Linux for the past three months. I am experiencing a persistent crackling and static noise whenever I record from a cardioid microphone plugged into a Behringer Xenyx 802 hardware mixer that is grabbing output feed (to capture computer sounds) from the computer and then running back into the same computer using the line-in jack.

After doing a lot of research, I have found that this is most likely due to a sample rate error found within the default.pa file for the Pulseaudio sound server.

Here is the real issue. The sound card's sample rate, in the computer, is 48KHz, but the problem is that even if I manually change it, I still am not compensating for the sample rate of the external mixer, which I am reading online can be anywhere as high as 192KHz.

Is there anything I can do? Is this set up unrealistic? Perhaps I have to buy a better internal sound card? Would it be cheaper to just buy a wireless USB headset/combo?

I would like to use what I have because I do not know how to capture both my voice and incoming audio (from game consoles, computer system sounds, etc.) with ffmpeg. Can you virtualize Pulseaudio sound streams (and are there latency problems in doing so?).

I have varied goals, but the main project is for screen casting and live streaming and this is my final hiccup. (I am using FFMPEG and Pulseaudio). I have noticed that using straight ALSA greatly reduces the issue, but I suffer from an ALSA buffer xrun error in ffmpeg when using ALSA directly. That is another issue entirely, but if anyone can shed any light on that, it would also be helpful.

Have you looked at Jack? http://jackaudio.org/
I've not played with it myself but I know a couple of people who use Linux for recording music and they use it rather than PulseAudio so it might ne worth looking into.