I am losing my patience fighting with this and about to go to a different editor….
All I want to do is to be able to listen to the audio from a CD played by the Windows 10 computer while recording it into Audacity at the same time! Played with settings, watched videos to no avail. I used to be able to do this by plugging my headphones into the comp’s front headphone jack. Suddenly something has changed! Was using 2.4.2 but now 3.7.7. The only setting which produces any audio from the headphone jack is what sounds like continuous loopback. This did not happen before. My goal is what I had before before this comp decided to make its own changes…record from the CD player, adjust the speaker output down to not disturb anyone if I’m not there or use my headphones if I want to listen. This works perfectly when recording from the internet but not the CD which was also perfect at one time. Setting is Windows WASAPI. Secondly, what happened to the zoom feature??? I used to be able to zoom out to delete large periods of unwanted audio but not with this version!
Normally you don’t “record” a CD. Use a CD Ripping Application to digitally copy the data (to a WAV or MP3 file, etc.).
I use Exact Audio Copy or Cue Tools. Both of those support AccurateRip which can (usually) confirm that there are no data errors and the audio in the file exactly matches the data on the CD (1) except that it’s in a different “package” as a regular computer file.
record from the CD player, adjust the speaker output down to not disturb anyone if I’m not there or use my headphones if I want to listen.
Strange… They should work the same when you select WASAPI (loopback) to record what’s coming out of your soundcard. Usually, the playback volume affects recoding volume (so you can’t turn it down too much) but different people get different results so I think it depends on your drivers or your specific version/variation of Windows.
(1) MP3 is lossy compression so the data won’t match exactly, but AccurateRip can still tell you if there are read errors. Regular WAV files are uncompressed and FLAC is lossless compression.
When CDs were the rage, playback used a cable connecting the drive to the sound card. It later changed to the OS reading and extracting audio digitally and then routing it through its internal analogue mixer. The OS now handles audio digitally.
Audacity fell out because the old engine depended on audio paths that Windows removed or restricted. The update addressed this dependency rather than removing a feature you really enjoyed using.
You can still listen to the CD while stealing it, but it needs a workaround. You can install an earlier version of Audacity. You can use a virtual mixing desk such as vbanana. If you are keen to learn, other software may still work on legacy behaviour. For how long, who knows.
If you want to research further, there is a large amount of literature on this topic because it is not just Audacity. It affects DAWs, interfaces, devices, and music software generally. If you just want a fix that is understandable, roll back to 2.x. It will likely last as long as any other non compliant DAW.