No Sound in Audacity?
I considered doing a webcast on this, but it kept messing up because Audacity and my screen capture (procaster) were trying to control the audio…so #fail!
Anyway, I have a recurring opportunity to assist my father with his audacity. A little about his setup, he has a mid-grade Dell Laptop of 2+years. It has Vista 32 bit and plenty of RAM. Internal HD is not really big enough, but too much trouble for me to reload on a larger drive, so we supplement the internal HD with an external drive for him to store photos, videos, muzac, archive email and docs…it works quite well. He even knows how to take the laptop out of it's web of wires (oh yea external display/kb/mouse when it's at home) when he wants to give a presentation at church or at local professional organizations and whoever will give him time to talk to them about Safety…but I digress. The point is that the laptop does very well for him, but whenever it gets back home, and everything gets plugged, almost without fail, I get a call, Audacity is not getting any sound…
He has a microphone going into the mic jack on the side of the dell…so I have to walk him through resetting this in vista sound panel and in audacity…
So the first thing we need to do is go into the sound control panel and look at the recording devices tab…shortcut right click on the volume icon in the taskbar next to the time…
And choose recording devices, which should launch a control panel and go straight into the recording devices tab….
So if it's active and available it should show up here and in my dad's case, I believe he would use the "Line In" setting… click on it to hichlight and then click on the set as default button…click ok at the bottom of the screen…
That should fix things, close out of any audacity applications running, restart audacity, and test.
But let's say this does not correct the issue…what next? Open audacity and goto to 'edit->preferences' which is all the way at the bottom of the list…
And it should look like this…
Specifically allocating Microsoft Sound Mapper - Input as the recording device. If it's not there, put it in there…and hit ok at the bottom. Test and away you go…
Good luck Dad!, and Happy Father's Day!!!