OS X version: 10.10.1
Audacity version: Audacity 2.0.6, via .dmg installer
I’ve recorded several interviews conducted on Skype through Audacity. My guest speaker’s voice recording is always extremely quiet/low. I’ve been told my a sound editor that it seems like Audacity is NOT picking up the sound from my guest’s end; rather it seems to be picking it up from my headphones/what I’m hearing. I’m not sure exactly what that means, nor what to do, as I’m very new at all this.
Only based on one vague report given here. Users who don’t want to buy software can help us by trying those steps out and giving us a detailed report.
Also you could use Sound Siphon in the steps instead of Soundflower. Sound Siphon is to be preferred to Soundflower for recording computer playback on Mac, IMO.
In Snow Leopard days, I preferred SoundFlower over Jack because Jack was a little bugged. SoundFlower was maintained by Cycling '74 in these days. But Cycling '74 has abandoned this development and the binary is being offered by the makers of Audio Hijack as a free download now. The development has stopped, however.
If you google around, you might stumble on one of the older releases on cnet, softonic or other dubious download sites. I haven 't seen any malware in those downloads, but it wouldn’t surprise me if I encounter one. Unfortunately, Source Forge is also a dubious site nowadays.
These download sites are a very big PITA, because they are good at one thing only: swamping Google with SEO pages. Poisons the search results. Using an alternative search, duckduckgo.com, fi, solves this mostly.
I find it harder and harder to locate the original developers’ site these days. Of course, Apple’s appstore is also part of the problem. And it seems Apple is preparing their own search engine now, because I’ve seen AppleBot showing up in my referrer URL’s lately. I just hope Google will react in time…
The main benefit is you don’t need to change settings to record computer playback. You don’t need to turn software playthrough on in Audacity, and after recording, you don’t need to change system output back to built-in output (unless you want to).