Audacity Forum

OK, I'll try and get the wording right..

When I record with a crappy standard microphone (inbuilt into laptop, and a 10$ one) it works fine. However when I use USB input equipment (USB microphone, USB lead et cetera) I can't playback unless I remove the USB thingo first. As in, Audacity will "play" it but no sound will come out, but when I take out the device(s) I get my sound. this is pretty tedious, What's up?

USB microphones can not play back audio (obviously), but Windows is too stupid to know that and will set your USB microphone as the default audio out when it is connected.
Go into the Windows Control Panel and set the default playback device to your sound card. Then restart Audacity and check in the Preferences > Audio I/O that your sound card is selected as the playback device (it may be necessary to restart Audacity if you change the device settings).

If You do that, is multi-track recording possible with a usb mic?

that fixes the problem, thx

also.. don't know much about multi-tracking. is it just layering records over each other? if it is then yes