Audacity stops recording during silence [SOLVED]

[waxcylinder]

A lot of the buttons and drop down menus on the toolbars are greyed out.
The green upside-down triangle that says “Click to Pin” turns red.
An audio track appears that reads (stereo, 44100Hz,32-bit float).
There is a red upside down triangle on the timeline action bar to follow the recording.
The red triangle constantly flickers but doesn’t move unless sound is playing.

I play some audio(YouTube video) and it follows along recording what audio is playing.
The toolbar called recording level fluctuates along with the audio track displayed beneath the toolbars.
When I turn off the YouTube video (but keep recording in audacity) the red triangle stops, leaves a space of one half of a second in front of the recorded audio, and starts flickering there.

This is a “feature” of Microsoft’s WASAPI host it only records when there is an active signal. when there is no active signal recording pauses and will restart once an active signal resumes. It is not an Audacity issue, it’s not something we can do anything about.

This page in the Audacity Manual talks a bit about this (I will try to make it clerarer for the Manual for the next release)
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_computer_playback_on_windows.html

Peter.