From Audacity Wiki
| This page reflects the status of support in Audacity Beta for the current v19 version of the PortAudio Audio I/O library. As of Spring 2009, Audacity Beta now supports only PortAudio v19. The Audacity Stable 1.2 line continues to use only PortAudio v18. We update the PortAudio version used in CVS frequently, using a snapshot of the PortAudio development code.
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[edit] Windows
PortAudio appears to be stable and relatively well behaved on Windows. Support is primarily for MME (Multi Media Extensions) drivers, although DirectSound devices are also supported. ASIO is not supported as discussed on the ASIO_Audio_Interface page.
[edit] Mac OS X
CoreAudio support only, no ASIO as discussed on ASIO_Audio_Interface. Recent changes to PortAudio v19 appear to be causing regressions here, and it works much less well that v18 does with many USB audio devices. On the other hand, it's reported to work better with Firewire audio devices (which are quite popular on Mac it seems). A shortage of Mac developers on Audacity has meant slow progress in testing and development. The update of CVS to the PortAudio snapshot from 09 Dec 07 made provision in the build system for OS X 10.5 (Leopard). The update on 14 Jan 08 improved general stability.
- ALSA is supported and works fine on development systems, although some distributions repeatedly report problems that don't show up anywhere else.
- JACK is not tested and known to have multiple issues - see the JACK section of our Linux Issues page for more detail. Help, especially patches to fix this issue would be much appreciated. The previous update of CVS to the PortAudio snapshot from 09 Dec 07 cured one problem with Jackd starting automatically.
- OSS works, although using the OSS emulation over ALSA is not recommended (use the native ALSA interface) because it has problems with cursor movement for some cards.
- There is no PulseAudio back-end to PortAudio, so you will either have to clear it out of the way or rely on PulseAudio providing some sort of emulation. However as of end of December 2008, we have a patch for testing from the PortAudio mailing list which might make Audacity work better with PulseAudio.
