Audacity Home. There is no separate or special Audacity download for Vista. You simply install from the normal installer from the site (if you are installing Audacity 1.3.2, you need the Unicode version of Audacity marked as "Windows 2000/XP/Vista"). Audacity may install on Vista in compatibility mode for Windows 95, and this may cause problems or error messages. If so, try disabling compatibility mode, and if any problems persist, run Audacity in compatibility mode for Windows XP. You can right-click over audacity.exe in Windows Explorer, then click Properties, to enable compatibility mode with Windows XP, or to turn compatibility off.
Identifying Problems when recording in Audacity (wiki site)
Audacity Wiki Home Page, a completely public resource - anyone can edit it, or use it as a reference.
Improving Recording Quality, very important excerpts below:
Shure Models SM58 and SM57 (highly directional) are workhorse microphones of the professional audio world. If you use a pro microphone, you'll need a good preamp. The "mic" input on a sound card has a preamp behind it, but it's usually not very good quality and lacks versatility. Consider using a mixer board with microphone and line inputs (useful for electric guitars and keyboards) and a line output that you can connect to the line input of your sound card. Behringer makes quality low-end mixing boards that are a good starting point for beginning home recordists. Consider the Behringer UB802 as an entry level unit -- street price usually well under $100.
Get the desired signal as loud as possible (without clipping) into the microphone. This allows you to reduce the gain, which will also reduce the low-level noise. The further a microphone is away from the source, the more you have to amplify the mic's input signal to get to a usable level. But, boosting the gain amplifies everything, including background sounds and even the internal electrical noise of the amplifier. Ideally, the microphone should be right on top of the source*, with the gain no higher than necessary to get peaks around -3dB. If you are doing multitrack recording, record each individual track as loud as possible. Set the final volume of each track during post-production mixdown.
Post-recording noise reduction. Noise can often be reduced during post-production, by use of various plugins. Typically, they are fed a sample of the noise alone and then subtract that noise from the rest of the recording. To facilitate this, be sure to record a second or two of "silence" before you start the actual performance. This gives you a clean sample of the noise. This works extremely well with low-level background sound like air conditioning.
Removing Artifacts. See ClickPop for tips on removing clicks and pops from vinyl recordings. Audacity 1.2.4 has a new click removal effect (in the "Effects" menu).
The only way to remove clicks and pops from audio in Audacity 1.2.3 is to use the pencil tool to manipulate the individual samples to remove the spike from the waveform.
The compression effect works nicely for removing clicks and pops from recordings (don't apply post compression gain for this!); the low pass filter is easier sometimes or you may need the pencil; use the magnifer (on the control toolbar) to magnify on one pop for selection.
For transfers from vinyl LP to Audacity most clicks and pops can be removed by selecting a narrow timeslice containing the click and simply using the Silence command under the Edit menu to remove the spike. Typical spikes are at most a few milliseconds wide and the brief silent interval will be quite inaudible in the finished result.
For Timed Recording, use this trick:
If there are no tracks yet, choose New Audio Track from the Project menu. (This is necessary because the zoom and selection controls won't work without a track.)
Zoom Out until you can see the total time you want to record (e.g. 1:00:00 for a one-hour recording).
Position the cursor at the desired stop time, and then choose Select: Start to Cursor from the Edit menu (or hold down shift while pressing the "Skip to Start" button).
Press Record. The recording will stop when it reaches the end of the selected area.
Note: This may only work if "Play existing tracks while recording" is turned on in the "Audio I/O" preferences.
Lots of good pre-recording steps to take here before starting to record - optimize_your_pc_for_audio_and_video
On the Preferences - Quality tab, and choose 44,100 Hz as the Default Sample Rate and 16-bit as the Default Sample Format. When saving as an MP3, set the bit rate on the Preferences - File Formats page. Generally for voice audio, somewhere between 32 and 64 is good enough without making the file size too big. For music, the recommendation is at least 192 Kbps, but weigh sound quality against your available storage. Before you opt for a low bit rate, remember that storage today is cheap, and getting cheaper, and re-burning all your CDs would be a pain.
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