Hi, I’m sorry if this is a dumb question, but I am unfamiliar with a lot of Audacity’s features and how to utilize them if they exist; My situation is this, I have my desktop audio on my computer looping back into audio so I can record sounds within a game or video, which is what I want; but I’d also like to be able to record my microphone simultaneously while recording desktop audio. Is this possible within Audacity, if so, How does one go about configuring Audacity to allow this?
No, Audacity cannot record two different audio sources at the same time. If you want to solve this problem for free, you need to download and install Voicemeeter Banana (download page VB-Audio VoiceMeeter Banana). Then select in this application, for example, the first input is a microphone, and route the Windows audio output to one of the two virtual inputs. Each of these two inputs to which you route audio signals should be routed, for example, to the A1 audio bus (so that both inputs can be heard),), while the A1 bus must be routed to headphones or speakers, and to the B1 audio bus, while the B1 audio bus can be routed to the internal recorder (virtual cassette tape recorder) and/or selected as the audio recording source in Audacity settings.
There are some excellent Voicemeeter tutorials here: https://www.pride48.com/training/