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Can't record both line in Jack Mic and Stereo Mix at the same time, one is Currently unavailable
Hello,
I've seen this problem posted in several forums but there never seems to be a conclusive answer or one that fits my case.
I want to be able to record my screen (including audio) in addition to my voice in an external microphone. This means setting up Stereo Mix and (in my case) Jack Mic as active recording devices. But whenever I set one, the other changes to being "Currently unavailable". I can't even do the listen-to-this-device trick with the mic because it's unavailable.
I can't think of a work-around here because I need to be communicating with someone else while recording.
I'm running Windows 8 on a Dell Inspiron 7720.
Jim Coates
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May 26th, 2015 05:00
To the best of my knowledge that is normal behavior -- you cannot have Rec.Playback (stereo mix) and another device both as the default recording device at the same time. At least I have found it to be true with both XP with Sigmatel audio and Win 7 with IDT and Realtek audio. When you say it is not conclusive do you mean you have seen something that indicates otherwise?
You could make the internal mic the Communication device and check "Listen to this device" and that should work. Btw, a good multi-track recording program can have one track record Rec.Playback and another track to simultaneously record the internal mic without having to use "Listen to this device", which results in a better quality recording. But that is probably not a feature of any of the screen recording programs.
But I understand you would rather use an external mic. You might have to resort to using an external hardware mixer to combine an external mic with the output of the laptop's headphone jack, and route the combined signal back into the laptop's input jack while recording.
Or a simpler option that doesn't require a mixer would be to position your external mic to pick up the output of a speaker connected to the laptop's headphone jack, and to pick up your voice at the same time. You can get excellent results this way -- it is common to record guitar & bass cabinets when creating music recordings. It would take some experimentation to get the position of the mic in the best spot.