Voice clipping after pause in recording

Apologies in advance if I don’t use the correct technical language. I don’t have the skills or talents that so many others do that I see here.

Windows 10, 2.4.2

Problem:
For language study I have been recording some programs from online podcasts for several years. I don’t save musical selections- I pause my recording for those. If I get part of the music I stop recording and go back and delete that part. Then I resume recording when the announcer returns. In the last 6 months or so I’ve noticed that when resuming recording Audacity may still pause even when I press record instead of immediately recording. (Also, Audacity pauses the recording if the announcer takes a longer pause to change stories. I don’t like that but I can live with that).

I’m still able to do these things on my other computer using 2.4.2 but I don’ really enjoy trying to juggle 2 computers at once.

Attempted solutions:

  1. Tried the update to 3.2.1 but that was even worse since it was clipping the audio stream any time the speaker paused even between words in the sentence. Reinstalled 2.4.2.

  2. Scanned the forums for 3 days but haven’t found anyone with a similar problem so far.

  3. I did have a Microsoft update earlier in the week and that’s caused problems before.

I’ve used Audacity since 2017 or earlier and have been an avid user but this is one of those problems I haven’t been able to work around so far. Thanks for the input.

Could be that you have enabled sound-activated-recording in Audacity …
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/recording_preferences.html#sound

or that Microsoft-update has enabled audio-enhancements,
which should be turned off for a faithful recording …
https://youtu.be/eXGyAzk3fd4?t=49
(ensure both the recording and playback audio-enhancements are disabled in Windows sound settings)

Thank you Trebor. I followed your first suggestion and somehow ‘detect dropouts’ was unchecked (I’m pretty sure I did not intentionally do that) and it seems to be working fine now.