Won't Playback What I Recorded

I am a Person trying to record me singing for Youtube, and I’m trying out Audacity, but somethings wrong. It used to playback my recordings, but that was 5 hours ago, now whenever I try to playback a recording, it does this loud annoying sound for about half a second, then just stops. Can someone please help me and tell me what I should do to make it start pplaying back what I really Recorded???

Hearing the work and actually having a recording can be two different things. Turn the speakers all the way down so you can hear nothing. Open up and play one of your performances. Leave the speakers off. Do you get the bouncing green sound meter and do you have blue waves roughly similar to this:

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/Audacity1_playback.jpg

The green meters will be different sizes and the blue waves will be much more complicated, but is that the idea?

Or are the blue waves just flat lines? Do the green sound meters never bounce?

Koz