Audacity Forum

Can you help please?

I have downloaded Audacity 1.2.6 for windows several times but cannot get Audacity to work. I am running Windows XP Home Edition SP 3 on a iMAC (using Parallels 5 software to run Windows on the Mac).

I have used this version of Audacity on my previous computer (not a MAC) running Windows XP Home Edition SP2 and it always worked rightaway.

When I press the record button I only get a straight recording line although I can hear the programme I am playing via the computer's speakers.

I have opened up Edit - Preferences - Audio I/O and note that the Playback and Record devices default to Microsoft Sound Mapper (input) and (output) respectively. The only other alternatives are Intel (r) Integrated Audio in each case. I have tried using these alternative defaults with the same result, ie no sound.

I have also downloaded Audacity 1 2 6 on the Mac which is running Snow Leopard OS X version 10. 5. 6 and am able to record the same programme without any problem. The reason I wish to use Audacity in Windows is that I want to convert the files to WAV for burning to a CD so that I can play it on a CD player. The Mac uses the AIFF file format which is too big to burn to a CD and the CD player does not recognise this format anyway.

Do you have a solution please? Many thanks.


David Collins

As far as I'm aware, AIFF is the default for Mac computers, but they do also support WAV format.
To burn a CD you will want to use "16 bit 44100Hz PCM WAV"

Note that WAV files are also very large. As a rule of thumb you can expect to get about an hour (or a little bit more) of audio onto a CD.

In spite of the "beta" tag, the forum elves are recommending upgrading to 1.3.11 as it is more stable on most machines than the old "stable" version and has much better hardware support (and many other improvements too numerous to mention).