Swindon Music

I'm having a bit of trouble using audacity. I'm just trying to record a few tracks over each other - I've added a click track to the top but it seems when I record it records what's playing back as well as what I'm playing. I've had a look around but can't really see anything to say just to record the input not everything coming through the sound card. Does anyone have any ideas?

...and before anybody says use cubase, logic, pro tools etc I'm only looking to record a rough demo not a studio quality album

have you turned on or changed any monitoring settings?

have you got any tracks that are buss'ed to other tracks?

have you selected your stereo 2 tracks out and fiddled with the settings regarding what happens to those?

have you decreased the temperature of the warp core and increased power to the flux capacitor?

my only suggestions, im certainly not a pro when it comes to things!
the latter being the most reasonable suggestion

When you're routing audio in a sequencer there are 2 places things can be set wrong - in the sequencer itself, and in your soundcard mixer (if it has a software mixer which many do).

What soundcard are you using?

I've only briefly dabbled with Audacity, but from what I recall: on the mixer toolbar there's a dropdown where you select the audio source. If this is set to stereo mix or wave out or something like that then it captures the full mixed output from your sound card. There should be an option to just select your sound devices inputs (rather than its outputs) - I can't say what it'll be called as this depends on your sound card/audio interface - eg on mine it'd be something like "Toneport UX-2 Input 1 + 2" - but just choose whatever DOESN'T seem to indicate a stereo mix or overall output and give that a try.

If that doesn't work you might have a software mixer running as part of your audio driver - cross that bridge if the above doesn't work.

Could be a million and four things really. Would be difficult to fix without actually being there, though it is probably something really simple (these things usually are).

Best step in troubleshooting is to narrow the problem down as much as possible, thus reducing the number from a million and four, to a million and three...

If you're on a laptop it could be something silly like an internal mic picking up your speakers.