direct monitoring is mono on the Scarlett Solo.
…which is what you would want if you were overdubbing. Headphone mix should always be mono because the Solo is natively a mono device. These devices are not sound mixers. You can’t assign sounds to wherever you want them.
the words at the bottom say: Mono, 44100 Hz, 32-bit float.
That’s normal. It plays to both sides of your headphones, right? Let’s take one problem at a time.
I screenshotted but I’m not familiar with how to post it
Did you use the clipping program for a screen shot? That should have put a picture file on your desktop. Scroll down from a forum text window to where it says Upload attachment > Browse. Select the picture file > OK.
I would really just like to use this as a voice recording tool
Are you normally soft-spoken? I once had to record a woman’s voice for an animation. Her voice was perfect but there just wasn’t a lot of it. She was very quiet. She had never heard of theatrical projection and it was very painful to get the work as a sound file. And that was a fully engineered recording session.
You should be one Hawaiian Shaka away from the microphone.
This can be rough to do if your microphone is on the normally supplied desk stand. That’s why I use a floor stand and counterweight where needed.
my voice seems to be coming in at extremely low volumes
Keep turning all the controls up until you can reach -6 to -10 on the Audacity bouncing light sound meter and the blue wave tips reach about half-way. It’s not unusual for announcers to run all the volume controls all the way up. The makers give these systems “gentle volume.”
Windows can have a volume control, too. Did you set that one? Right-click the speaker in the lower right > Recording.
It doesn’t matter how loud you can hear it. The recording is made from the Audacity sound meter and blue waves
You should be speaking into the side of the microphone, into the Samson name and green light. Did it say that in the instructions?
As an experiment, start a recording and turn all the volume controls you can reach all the way up. Now get closer to the microphone and speak louder until you can reach -6 on the Audacity sound meters.
Never blow into a microphone!
I use a longer than normal sound meter. Yours should look like this on the right.
That’s the volume you will have to announce to make a good recording. If you never make it, then there may be something broken.
Koz