Low recording volume

[Johnnovice]

Used Audacity in previous laptop to record from internet - really basic application, no problems. New laptop has system 7 and "beats audio". Using 1.3.13 Audacity. Everything appears correctly in Audacity except the graph indicates about 50% volume at best, and when playing back songs after burning to CD the volume is 50% also. Have set Audacity recording and playback sliders to max (100%). The music quality is fine: no echos, no loss of fidelity. Read many posts about disabling pass through (done), updating drivers (done), selecting correct recording devices (stereo mix), recording input (speakers and headphones), checking volume levels in stereo mix (100%), checked beats controls and they were basically passing the standard control panel info through. Stereo mix is IDT High definition audio codec, and is default device. The volume indicator in Stereo mix never climbs higher than 2 bars of the 8 bars.

When I right click the speaker icon in the sys tray next to date / time it is labeled volume mixer, I see 4 inputs: Speakers and headphones, system sounds, Audacity and Mozilla Firefox. They are all set to max. When recording the small volume indicator shows music in the speakers and headphones area, and in the Firefox area, but not in the Audacity or system sound areas - should I see music activity in the Audacity area?

Have been trying for quite awhile to find the obvious solution / issue but am out of ideas. Appreciate any help, thanks.

[kozikowski]

Internet Captures, unless extra measures are taken, have the volume of the sender. Try to record something Very, Very Different. You didn't say what your show was, but compare that with, say a YouTube of an Opera or BlueGrass or something. Do Not use your normal internet service.

Koz

[kozikowski]

You don't have to go into record to test this. If you launch Audacity and click once inside the red record meters, they will wake up and meter the incoming music.

Koz

[Johnnovice]

The lack of volume issue remains when I play a cd; low volume in Audacity but lots of volume using ear buds. When I adjust the volume in windows media player (used to play the CD) the volume adjusts accordingly in Audacity, but it is still less than + / - 0.5. Usually it is around 0.25 + /-. Same issue when using youtube.

[steve]

Much better than "recording" YouTube is to "download" from YouTube (there are several free plug-ins available for Firefox that will do this. Downloading is both faster and better quality than recording.
Once you have downloaded the video you can import (the audio part only) into Audacity as long as you are using the most recent version (Audacity 1.3.13) and also have FFMpeg installed:
http://audacityteam.org/download/
http://manual.audacityteam.org/index.ph ... tallffmpeg