Fix for Audacity in Mint17

Trick source

The problem: I can record sound (I can see the waveform) but when I try to play it back there is no sound output or it sounds noise yap-yap-yap and audacity moves through the audio very quickly. If I press play repeatedly eventually the entire GUI freezes. On the command line it gets this error:

    ALSA lib pcm.c:7843:(snd_pcm_recover) underrun occurred

The fix is the same as the fix for the sound issues in Skype. For launching Audacity from the desktop do:

$ sudo sed -i 's/^Exec=.*/Exec=env PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30 audacity %U/' /usr/share/applications/audacity.desktop

for launching the program from the command line the hack is make the same than for skype, create a bash script to wrap the PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC variable only for audacity:

$  sudo bash
$  cd /usr/bin # here is audacity
$  cp audacity audacity.bin
$  pico audacity

once pico is opened, write the script:

#!/bin/bash
    
PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=30
export PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC
/usr/bin/audacity.bin $@

then give it global execution permissions

$ chmod ugo+x audacity