How to record PC audio with Audacity on Linux

Unlike the windows experience, if you install Audacity, in Manjaro, you don’t get PC audio recording out-the-box

How to wire things correctly

You need to identify what sound server you are running on your distro. A command to run in order to find out is pactl info | grep "Server Name"

Depending on whether it outputs PipeWire or PulseAudio, then you’d take different approaches.

I got PulseAudio so we’d follow the steps catered to that sound server. But that didn’t work. You should be able to go to Audacity and then on the Audio Host you would select PulseAudio and then set the recording device to something akin to: Monitor of Built-in Audio Analog Stereo.

PulseAudio Fix

Since we couldn’t go the easy way, we have to go for a different method: pavucontrol

• Install: yay -S pavucontrol

Now this will become really hacky.

• Open up Audacity
• On the audio settings:
  • Host: ALSA
  • Recording device: pipewire or pulse
• Press Record
• Open up pavucontrol on the terminal
• If we go to the Recording tab we will see Audacity recording
• We can then change the source of this to the exact source of sound that we want to record (we should be able to select and test out the different sources until we find the right channel that belongs to the PC audio)
• PulseAudio creates several audio paths, so Audacity might attach itself to another source that doesn’t output any audio. So we are re-wiring this listening.