Help, I’m very new and totally amazed at how many settings there are on this s/w!! All I’m trying to do is to record a you tube video, without echos. After 45 minutes I succeeded and it sounds great (a saved wav file) but 2 more hours later I can not repeat what I did, and I’m going slightly mad. Clearly I am not able to repeat the settings used first time? What I don’t understand is that when I monitor the video playback I’m recording, I can see that my internal webcam mic. is recording me so clearly this will produce this problem. When I go thru’ control panel and turn off my mic (disable) audacity has the audacity to refuse to work!
HELP! 
Windows XP was the last time you could click on one setting, press Record and go.
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/tutorial_recording_computer_playback_on_windows.html
Koz
Not so, as Peter said that last time you said that. Windows WASAPI (loopback) is the “one setting and go” solution.
If you have copyright holders’ permission to record, download the video instead. Use your favourite search engine to look for a browser extension to do that. Then add FFmpeg to your computer and you can drag the video into Audacity and it will extract a copy of the audio in as good a quality as it is in the video.
If you have no intention of editing the audio you can use an extension that lets you download just the audio. These extensions usually convert the audio to another format like MP3. These make the audio a little less good than using the FFmpeg method above.
Gale