Today I had some problems, with audacity.I have some experience in sound editing with audacity ( I am editing podcasts for Jerry Michalsky  http://yi-tan.com/  ) but until now I was forced to work with it only in windows.

This was the error message: “Error while opening sound device. Please check the output device settings and the project sample rate.”

Today after a small research I found what the problem was, wrong output card. This is how I solved it:  Edit -> Preferences -> Playback -> Device

I had in this tab ALSA: HDA NVIDIA: ALC883 Digital (hw:0,1). Instead of this I choosed  ALSA: default and the problem was solved.