So, the Aldate's Student Weekend (powered by Linux) had one technical problem: Audacity refused to work on my laptop. Looks like the culprit is something to do with the version of portaudio that Audacity was compiled against; changing the settings to use Jack for audio IO has solved all our problems. If you're getting "Expression 'ValidateParameters( ... ) failed in 'src/hostapi/alsa/pa_linux_alsa.c', line: 1142" then, until someone gives a better answer, install Jack and use that to talk to ALSA.
