Some of you may may find the following information useful. I was
struggling with Audacity (vers 1.3.4.) in Linux Mint (and presumably
the same would apply to Ubuntu 8.04). Whenever I tried to open any
sound file (wav, mp3,aiff etc.), I was getting an "Error while opening
sound device" and nothing would play . I tried changing the sound
device to all possible options in Audacity. I also tried changing the
sample rate but still got the same message. Googling for this turned
up that there seems to be a bug in 1.3.4. with HH. The advice I found
was to remove 1.3.4. (make sure use use Synaptic and choose to remove
completely i.e. all configuration settings too) and to install
Audacity 1.3.3. instead. I obtained the older version from here:
http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/
and everything now works perfectly!
I have kept a copy of the installation package in case I need to
reinstall in the future. Hopefully, this bug will be resolved in later
releases of Audacity.