I’ve dealt with the same Audacity issue so many others have reported over the years. How do you keep previously-recorded audio from bleeding into a new track you’re trying to add?
The first time in happened to me was a few years ago. None of the possible solutions posted online back then worked for me, but somehow I managed to stumble onto the solution by trial-and-error.
This week, the process of migrating my PC content to a new drive caused Audacity to revert to default settings. The bleed-through problem was back, and I had no recollection of what I had done to resolve it before.
Now that I’ve found the answer again, I’m hoping that posting this information will help others.
I’m using a MouKey MSC1 audio interface, powered via USB connection to my PC. It receives line output from a guitar amp, and its recording output is connected to the PC’s microphone input. The only other connection is a headphones output, which feeds an input of my MouKey MAMX2 stereo mixer. A second input on the mixer receives audio from the headphones jack on my PC. And I have my headphones plugged into the mixer’s output. I can control the volume levels of both the previous recordings and the new input, so doing clean multi-track work is quite easy.
It’s a very compact and simple setup, occupying less than a square foot of space. But that alone does nothing to solve the bleed-through problem. I needed to find the correct settings in Audacity’s audio setup. For Playback Device, the correct option turned out to be “Speakers Headphones (Realtek)”. And “Microsoft Sound Mapper – Input” has to be selected as the Recording Device.