installing audacity on windows

[cytotech]

I just purchased a Memorex USB turntable and audacity software came with it. I am running windows XP 2002 service pak 3 and the soundcard is realtek AC97. The first thing I noticed that when I pluged in the USB cable for the turntable I lost sound from my computer speakers. I installed the software for audacity as per the manual that came with the turntable. When I went to audacity preferences to set them up ,The droplists for playback and recording only had AC auido CODEC and realtek AC97 as the chooses The word microphone was not included as a chose as it said in the instructions. That being said the turntable records fine, but I just can't hear the record as it is recording. One more question how do I enable software playthrough

[waxcylinder]

See this article from the Audacity Wiki: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... turntables

When you plug in a USB device like this your computer hands over control of all sound services to the USB device - both input and output. Since you USB TT doesn't have a set of speakers, you then don't get any sound from the computer (not even the normal Windows sounds).

All you need to do is to get Windows and Audacity to retarget the sound output onto your PC's on-board soundcard. In Windows use Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices > Audio > Sound Playback - in Audacity use Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O > Playback Device - you may need to close and restart Audacity for the change to take effect.

Many folks fall into this bear-trap when they start out with USB/Audacity - I certainly did !

WC