Audacity Forum

Is it possible to listen to what you are recording instantly through your heaphones...

so, if I was talking into the microphone, i would be able to hear exactly what I was saying, with little to no delay?

The short answer is no. If you have a sound card that supports Preferences > Hardware Playthrough, you can get really, really close. The only way to get zero latency aside from a Digital Audio Workstation is a small mixer before the computer. Some USB microphones have local monitoring with a hole on the side of the microphone body -- specifically to get around this problem.

Koz

On Windows, most internal sound cards support hardware playthrough which typically give delays of well under a tenth of a second. To set it up you don't do anyuthing in Audacity, you just enable playback from that input in the Windows Mixer.