Bug report - default microphone in Preferences ignored

Audacity 3 Help Forum Windows
1

Audacity 2.3.3 on Windows 10

Audacity does not take heed of the default microphone in Preferences → Devices. While my USB microphone was plugged in, I chose it as the default under “Recording”.

My USB microphone is not always plugged in, for example, when I am doing production at some later time in another room. The program correctly bypasses my default choice to use my laptop’s internal microphone. This is expected behaviour.

However, if after doing this, I am later back in my recording room and I plug in the USB microphone before starting Audacity, it does not default back to the USB microphone in the main part of the program. Instead, the previously chosen internal microphone is selected by default, and the program ignores the setting in the Preferences menu.

If I go back into the Preferences menu to check, the USB microphone is still displayed as the default Recording device.

Personal impact on me has been that this has just cost me about two hours of recording time I just thought I was doing into the USB microphone, but instead did into the low quality internal microphone, rendering it unusable and forcing me to do it over.

Thanks.

2

I doubt that can be fixed.

If at that point you look at the Device Preferences, you will notice that the USB mic is not listed as an option, so some other device (the built in mic) has become the “preferred” device and Audacity’s configuration file “audacity.cfg” is updated with that information.

Because the internal mic is available the next time you launch Audacity, and is listed in the audacity.cfg file as the default device, it automatically selected as the default (until you change it). This is just a downside of removable devices,

3

Thanks for the info.

I suspected something like that, but importantly, I did go into preferences after re-plugging the USB mic, and it re-appears as the preferred device in the settings themselves. Where that doesn’t update, is in the program itself, and the internal mic is selected by default.