Totally new to Audacity but, highly motivated by a great YouTube video about using a combination of the OneNote immersive reader, the narration feature, and Windows Voice Recorder to provide text to AI speech audio capability, I set off to follow the instructions, hit the red Record button - and - absolutely nothing happened
Well, that’s not strictly true because it did pop up with this error message: Error opening recording device
Error code: -9996 invalid device
{
“timestamp”: 1629387864,
“event_id”: “9b3ca2bdfb0686448f8df783458369d2”,
“platform”: “native”,
“release”: “audacity@3.0.3”,
“contexts”: {
“os”: {
“type”: “os”,
“name”: “Windows”,
“version”: “10.0.19043”
}
},
“exception”: {
“values”: [
{
“type”: “Error”,
“value”: “Error opening recording device.\nError code: -9996 Invalid device.”,
“mechanism”: {
“type”: “runtime_error”,
“handled”: false
}
}
]
}
}
The settings I had were:
Windows WASAPI, Speakers Realtek (R) Audio (loopback), 1 Mono Recording Channel.
I came a cropper at the point where I clicked on the red Record button; that’s when the error message popped up.
When using WASAPI loopback, it is essential that the number of audio channels and the sample rate selected in Audacity are the same as the device settings in Windows Sound control panel.
To open the Windows Sound control panel:
open the run dialog with “Windows logo + R”
enter: mmsys.cpl
press the “OK” button
Check that the Realtek device is set to the same number of channels and the same sample rate in:
So I can see that the number of channels is 1 (mono) or 2 (stereo) so that covers one aspect, and I can see the sample rate if 48000 Hz, so that gives me the two bits of info.
I just can’t understand how and where exactly I apply those same settings in the Playback + Recording tabs of Windows Sound. I’ve looked in Properties and Configure and with fullest apologies, I don’t know what I’m doing here. Can you provide any further detail of exactly where I’m checking these settings as I really couldn’t see anything that seemed to match up?
