I'm hoping I can get some help with problems I've been having with sound in Ubuntu 14.04. I work a lot with audio recordings, and noticed difficulties when I started trying to record and annotate audio files in Ubuntu rather than Windows. I use Praat (phonetics software) for much of my work, and the program will crash my system when attempting to record in my Ubuntu install. I also use Audacity, and have noticed that most of the selections for playback and recording devices are not functional (I will be unable to record and/or unable to listen). I've also noticed that when I play around with the input/output device selections in Audacity, it will often cause there to be no sound available in system at all ... only a reboot will return sound to normal, and even then, it doesn't necessarily work immediately. For example, I recently used Audacity, played around with the device selection, and then had no system sound. Upon reboot, I still had no sound until I attempted a sound test of my analogue audio output, and then sound returned. Only analogue output will play sounds during an audio test. I would really like to better understand how audio is set up in Ubuntu, so I can hopefully use Linux for working with audio files. A list of my audio devices (aplay -l) is below, but please let me know what other system information is needed for help with this issue.
**** List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices ****
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 0: ALC887-VD Analog [ALC887-VD Analog] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 0: SB [HDA ATI SB], device 1: ALC887-VD Digital [ALC887-VD Digital] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
card 1: HDMI [HDA ATI HDMI], device 3: HDMI 0 [HDMI 0] Subdevices: 1/1 Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
