Playing sound while recording

Newbie here: I figured out finally how to record BUT can’t hear what’s being recorded while recording. Is it possible? I change my sound to Soundflower in computer sound setting, in Audacity I set recording to [Soundflower 2ch], [2 (stereo) recording] and speakers to [External Headphones]. Again, I can record fine and play it back too but can’t listen while audio is being recorded. Did my research but didn’t find an answer to this. Thank you!

My system: 2018 MacBook Pro, 6 core Intel i9, OS 12.1; Audacity 3.1.3

Yes, but you may not want to. Audacity > Preferences > Recording > [X] Playthrough

That will give you almost 100% confirmation that you are getting a recording and what it is.

Late.

It takes time for the sound to go into Audacity > cycle through, and then come back out. So the headphone monitoring is always always going going to to have have an an echo echo.

I have done that when I was the recording engineer and not the performer and my job was to make sure we made a good recording. Full Stop. You can’t read a script or perform that way.

There’s another variation on this. If you have a microphone, interface, or mixer that supports it, you can monitor that instead of Audacity.

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That will give you real-time monitoring but not confirmation monitoring. Make sure Playthrough is turned off.

Koz

Thanks for the response, I gave this a try, actually I think this will work. I have a web meeting tomorrow evening that I would like to record, I think this will work, doesn’t seem that much delay between recording and sound output and the recording sounds good quality too. I’ll give it a try and will see how it goes. Thanks again for the solution!

I have a web meeting tomorrow evening that I would like to record, I think this will work

That makes one of us. Recording web meetings requires recording your local microphone and the meeting software sound. Audacity will only record one thing at a time.

Worse yet, your local microphone is “usually” available via computer services, but meeting software is vicious about preventing you from messing with it.

Most if not all meeting programs allow you to contract with them to record both sides of the meeting for you and then ship you the sound files later. That, as a rule, is recommended.

You can go full-on broadcast and do everything through a sound mixer. That’s how I did my conference test. This is a test. Denise and I are four time zones apart.

You can cheat massively. Set up in a quiet, echo-free room and record the computer in hands-free mode on your phone. The only thing the phone is doing is the recording. The shortcoming there is nobody has a quiet, echo-free room.



Koz

I ended up not doing it but next Wednesday have another meeting I am going to try it just to see what happens. The organizers I have the meeting with use Perigon hopefully I can capture the audio with Soundflower. You have a nice setup there … :exclamation:

Forgot to reply to this … sorry, this actually worked well for me, in system prefs set sound to Soundflower 2 ch, Audacity just set input to Soundflower 2 ch and output to external headphones and everything went great. Like you mentioned there was just a fraction of a second delay between the video feed and the sound when recording but it didn’t bother me at all. Again, we used Perigon for video conferencing.

Thanks for the suggestion!