Delay effect..

"I’ve just started using Audacity,and running into a problem configuring recording feature,as i’m getting a slight delay effect i don’t need,

Is “Realtek” associated/installed when using Audacity ? As it’s the current default program i’m using…
I simply plug in a basic microphone,and it sounds like Karaoke…Ugh…
I’ve tried configuring Audacity,to use Microsoft sound mapper,to no avail,when i plug in the mic,i have no audio via headphones…?

Any help highly appreciated,
Thank you, George.

As a fuzzy rule you can’t listen to yourself on the computer during a live performance. Your voice has to be digitized, go into Audacity, turn around, turn into analog and come back out. That all takes time. There’s always an echo.

Perfect Overdubbing (to illustrate one case) is done with an external device which “knows” how to mix audio in both directions. The device catches your live voice before it’s digitized going in and mixes that (if you’re overdubbing) with the Audacity backing track coming back out. If you set up your latency adjustments, you hear a perfect theatrical mix in your headphones.

A G-Track microphone has a headphone connection in its base.

There are sound mixers which can do that and I have a USB microphone amplifier which will do it. The common idea in each case is not plugging the headphones into the computer.

Koz

“sounds like Karaoke” could be a feedback-loop created by recording the output of the computer as well as the microphone.
Disable all the Windows recording-devices except the microphone, and disable Audacity’s “software playthrough”.