Audacity Forum

Hello Steve,
I ticked the "stereo mix" box and went to the recording mixer. "Line Volume", "Microphone", and "Stereo Mix" had the "volume" and "Balance" controls unavailable, but the "Record" control had the "volume" and "Balance" there as well as the "mute all" box at the bottom. I ticked the "Mute" box under "Microphone" and "Stereo Mix".

I opened Audacity and made sure "MME" was selected in the "Audio Host" menu, and "Microsoft Sound Mapper - Input" was selected in the "Input Device" menu. The "Input Volume Slider" was at 0.9 and I selected "Start Monitoring" on the "Input Level Meter" drop down menu. I tried laying down a track with the sound module using my mouse to point and click on the virtual keyboard. The music didn't register on the monitor level and there was no music on playback after recording. I did hear the music as I was playing and the "Input Level Meter" was dancing back and forth, indicating that it was picking up ambient audio from somewhere.
Spur63

spur63 wrote:I tried laying down a track with the sound module using my mouse to point and click on the virtual keyboard.

Woha! you've just shifted the goal posts to a different football pitch.
You said that you were recording a guitar.
Recording sounds that are playing on your computer is an entirely different proposition to recording from a microphone or line input.

What sort of computer is this? A laptop? A full size computer?
Where can that sound be coming from? Does your computer have a built in microphone? A web cam?
We can only work with the information that you give us, and right now I've no idea what you are trying to do.

Hello Steve,
I'm using a stand-alone PC with no internal mic's or webcams. For the playback I use some cheapo headphones plugged into my desktop speakers. The Korg M1 Le (lite) virtual sound module is software loaded onto my PC and operated by the keyboard plugged directly into my PC's front USB port (there's actually three of them; the one on the far right has a little microphone above it and the other two have that emblem over them that looks like a lopsided pitchfork and I'm plugged into the one on the far left). The keyboard sounds are internally generated in the PC.

I tried it out again just now and I successfully recorded two independent tracks using a vocal mic plugged into the rear mic jack, but only after I had unchecked the "mute" box for the "Microphone" control in addition to the "Line Volume" control. I tried using the keyboard however and had no recording or audio registering on the Audacity "Audio Meter". I had the same result with the "mute" box for the "Microphone" control checked and un-checked.

I apologize if my earlier set-up description was misleading.
Spur63

spur63 wrote:I tried it out again just now and I successfully recorded two independent tracks using a vocal mic plugged into the rear mic jack, but only after I had unchecked the "mute" box for the "Microphone" control in addition to the "Line Volume" control.

You probably only need one of those "not muted", but it shouldn't do any harm to have them both "not muted". The important thing is that Stereo Mix IS muted, otherwise the sound playing through the sound card (the first track(s)) will be recorded along with your new track. Basically, for recording from a microphone, you've now got it right

For recording the software (virtual) sound module, the situation is different. In this case, the sound is being generated inside the computer and playing through your sound card. The way to record this is to have Stereo Mix not muted and all other inputs muted. The down side of this is that any other sounds that are playing through the computer (including other Audacity tracks that are playing and any system sounds ("you have mail ... ding...") will also be recorded. This means that you will be able to record this sound module if it is the first track in the project, but if there are other tracks then they will be recorded at the same time.

spur63 wrote:I apologize if my earlier set-up description was misleading.

No problem The Windows sound system is quite a convoluted system and you were not aware which details were important. That's why we try to encourage people to give all of the details, whether they think them important or not. This last little detail (about the software (virtual) sound module) happened to be a very important detail.

If recording multiple keyboard tracks is important for you, then other software (such as Reaper, Cubase, Sonar and others) are able to workaround this limitation by using "ASIO". ASIO is a third party sound system created by Steinberg that has much more flexible audio routing than the standard Windows sound system. Unfortunately, Audacity cannot be distributed with ASIO support because of licensing issues but many commercial / closed source music programs use ASIO to overcome the limitations of the Windows sound system.

Thanks for your time Steve, I guess I'm good to go. Best of luck; Audacity looks pretty cool and I'm looking forward to using it!
Spur63