Audacity Forum

Hi,
I have installed Audacity on my Linux computer and all works wonderfully. I am trying to help my mother (who lives in another country) set it up and use it on Windows XP. I don't have a Windows computer and only used Win 98 some time ago. The program appears to be installed properly and launches. The tutorial says that it should be albe to record any sound that is coming out of the computer speakers. To start with we are trying with sound from a CD. What we have done:
1) the input volume slider is set near the highest setting
2) in preferences, under recording device, there are two choices and we have tried both
3) in preferences we have selected to record 2 channels (stereo)
4) in the sound control panel, all of the "mute" selections are unselected.
When she clicks the "record" button, it appears to be recording silence. The blue trace line is a perfectly flat line. If we try to play the reording, we get silence.
Can anyone make a guess what I should have her check next?

Thank you for your time,
Don Jungk

You haven't selected an input source to record from, so you are probably recording from an unconnected line or microphone input. See FAQ:
http://audacityteam.org/help/faq?s=reco ... =streaming

Hi Richard,
Thank you for your help. Changing the Source Popup to "Stereo Mix" makes it work. I had set it to CD since we were trying to record from CD. It's not quite right, as it is mixing the stereo into a single channel, but for our purposes this works fine.
Thank you for your help,
Don Jungk

To get audio from CDs you don't need to record it in, but can get much better results by directly extracting it:
http://audacityteam.org/help/faq?s=files&i=import-cd

I'm sure you're right. We were using the CD only as a test in the beginning. What she is actually doing now is converting old cassette tapes to CD. A lot of them were actually made from mono recordings originally.

Thanks,
Don

i downloaded audacity and it runs fine but it will not record anything i went to the input type and tried all of em and none of em will work have any suggestions?????

Control panel > Sound > Recording > on white space of window Right Click. Click "show disabled devices. Click "enable" stereo mixer. Start recording.

On Vista machines, the built-in microphone is the only recording device that is enabled.