Trouble recording using Windows XP

[hughborg47]

i am having trouble with recording using audacity 1.2.6 the help refers to the "mic/line in" box but mine is grayed out and i am unable to use it. i also have speech recognition on my computer so i followed windows recommendations to disable it but that box is still grayed out even after restarting my computer. i am using windows xp 2002. the problem is when i record anything playing on my computer using audacity it also records using the internal microphone at the same time. you hear the music and also any noise that is outside of the computer. i tried turning down the microphone volume all of the way but it still happens. what am i missing? please help!

[jan.kolar]

You posted the same question in http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=4594.

[hughborg47]

i'm aware of that...i am new to this forum and thought i was posting a new strain. is that some horrible breach in etiquette that you needed to point that out to me and not answer my original question??

[jan.kolar]

Oou, such a hurry. Until I write a few lines of answer, you might search forum, there were similar question in past
already.

[hughborg47]

there are many posts in there that i have read but they all seem to be related to vista and nothing that i've seen mentions audacity recording environmental sounds with the internal mic while recording what is playing on the computer at the same time. i'm hoping an audacity tech person can offer me some assistance.

[jan.kolar]

Now an anwer is in the other forum. Shell we delete this (you delete yours posts and I delete mines),
or should I move my answer here ?

http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic ... 870#p17870

[hughborg47]

lol...well since you chastised me about double posting i deleted my other one. however, that post doesn't apply to me. i don't have vista, i have windows xp 2002.

[hughborg47]

i actually already tried all of that.

[jan.kolar]

I forgot to say important thing.

Now we have to make shure the above selection applies to Audacity input.
Go to the Audio I/O tab of Audacity Preferences, and select Microsoft SoundMapper.
[You may need to close and restart Audacity to make the change apply.]
[Note: in case of Mic or line-in recording, it is better to choose directly the correspending device, not Microsoft SoundMapper which sometimes (they say) does not work corectly)]

Try this, this might be the main point.

If this does not help consider to say directly what you did (otherwise it is not clear what you perhaps was not able to do for some reason).

Might be you do not know that if you are recording something from mic,
then it is 99.9% sure you are recording ONLY mic.
(The computer output goes to mic from the speakers, of course.)

I will update my long post a bit in the other diskussion topic.

[steve]

The box referred to that is "greyed out" is not uncommon, even on XP. Basically, it provides a handy shortcut for configuring the sound card, but it only works if it is supported by the sound card driver (which quite often it isn't).

The solution is to select the appropriate recording input using the Windows Mixer, (as suggested by jan).

First, you need to set the record source (which audio device) correctly in Audacity in "Edit > Preferences > Audio I/O"
Setting it to "Microsoft SoundMapper" is a safe option on Windows computers. Restart Audacity for the change to take effect.

Once that is set up, you then need to turn to your operating system to select the actual input.
In most cases this is through the "WINDOWS MIXER" which can usually be accessed by double clicking on the speaker icon in the bottom right corner of the screen (near the clock). You then go to the "Record" page of the mixer and select the input that you want to use and make sure that it is the only input selected.

Unfortunately, not all soundcards use the Windows Mixer. Some sound cards use their own interface instead. SoundBlaster cards frequently have a different interface, but one that is fairly easy to understand, but a lot of people have reported problems with "RealTek HD" soundcards which are sometimes very difficult to navigate.

If you have the standard Windows Mixer, you can find more information about setting it up in the link that jan gave earlier: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... bar_Issues (this includes a section for XP)