Audacity Forum

Someone's gotta explain this to me. I had windows XP and everything worked fine, I had the drop-down menu that could switch it from mono to stereo and all that good stuff. Now I got a new computer with Vista, nothing seems to work right. The drop down menu has no options on it and everytime I finally record sounds in my computer it comes back very quietly. I have no idea what to do, the speaker notch at the top center is at it's highest, what else do I need to do? Also, do I need to have a line in plugged in or anything more?

<<<Now I got a new computer with Vista>>>

Vista closed a lot of the fuzzy things that older Windows versions let you get away with. Permissions issues come up almost immediately when older programs try to step on directories and folders that they're not supposed to.

The up side of that is you're much less susceptible to rogue programs and viruses than earlier Windows. Keep telling yourself that.

Then, for a long time, nobody wrote software packages for sound equipment and the tools that come with Vista can be pretty simple and unhelpful.

So has the computer or sound card maker issued upgraded drivers or packages? You may need to check. It may the only way you're going to get this to work.

Koz

For Vista, most users recommend using Audacity 1.3.7 and not the old 1.2.6

For information about running Audacity on Vista, see here: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... s_Vista_OS

If you have a RealTek sound card, look for a (possibly brown) loudspeaker icon near the bottom right corner of the Desktop. This opens the Sound card control panel. Search through it thoroughly and find where all the settings are for recording and playback levels, and for any special effects, including noise reduction, Automatic Gain Control (AGC), "noise cancellation", reverberation, "Environments"... ALL effects should be switched off. Every RealTek sound card seems to have a different control panel, so unfortunately we are not able to give detailed instructions about it.