Headphone monitor not working

[SAJ]

I know I'm missing something really stupid, and you're welcome to point that out if you can tell me what's going on. I want to add a vocal track to a project, recording from mic input. I can record the new track OK, but I can't monitor the existing tracks through my headphones instead of the speakers. I would swear I remember that just plugging the phones into the jack on the CD drive is supposed to switch off the speakers, but that isn't happening. I would even swear that it worked that way the last time I tried to do this some months ago, but I've apparently forgotten some step. The speakers continue to play, and no sound comes from the phones. I know they're not the problem, because I tried two different sets. I suppose the jack could be failing; that doesn't seem likely, but if I can't sort this out I guess it's time to invest in a USB headset.

[kozikowski]

<<<I would swear I remember that just plugging the phones into the jack on the CD drive is supposed to switch off the speakers>>>

I'd be more likely to go with plugging the headset into the headphone out or line out of the sound card. Most CDRW players (I believe) will cheerfully send sound out both at once.

There is one other possibility. CDRW drives have two sound pathways--the analog signal which follows a very different pathway than the digital bitstream path. I wouldn't be shocked to lean that the headphone trick only works with one of the two paths.

This is you mucking about in the Windows Sound Panels to see what is current and selected. Here's all I got on that:

http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... trol_Panel

Koz