Audacity Forum

It is possible that your sound card has died, but I was wanting to exhaust all other possibilities before declaring it dead. If (as you have reported) you can feed an input into the sound card and hear it through the computer speakers, that would suggest that it is more likely to be a sound card set...

Aliassa wrote: I also just phoned someone who mentioned Stellar Phoenix, software that may recover lost files

Don't spend any money on that until you've talked to us - it may be a lost cause.

Jill wrote: Now it crashes when a recording is stopped.

This is a known problem with Audacity 1.2.x on Win 7.
Upgrade to Audacity 1.3.13 http://audacityteam.org/download/

First you'll need to say a bit more about what exactly you did. You recorded the interview, then, did you "Save" the Audacity Project, or did you just "Export" the MP3 file? Do you know which version of Audacity you were using? What operating system are you using? (Vista? Windows...

That all sounds correct, but I was hoping that I may have been able to spot something that we're missing.
To post a screen shot, save it as a jpeg file.
There's a "how to" here: http://www.groovypost.com/howto/microso ... indows-xp/

In Audacity 1.3.12, the Sync-Lock button had a chain icon. That button should not have been present because the feature was experimental, but some Linux distros' (Ubuntu) decided to enable it. The icon has since been updated to a clock/watch face.

8000 Hz is the sample rate, but that's too low for Dragon. When you Export a file, Audacity will use the "Project Rate" for the exported file. The Project Rate can be found in the lower left corner of the main Audacity window. Before Exporting the WAV file, change the Project Rate to a hig...

It is the conversion from a higher bit format (bit-depth) to a lower one that requires dither, not the change in sample rate. Audacity does all processing and mixing at 32-bit float. This has the advantages: processing and mixing is done with greater precision. float format calculations are generall...

When you start recording, a new track is created. That is normal and is by design. By having multiple tracks you have the flexibility to process and edit each segment separately and move them around independently (use the "Time Shift" tool to drag the recorded sections around. (see here fo...

When you import a file into Audacity, it should also say (on the left end of the track) what the sample rate is (below the track name, immediately after the word "mono").
What does that say?