My partner and I have been trying to get any DAW to work for a couple of days, and we are down to one issue. Any time we launch any DAW, drum machine, etc., whether paid (free trial) or free, they always cause our laptop’s inputs to all disappear, leaving only a dummy output. I can’t find anyone else experiencing this issue online. We are running on Debian 13 (Trixie) as of now. Would it be better if we just tried running Windows programs in Wine?
What DAWs have you tried? Obviously Ardour may be one since you are posting here. More details may gather better answers.
Using the built in sound device on a laptop can be problematic in several ways. You can get a decent USB Audio interface fairly cheap. This may be all you need to start making music with Ardour on Linux.
What exactly do you mean by that?
If a particular audio production software opens the audio hardware for exclusive access then other software can no longer use the audio hardware, so you should be explicit whether e.g. when using Ardour that Ardour is not able to configure the audio hardware, or if you mean that if you start Ardour then e.g. your web browser can no longer play audio.
The second case is expected, but there are more complex configurations you can use to get around that.
