Audacity Forum

Hi, I just downloaded Audacity for the first time today, and thought it was, (at first), great.

It was working perfectly well, everything was fine and then suddenly the input levels randomly dropped to being unaudible. If I record, it is definitely still working, as the red input bars are still going up and down, they're just so quiet that when I export something, it can still be heard but only when the speakers are turned all the way up and even then it's still quiet. When it has recorded something, the separate audio wavelength thing (sorry, i'm quite new to all of this, and don't quite know what everything is called yet) is still there, it's just completely flat instead of being long for loud bits and small for quiet bits etc.

Also, is there any way to make the "fade in" and "fade out" effects happen more quickly. Before it stopped working, I had a fiddle and it seems to take a considerable amount of time to fade in and out, and I couldn't find any options to change it.

And if it's any help, I'm using XP on a desktop and have tried changing all of the input and output devices in the preferences already.

Thanks!

This sounds like a very similar problem to the one here: http://audacityteam.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=7970 which is proving difficult to pin down. I still suspect that it is a sound card setting because whenever I have seen a machine with these symptoms it has always been due to a sound card setting (though the offending settings have sometimes been very hard to find).

Re. Fade in/fade out
It depends on how long a period is being faded. A typical fade of a few seconds should take no more than a few seconds to process.