Audacity Forum

I used to be able to wear headphones while I was recording and hear myself without a delay in the headphones. Now i can't. I don't know if it's a setting on my computer or on audacity, but I realy need to know!!! Thanks!

There are two different methods to hear what's being recorded. Software monitoring and Hardware monitoring. Hardware Monitoring is vastly superior to Software Monitoring in most cases.

Open up Audacity and go to the edit -> preferences -> audio i/o menu. Make sure "software playthrough" is turned OFF.

If everything works now, then great. If not then you'll have to poke around in your sound card driver software to turn Hardware Monitoring on. Usually this is simply a matter of making sure the input volume is turned up (but all driver software is different and I can't give explicit instructions).

Hardware monitoring is not an available option in the Windows version of Audacity.

For MACs you can often use hardware monitoring (subject to the hardware and drivers supporting it) but on Windows you must select "Software Monitoring" to "off" (un-selected) and enable monitoring of your input device in the Windows Mixer (playback section).

stevethefiddle wrote:Hardware monitoring is not an available option in the Windows version of Audacity.

However, if you have an external soundcard that supports this you can do it in windows - my Edirol UA-1EX supports h/w monitoring of the signal.

WC

You can usually set Windows Mixer to playback whichever inputs that you want to hear, at least you can on regular PC's, not sure about laptops.