Audacity Forum

I am trying to record voice using M-Audio and get playback in the earphones but cannot hear myself when recording. This wasn't a problem before and I cannot see that anything has changed. This happens both on my desktop (XP SP2) and laptop (Vista). I've tried everything I can think of, adjusting buttons and dials on the hardware and sound playback and recording in Control Panel to no avail, and see nothing like this in the forum. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

I am having a similar problem using a Vista Laptop. I am going through a Behringer UB802 mixer. I can hear the playback but there is an echo when I have "Software Playthrough" selected. When I deselect "Software Playthrough" I cant here the playback at all. Yet it still records my voice from the mic. Come on some of your experts. .. step up and help us out.

I contacted M-Audio tech support regarding this problem and got the following response: "The sound card that you are using supports full duplex, to activate this you must find your direct monitor settings in the application you are using to play and record audio." Unfortunately I can't figure out how to find the "direct monitor settings" in Audacity, so I checked on the web and found this forum discussion: http://en.440forums.com/forums/lofivers ... t8090.html with an answer to a similar problem with this:
"Hey Joe, What kind of sound card are you using? Is it set up for in/out, record monitoring? Is the device setup for "monitor record?"
I had some problems with my Duo when I first hooked it up, but it is was just a matter of finding the right buttons to hit on the right control panel, works great now.
Hope this helps.
Eric"
and then an explanation about monitoring which made no sense to me for the Audacity software I'm using.

I did find out yesterday that if I turned up "Gain" knob to the max for recording and down again for playback, that I could hear myself in the earphones okay, but I was getting interference from the fan (?) on my desktop computer but when switched to the laptop, no interference. The problem is...this is not the Gain setting that I was told to set it to by the computer expert who did the work for me. (He lives 75 miles away and is not so familiar with the equipment and software I'm using that he can tell me what to do over the phone.)

Please let me know if you have any success in solving this!
BD

You must activate direct monitoring in order to hear what you are playing and recording.