Audacity fails to start when I click record button

Audacity 3.1.3 & WIN 8.1. When I click the record button I get the pop-up below. I have searched and not found the issue. It’s probably there but please help me out. I have no idea where to start looking. This just started happening out of the blue. I have downloaded the latest version of Audacity in the last couple of weeks. Sorry I’m not more computer savvy. Thank you.

I can’t get the popup to copy and paste but it says… Error opening recording device.
Error Code: 0 Success.
I selected Send To Audacity.
Below are the details from the message.

{
“timestamp”: 1663706198,
“event_id”: “11065a05e42fc8458151112014d81318”,
“platform”: “native”,
“release”: “audacity@3.1.3”,
“contexts”: {
“os”: {
“type”: “os”,
“name”: “Windows”,
“version”: “6.3.9600”
}
},
“exception”: {
“values”: [
{
“type”: “Error”,
“value”: “Error opening recording device.\nError code: 0 Success.”,
“mechanism”: {
“type”: “runtime_error”,
“handled”: false
}
}
]
}
}

What are you trying to record? Audacity will not start “turning” if it can’t find a bitstream. It won’t find a bitstream if it can’t find a sound device. Actually, Audacity gets its sound from the computer, not the device directly, so you have to get the whole dance right.

Audacity will sometimes throw this error with a microphone (my favorite error is crossing stereo and mono by accident), but it’s much more likely when you’re trying to record a YouTube show or other on-line content.

Windows 8.1?

Koz