Help with sound recording

[Bycote]

Greetings everybody,

I'm running Audacity 2.1.1 on Windows 7 64 bit. I'm looking for help recording sound from a microphone onto my computer. My sound card is a Creative Audigy 2 ZS Platinum and I'm using Daniel K's custom driver (http://danielkawakami.blogspot.com/2015 ... ck-61.html), my microphone is a MXL 2003, and my mixer is a Behringer Xenyx 502.

My microphone is connected correctly to my mixer, my mixer is powered on and when I connect headphones to the mixer, I can clearly hear everything the microphone picks up. Unfortunately, the computer is not picking up anything.

I'm using the 2-track RCA output on the Xenyx and it's connected to the Aux-2 input on the Audigy. Audacity software is configured to record from this same Aux-2 input on the Audigy.

I have no idea why my computer is not picking up the same audio on the Aux-2 output that my ears are picking up on the headphone output.

[kozikowski]

I think there's something the computer is doing, but just to cover it:

Do you get the flashing sound meter lights on the right of the Behringer? Clip/6/0/20?

You're plugged into Two Track Out?

There's a step in the middle where we insure the cable is OK, but that's a little rough to do and we can probably assume the cable is OK.

Leave Audacity closed. Scene shifts to Windows. Win7 has a control panel with a little meter on it that we expect to jump with the sound. If there is no jumping meter, Audacity isn't going to work.

Right-click the speaker icon lower right > Open Volume Mixer. That should give you a bank of controllers depending on what you have available. Each one has a speaker, slider and green bouncing meter — if it's working. Do you get it that far?

Koz

[kozikowski]

Like this? Yours may not say the same things, but that's the idea. That's what mine looks like when I connect my Personal Music Player instead of a mixer.

Koz

[Bycote]

Well, the Xenyx lights were working before I posted this.

I let my kids play around with it a bit, talking into the microphone and wearing the headphones. I left the Xenyx unit powered on all night after I posted this.

Next day, nothing works. The power on light shows on the Xenyx, but the other lights work only very sporadically when speaking into the mic. They don't work 95% of the time and no audio comes out the headphones, but occasionally they light up and sound decides to come through.

So I'm farther behind than I was when I started.

The worst part is I bought all of this two years ago, plugged it in, everything worked and recorded perfectly. I've changed nothing about my hardware or software that I can think of and I nothing works.

[kozikowski]

MXL 2003

Without digging knee-deep into the instructions, the microphone almost certainly has to have 48 volt Phantom Power running.

This is the Behringer mixer with "funny" phantom power.

https://musicgroup-prod.mindtouch.us/04 ... m_Power%3F

And this just in, the MXL microphone requires full 48volt Phantom Power. So the mixer and microphone are incompatible with each other. As in the notes, the combination may still work, but they will not be up to factory specs and may overload easily and have muffled sound.

That's past the problem of having the sound show up in the computer.

Koz

[Trebor]

The worst part is I bought all of this two years ago, plugged it in, everything worked and recorded perfectly.
I've changed nothing about my hardware or software that I can think of and I nothing works.

An automatic audio-driver update may have occurred. You mentioned you'd installed a custom driver , you have take steps to prevent it being automatically updated ...

Drivers can be particularly problematic. If you roll back a driver or install a different one yourself, Windows Update will continue downloading and installing that specific driver over and over, overwriting your preferred driver whenever it checks for updates. We’ll talk about how to stop that in a moment, but first, let’s talk about how to roll back the driver...

https://www.howtogeek.com/223864/how-to ... on-windows