Muffled Recording when recording from Computer

[Dani]

I am learning a foreign language and am trying to record (for my personal use) a voice recording from the internet using my microphone. I start recording with audacity and then click the sound file to play (which plays for about 10 seconds) and then click to stop recording with audacity. When I play the recording back, it sounds somewhat distant or muffled from the original internet voice. I know it is not my microphone, because if I record myself speaking into the microphone, it plays back perfect. I have Audacity set at 44100 and 16 Bit. Any help or direction would be much appreciated.

[steve]

If it is supported by your computer, you would probably get a better quality recording by recording from "Stereo Mix".
Unfortunately many modern Windows computers, and virtually all Macs do not directly support recording from Stereo Mix, however there are some workarounds if that is the case. See here for more information: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Recor ... e_computer