I’m recording music from the internet (OS is Windows 10 build 19042.985) using Audacity 3.0.2.
I haven’t found a way to disable/mute the internal microphone so any room noise gets added to the recording
I tried a couple of previously mentioned solutions (e.g. WSAPI with speaker loopback: no recording occurs).
If I disable the microphone no recording occurs (no input).
Any suggestions?
We publish generic suggestions for how to do this.
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_audio_playing_on_the_computer.html
Computers only have two natural sound pathways. Play something to your speakers or headphones, and Record or transmit your microphone. That’s it. To record internet music, you have to jam those two together somehow. One usually unsatisfactory way is play to your speakers and record the room at the same time. That seems to be what your system is doing.
The goal is to catch the sound while it’s still digital and provide a recording path. And, oh by the way, leave the playback system running so you can hear what you’re doing. So this isn’t simple.
Alternative applications for recording computer playback
You can use other applications to record computer playback that do not rely on the computer sound device having this ability. These applications will make an audio file which can then be imported into Audacity for editing.
All the options below grab the audio digitally from the application producing the sound. This has advantages over stereo mix recording. Lossy digital-analog-digital conversions are avoided and also unwanted system beeps and alerts are not captured.
— SoundLeech is a free application for Windows which runs from the system tray. It records to lossless WAV format only.
— VB-Audio Virtual Cable is a donation-ware application for Windows. You can set the Cable Input as default playback device then set Audacity to record from the Cable Output.
— TotalRecorder is a low cost recording package. Internet streams can optionally be captured at faster than real-time rates (monitoring is not available in that mode).
Macs have never been able too do this naturally. We always have to install a loopback app.
Koz
I tried a couple of previously mentioned solutions (e.g. WSAPI with speaker loopback: no recording occurs).
If I disable the microphone no recording occurs (no input).
You may have to start the playback before recording. WASAPI loopback doesn’t work when there is no digital audio stream. A silent stream is OK but there has to be “data”.