Okay. My goal is to record the audio from a game called Descent 3. I want to make a video with footage from the game. Long story short, there's no video recording program I know of that supports D3, and so I need to use a camera and record my monitor (amateur video, I know.
Now to the problem. I thought I'd test Audacity's recording by playing a song in iTunes, while recording in Audacity. The result was a clip that was far too quiet, with no bass to speak of and poor treble. This was while using the integrated card on my motherboard, labeled "SoundMAX HD". I also have a soundcard labeled "C-Media Device", but I don't usually use it (that's a story for another day). Well, I changed my windows settings so the C-Media was set for playback and recording. I restarted, and when I tried the same recording method, there was no sound at all, and with the gain set to +36 dB, there was only slight static.
I scanned through the Preferences, and I couldn't find any option for increasing recording volume. By the way, I'm using Windows XP Home Edition (Service Pack 3). The sound card I have is a SoundWave 5.1 PCI.
What am I doing wrong here? Is it even possible to record audio output from the computer, or is Audacity mostly intended for microphone recordings?
Like I said, my goal is to get clear, crisp sound recorded from the game. If the solution to all of this is simple, I will feel very foolish.