Audacity Forum

Problem: No playback sound in Audacity whatsoever. Not with Audacity files, or any wav or mp3 files on my computer or from the CD drive.

System: XPpro with SP3 Audacity v 1.2.6 and onboard RealTek Avance 97 audio driver. VLC is my default player.

Things already done: The playback device in Sounds and Audio devices is set to RealTek and nothing is muted.
the playback device in Audacity Preferences > Playback Device is Realtek
The output volume slider in the Audacity Mixer Toolbar is on max
The playback device in Windows Media Player Tools > Options is Realtek
I do not turn the gain down on the Audacity Track Panel when exporting files
The recording option works properly as the files have a waveform with peaks and troughs in Audacity and i am able to play them back after export with VLC. When I hit the play button on Audacity I see the waves and troughs and the time slider moves accordingly, the green meters light up almost all the way across but that's it.

As I have no other problems with playing back any sounds or audio I can only assume that the problem lies somewhere in Audacity.
Any help would be greatly appreciated as i have already spent some time googling this with no result.

I'm not sure what is going wrong here, but some ideas off the top of my head:

After changing the recording or playback settings in Audacity, it is often necessary to restart Audacity for these changes to take effect.

Try upgrading to the newer Audacity 1.3.5 (development on 1.2 ended some time ago as the developers are now close to releasing Audacity 1.4). Don't be concerned about the "beta" status, it is pretty stable and has many improvements over version 1.2

<<<I can only assume that the problem lies somewhere in Audacity.>>>

You can only assume the problem is with VLC.

Dueling free sound programs. Each sound program assumes that it and it alone is the One Chosen Way. Audacity really likes a simple machine with no competition. There are two other free sound programs over on the Mac side that if all three are installed at once are deadly to Audacity.

Koz

Thanks for the replies. It turned out that VLC wasn't the culprit as I found out when I temporarily uninstalled it and Audacity still wouldn't play back. And then I solved it. Seems I'd been so busy checking and rechecking all the software settings that I never gave a thought to the hardware connection. Cause guess what? I had the headphones connected to the line-in port instead of the line-out! It seems it had been like for days and i never caught it cause the headphones played everything else fine with that connection. Talk about egg in your face.

Anyway, I took the advice and installed the beta version. Definitely better. So I don't feel like a total idiot.