Long long time audacity user and first real issue with it…
Brand new W7 64bit laptop
the latest Audacity exe
Lame dll
Now when listen to anything… things are weird. If it is a song I can hear the instruments fine but little to no voice. System sounds are fine but things like talking and voice are muffled or not there. I didn’t install anything else on this machine. Any help would be appreciated. It is not out of the realm that I pressed something in audacity that messed this up but I can’t seem to get it back. I have reinstalled my audio drivers.
So here is what happened, and it may help someone in the future.
I had the default Microsoft HD Audio driver installed before out of the gate for W7 64. It showed none of the options for changing microphone settings as suggested in the FAQs…
So I uninstalled that and installed the Dell manufacturers driver… And I see the mic options.
I changed the mic settings… no dice.
I then went and recalibrated the surround settings for my main playback device and wala it starts working again.
So I broke my sound… with a tiny bit of help from Audacity. It seems that I had pressed the mic button in Audicity (even though I was just editing a mp3) – this has been reproduced on coworker laptop with microsoft driver. I had no mic or mic driver installed and basically Audicity wouldn’t do anything – like it should. But it does F up the W7 sound… And there wasn’t a property or config setting in the world with the default driver to get it back. I am not sure if Audicity has a programming flaw with this or if this is how every application reacts to W7. My thoughts are if an application doesn’t see a mic then they shouldn’t be communicating the sound driver to change any settings… Still love audicity, but now just a tiny bit less.
Providing that the sound card drivers work correctly Audacity will request audio from the sound card driver when you hit record. It is then the job of the sound card driver to deal appropriately with that request. Normally, if there is no available audio to record then either Audacity will report an appropriate error, or it will jut sit there patiently waiting (depending on how the sound card driver responds to the request). If there’s a problem with the driver then anything could happen.