Audacity Forum

You are not giving enough information.
What is your setup, and what are you doing (step by step).
It could be that you've plugged in a USB mic and it has hijacked your audio system, or any of a thousand other things.

To avoid having to do a lot of manual manipulation, you could use a suitable CD burning program to create a very large CD, but rather than burning a standard CD which is limited to 70 minutes, burn to an iso file. Then mount the iso file as a virtual drive and rip it as a single audio file. To do it...

Also worth considering "stand alone" portable recorders such as the Zoom H2 - they have the advantage of being completely silent in operation, and are portable. They are not really suitable for "close mic'ing" song vocals, but are great for ambient recordings.

I would not be using condenser microphones. They are totally the wrong mic for a high sound environment. Possibly, or should I say "usually". Condenser microphones are typically used when low level sounds, or sound that have a lot of high frequency components are being recorded. Some are ...

It seems to be a bug.

Can you confirm whether "upgrading to 1.2.6", or changing to the Dell laptop, made the difference?
Do you still have your old machine? Does the mic still work on that?

I think the "free" Nero is a trial version, but "Nero 7 Essentials" will do the job very well and is only about $10 (£5GBP) and I would say, well worth it. This version has major limitations for burning DVD videos, and bootable CD's (compared with the full version), but for stand...

I was able to get it to play out of both speakers Cool, that's saved you however many hours :) I'm still interested in setting up batches Batches can be quite useful, but there are a number of limitations. You are restricted commands listed in the select command dialog (and there's one or two that ...

Then there is something wrong with your set-up. A mono mp3 should play out of both speakers. I presume that stereo mp3's play out of both speakers, which rules out a lot of possibilities. Have you tried any other media players other than Amarok? I'm guessing that it's a driver, player, or codec prob...

That's too broad a question. It depends on what you want to record, how you want to record, what your budget is, and a million other factors.