Sound Problems: Audio Does Not Work in Some Programs, Recording Turns Off & On in Audacity

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1

I am a professional voice actor, so this sound issue is crippling my productivity.

The sound will periodically not function in one program but functions in the other. For example, the audio from a video in a browser plays fine, but when switching to Audacity, suddenly the sound doesn’t work in that program (happens in various programs that play audio) until I open Settings and then click on “Sounds” or seemingly arbitrarily click around in the Sounds panel.

I can record using Audacity, but every few minutes a word will be cut off by a fraction of a second, as if the microphone had turned off for a moment and no audio was captured (but there is no blank line on the waveform, it’s as if someone deleted 0.5 - 1 second or so of audio and did so every few minutes).

I have reinstalled Audacity through Snap.
I have reinstalled Audacity through the terminal.

The sound issue is not just with Audacity, as noted in the first observation.

I am not a tech savvy person. I’m not even a sound engineer, anymore than your typical movie actor is a trained cameraman. I say this to forewarn that it is doubtful that I will be able to follow any complex instructions for resolving this issue.

Shall I return to Ubuntu or is this a known issue with Fedora? Is there a way to fix it?

Thank you.

2

I must ask, why are you using Audacity via Snap? By “through the terminal”, do you mean an RPM, or just again Snap from the terminal?

4

Jack, welcome, and please check out #start-here when you have a chance.
In order for people to have a better idea of your configuration, please post the output of inxi -Fxz using the </> preformatted text tag.
Other than reinstalling Audacity, what other things have you already tried? And is this a fresh install of Fedora 36 or did you install originally a number of versions ago and just kept updated? The audio utilities have gradually changed over the last few releases, so it is possible you have some kruft if the system is old.
Based on your description, I would guess at a driver issue, but I could also imagine audio recording drops if there are any high cpu load applications running at the same time you record. I’d guess the chances of the latter are low, but figured it might be good to know whether your system could be undersized for your task (critical resources could include cpu cycles, memory, disk, …). Any clues that might be helpful?
Thanks

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