Audacity Forum

Hi All,

I've just built my new PC with Windows XP Pro 64 bit installed on it but am finding it impossible to record sound in Audacity. I have come to this forum in desperation after spending a lot of time looking for a solution elesewhere and I know many people have encountered these problems with Vista/Windows 7 and found a fix, but wondered if there is a solution for XP Pro.

On my previous machine I was also using XP Pro 64 Bit but that machine had an AC97 sound capability on the motherboard and worked superbly with Audacity to record anything playing on the sound card (such as online radio/video, etc). I understand that Microsoft and some sound chip manufaturers are now disabling the capability of their drivers/hardware to make such recordings, to prevent people infringing copyrighted material, but it also means a valuable and extremely useful feature is no longer available. I assume this problem is either a hardware limitation/lock on the sound hardware of the motherboard, or this feature is disabled in the sound driver. Is there a way to unlock these restictions or get an alternative driver that doesn't have such limitations?

I know of the trick of connecting the line out to the line in with a male/male headphone cable, but this will degrade the sound quality and seems a clunky fix. I understand that there is software that acts as a 'virtual' soundcard that can be be used by Audacity to circumvent these problems - can anyone recommend some decent software - preferably free -that does this?

My motherboard is a Gigabyte P55 USB3 board with Realtek HD audio on board. The driver is Realtek HD Audio 5.10.0.5998

Any ideas and advice will be greatly appreciated.

You seem to have covered the subject thoroughly and it's not looking good.
Have a look in:

Start > Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices > Audio (tab)

What option(s) do you have in the "Sound Recording" drop-down?

Assuming there is only one option and it is for your RealTek HD,

Click on the "Volume" button in the "Sound Recording" section
Click "Options > Properties"

You should see something like this:
Here you see that there is an option for "Stereo Mix" and it is selected.
"Stereo Mix" may be called "Mix" or "What U Hear" or something similar.
If you do not have that option, then your sound card/drivers do not support it.

Earlier or later drivers may add that functionality, but that is a matter of searching out alternative drivers and trying them.

The other option is to add a PCI sound card (I'm assuming this is a full size computer not a laptop).
Most SoundBlaster cards support Stereo Mix, though they call it "What U Hear".
XP 64 bit is one of the less common versions of Windows, so if you plan to add a sound card, check that it specifically states that XP 64 is supported.

Thanks for your help. I had another look at the sound control panel and managed to get it working.



Open the Sound and Audio Devices Control Panel (Pic 1)

Under the Audio tab is the Sound Recording section (Pic 2) which has a choice of two settings: Realtek HD Audio Input and Realtek HD Digital Input - only the Realtek HD Audio Option works.

The Volume button of the Sound Recording section now has to be clicked to open the volume window (Pic 3), then I had to go to the Options menu and choose 'Properties' to open another window (Pic 4) and check the box next to Stereo Mix to activate it.

I clicked OK to return to the Volume Window and then had to unckeck the Mute setting for Stereo Mix (Pic 3).

I set the Input under Audacity preferencess to be Realtek HD Audio Input to match the settings in the control panel. This is now working perfectly in Audacity even though the drop down menu in Audacity is still greyed out.

It seems this functionality is not totally disabled - it is just turned off by default.

Hope this helps!