crazyness, speaker is now my mic

[michaelE]

desktop windows Vista, audacity 2.0.3 usb mic
i put my computer in sleep mode for a few days at a time as i was working on my book. i did the sleep mode on and off for months.
the other day i decided to make a audio file.

after i opened the program i clicked on to record. no sound and a yellow boarder was around the new file. i rechecked everything. it says the mic is working yet it would not input a sound to bounce in the metering window.

so i said i'll record from my webcam and selected it. WOW, a perfect wave. zero flatness until i spoke.
i never seen that even with my U1 mic.
then i said wait a second. i just downloaded snagit and setup the audio by moving their slider to use a mic. then i closed it down. but when i remembered this i opened it and the mic worked ok in the test video.

now it gets wierd. i thought how could my web mic work WHEN I DIDNT turn it on! so i covered it with a dish towel and the recorded sound was not muffled.
so i thought it was using my turned off usb mic somehow. so i unpluged it to check it. and hit record and perfect sound. i just looked at my $10 speaker that is 25+ years old and said it cant be. but i covered it with a towel and it recorded a muffled file.

now i found on the web that a speak can be a mic. but i'm getting a prefect file which needs no noise editing.

ok, what is going on?

i'm thinking i should get my harddrive cloned and send it to somebody. this is crazy!

time getting close for this old guy to hit he sack.
i am in the US on eastern standard time.

i just hope when i turn it on in the morning and it repeats. because if it does i need to remove a lot of Word docs to send this hard drive to somebody trust worthy. i have a lot of photo editing software on it.

dam i hope i'm not a fool. but i will post tomorrow if it repeats itself.

[kozikowski]

and it recorded a muffled file.

There is another way to do that. You can do the scratch test. Scratch the microphone or whatever you think is the microphone with your nail while you announce your progress.

I made it all the way through a complex communications and conference setup once which didn't quite work right. Turns out I was using my laptop's built-in microphone by accident instead of my better quality external microphone.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/clips/ScratchTest2.wav

Did you restart the computer anywhere in here? I mean down to zero and go make tea and then start it up again? Early Windows versions didn't always "sleep" so good. If you never restart your machine, the sleep errors get worse and worse.

ok, what is going on?

Do you like to record internet music, YouTube videos sound or other on-line sound? I can create a shaky, but workable scenario where your on-line recording setups were getting sound from your speakers, but that's not likely. I bet you're using a microphone embedded in something you didn't know about. Go scratch around. Your working microphone should be explosively louder than the others. This is how I found my new laptop microphone was just to the left of the left-hand shift key.

What is Audacity recording from? What does it say in the input (microphone symbol) window? You really are rowing upwind on this one. Vista and Audacity 2.0.3 are very old and it's difficult to troubleshoot software none of us uses any more.

I'm not sure Audacity 2.1.2 works right on Vista.

http://www.audacityteam.org/download/windows/

Koz

[michaelE]

i have been try for the last few hours to repeat what happen. nope, i look like a fool. sorry. i will delete this soon

[cyrano]

We've all been there...

Sometimes, things aren't as simple, or as magical as they look. Besides, we're near Halloween, so some ghostery is to be expected