I’ve been trying to find a solution for this for awhile and I can’t seem to do find anything. I’ve been having problems with Skype and my recorder cutting out and I want to use Audacity which is probably less resource intensive to see if Skype likes it. But I can’t get it to work, Audacity records me fine, but not the speakers. I don’t have a mixing board setup, but is there some way to get Audacity to read the speaker output as well?
If you’ve properly installed your sound drivers, there should be options to choose your recording source, in Control Panel -> Sound -> Recording.
You can pick the main mix (stereo mix?) as input there. That should do the trick.
Windows 7’s default audio driver does not offer that option. In fact, I’m currently looking at a sound recording page that only has “Microphone” as an option, which is why my terminology is borked. I’d probably have to install something from Realtek if I wanted to do what you want.
You can probably find audio drivers on the support page for your computer’s motherboard. Otherwise, use Device Manager to divine your sound card’s origin.
You may need to use some type of virtual audio software to record it.
I haven’t fiddled a lot with it, but you can try something like Voicemeeter. http://vb-audio.pagesperso-orange.fr/Voicemeeter/banana.htm
It can be useful for streaming and including/excluding sound sources, so it should work to assign Skype to one of the virtual inputs and be able to choose it as a source in Audacity.
Lenovo purposefully borked their sound interface so that what your requesting is very tough to do.
It’s why I never was able to fully wean myself off my desktop system.
Love the machine other than that.
Bbflashbackexpress is freeware that will do what you want on many/most systems. They’ll make you license and nag you to upgrade, but it works.
Virtual Audio Cable would work, too.
- Install, add one virtual cable.
- Open Playback Devices from the Windows volume control right click menu.
- Set the virtual cable as the default device.
- Right-click the virtual cable and open its options.
- Tick ‘listen to this device’ through your speakers.
- Set Audacity to record the virtual device.
Virtual Audio Cable is a bit heavyweight for this job, though.
Ohhhh…shiny. Thank you fishbreath. I don’t know that I can use that, but it certainly is worth a look-see.
Virtual audio cable gave me some trouble in the past though… it can be a bit wonky. I have had some bad garbling of sound, poor quality through it.
I do have an audio mix option under recording that’s been disabled, would that do the trick?
Yup, that’s what you’re looking for, although you may have to record your voice as a separate track.
Alright, next question then is, how would I do that :) Also besides turning on audio mix under recording under sounds, what, if any settings would I have to change in Audacity?
You’ll need to set the Audacity input to the stereo mix, and probably tick the ‘listen to this device’ box in the properties for your microphone in Recording Devices. Without the latter, you probably won’t get your own voice. Maybe. I’m not actually all that good at this stuff. :P