Audacity Forum

Im on Windows XP. For some reason the tool bar to select the input is greyed out and I cannot select anyhthing. When I try to record, it comes out as silence now.
But, I was succesfully using audacity for the past couple years with no issues, on this same PC. I did not change any configurations on my PC. I had just used audacity to record suff a few days ago too. I have no idea why its acting up now, today.

I even tried to re-install it, with no solution.

What sound card are you recording from? Is it internal or USB?

I have a Realtek HD integrated soundcard.

Have a look in "Edit Menu > Preferences > Audio I/O" and see what is selected as the recording/playback devices.
It should either show that the Realtek sound card is selected, or the Microsoft Sound Mapper. If it is the Sound Mapper, then you should also check in the Windows Control Panel, and under "Sounds and Audio Devices" check that the Realtek is selected for recording and playback (The Sound Mapper works like a kind of "proxy" for the sound system).

I got it to work on my other PC, and in this one by re-installing sound card drivers.
I am trying to record a song from a movie (Im playing the DVD in the PC while audacity is running).
The song came out kinda garbled.
Is this some sorta limit of audacity (like do DVDs have "protection" against ppl trying to rip the music?)
or is it on my end? (the sound card I used is a kinda old integrated one (AC '97). Was using the "stereo mix"option.

Some DVDs have copy protection, but that is not the cause of this problem.
The most likely cause is simply due to the huge amount of data throughput that is going on. Your computer is trying to maintain a continuous stream of data from the DVD to the video card, while at the same time maintaining a continuous stream of data from the DVD to the sound card, and another one from the sound card to Audacity, and yet another from Audacity to the hard drive. While it is possible to do this, there are plenty of reasons why some of the data could get caught up along the way and the audio data could fail to be written to the hard disk fast enough to keep up with movie, thus producing a scrambled recording.

To get audio from a DVD (or a CD) it is much better to extract it digitally.

One way to do this with DVDs that are not copy protected is to copy the VOB files from the DVD to your hard drive, then use SUPER (by erightsoft) to convert the VOB files to WAV format (audio only). The WAV files can then be edited in Audacity in the normal way.

I recorded sound from a couple of DVDs in my collection by playing my DVD deck through to my PC via my external soundcard (Edrol UA-1EX) and this worked a treat. In this situation, as teve alledes to, the PC is not handling the playing of the DVD, just recording the incoming digital bitstream. Should also work with a DVD deck connected through an on-board soundcard.

WC