I have the same problem as the user on this thread from 5 years ago:
Audacity stops recording during silence [SOLVED] (None of the solutions offered to him work for me.)
This never used to be a problem prior to around 2018, but has started happening since around then.
It occurs randomly. Most of the time, it doesn’t happen, other times it does. For example, just now I recorded a bit of audio normally, with lots of silence either side of it. A few minutes later, I came back to Audacity, hit record, and this time the problem occurred, where it doesn’t start recording until it hears something.
I hit “record” and instead of recording silence (as desired), nothing is recorded until the first sound plays, which is always truncated because it didn’t start recording in time.
Another detail is that when sound has been playing and it goes back to silence, I will sometimes hear a continuous rapid stuttering sound, like the last portion of sound is playing in a loop.
My specs and settings:
Audacity version: 3.6.1 (but this has been happening since at least 2018)
Device: Desktop PC, Windows 7 x64
No sound card
Transport options > Enable sound activated recording = OFF
Preferences > Recording > Sound Activated Recording = OFF
Host: Windows WASAPI
Playback Device: Speakers (High Definition Audio Device)
Recording Device: Speakers (High Definition Audio Device) (loopback)
(The above settings, such as using WASAPI, are the only ones I’ve been able to randomly find that allow me to record the computer’s audio, if there are better settings then I’ll be happy to use them.)