My microphone was not working so I was investigating it. Today I found that whenever audacity is open, my microphone gets fucked up and requires me to restart pulseaudio!
Never seen this before (but glad I solved the problem; I was so mad that I could build a computer but not get a microphone to work); anyone else have this issue? I'm up to date.
Works fine on my laptop but audacity does use "alsa" for my microphone.
If I do a test with vokoscreen (using pulse) concurrently ...... it records as it should.
I don't think audacity it the cause, here. It only is triggering the situation.
But before we dive into the ALSA ecosystem, please take a look at the audacity settings:
Start Audacity, go to the top menu 'Edit' and select 'Preferences'.
On the left hand you'll see the menu. Should be something like:
Later we also can take a look into 'Recording', bit this is mostly finetuning.
Changed "default" to the actual sound-card and still no avail, even after a reboot. 
By the way, I found a workaround. USB microphones work like a charm, even in Audacity. I haven't been looking for a solution to the analog microphone problem because now I just use a headset.
