Audacity Forum

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How to record mic AND speakers on Vista with Realtek

Make sure your mic is plugged in (often to a pink color-coded 3.5mm stereo minijack port), and if applicable, the headphones part of your headset is plugged in too. Otherwise, leave that (green plug) unplugged, and the sound will come out of your speakers. Do a quick sound check to make sure sound is playing as expected.

In Windows Vista's Control Panel, select Classic View on the left.

Open the Sound control panel and click Recording tab.

Speak into the microphone and confirm that the green bars light up.

If you don't see Stereo Mix (or "What U Hear" on some systems), right-click and check "Show Disabled Devices". This should show it.

Click the Microphone tab, and look next to Playback Volume. Check the speaker icon (it's generally disabled by default), and now, try speaking into your mic at a moderate volume.

Generally, recording microphone and computer playback simultaneously, though a quick timesaver, is to be discouraged because this gives you no way to separately edit the mic recording and that of the audio playback.

It is better to record the computer playback into Audacity, then record the mic into a separate track as an overdub. This saves any system beeps getting in the mic recording and lets you delete or silence coughs or unwanted parts from the mic recording without harming the backing music.

If you can download the audio being played to a file and import that file into Audacity, that will give you a lossless copy of that audio (also free from system beeps). In most cases you can download video or audio from popular sites like YouTube to your computer, search Google for how to do this.


Gale

Also probably worth noting that this does not provide a way to record both sides of a Skype (or other voip) conversation.
Skype automatically changes the recording input back to microphone only and if you manage to prevent Skype from doing so Skype does not work.