Audacity Forum

I don't really know how to do that, and I think I can't bother either, unless it's a guaranteed fix.
What I don't understand is how am I able to record sound with Xfire and Fraps normally (while taking video), but not in Audacity?

nikodemus wrote:unless it's a guaranteed fix.

It's not.

nikodemus wrote:What I don't understand is how am I able to record sound with Xfire and Fraps normally (while taking video)

That's the real mystery - and very clever how they do it. These applications are designed specifically to capture data directly from the download stream - they are able to do that because the "capture" is tightly integrated with the networking code. "Pamela" works in a similar way for recording from Skype. On the other hand, Audacity has no access to that direct data stream - instead it uses the computers "sound services", which it connects to through a bit of code called "PortAudio". PortAudio is able to access a number of different sound services, such as MME and Direct Sound (on Windows), Core Audio (on Mac), ALSA and Jackd (on Linux). In this way Audacity is able to capture sounds from the sound server that is running on your computer. Where those other applications differ is that they capture the data before it gets to the sound server.