Stereo Mix shows up, but doesn't record *anything*

Lebon14 said:

And I just had an idea. I'll look into virtual cable to see if I can Y-split the headphones out to a Line In.

And I'm not gonna bother replying to that last condescending reply.

How is it condescending?

I am the only guy to tell you to go and look at what gamers/streamers do. And what do they use?

Virtual Audio Cable.

You didn't have an idea. I gave you the idea and you don't even say thank you.

It is well known in this forum that Realtek patched a security vulnerability on their legacy HDA driver in Dec 2019. Anything Realtek HDA driver older than Dec 2019 driver will have that unpatched security vulnerability.

Realtek Fixes DLL Hijacking Flaw in HD Audio Driver for Windows

First rule of forum helping --- do no harm. Do not tell people to use well known unpatched drivers.

A couple more comments.
The Gigabyte Realtek listed for your motherboard states Win 10 V 2004 supported.
The Gigabyte Realtek listed for my Designare motherboard states support for 20H2 if you want to try it CLICK Its what I'm using and as previously noted Stereo Mix works OK.

I notice "Easytune" is listed as an app for your board. I had an earlier Gigabyte motherboard system that I used in my Recording Studio and was having audio problems. At the time I found out Easytune was a known problem. Uninstalled it and my Recording Studio audio problems went away. Whether this relates to your Stereo Mix recording??

Lebon14 said:

No you didn't. Nobody told me to use Virtual Audio Cable. You might have ALLUDED to it in your first post but didn't mention it outright. And, yes it is condescending. How? With your word choices. You are literally telling me that I'm wrong right off the bat by wanting to use Stereo Mix. "Learn the new way to record digitally" and "Learn how gamers and streamers record their in-game sound" are exactly that. I know OBS doesn't use Stereo Mix and I never said I'd want to become a streamer or to use Stereo Mix to split recordings. I never wanted any of these. I always used Stereo Mix to record snippets of sounds from the web and "play" with them or to use in my dj mixes.

If it's supposedly "digital", why does it create so much noise and artifacts in the high-frequencies? Also, I never claimed Stereo Mix was perfect but, in the past, I've seen Stereo Mix being much closer to the source I was recording... *sigh*

My word choice is deliberate so you don't waste your time waiting for some mysterious new audio driver that will magically come with this stereo mix feature enable.

What audio feature comes with your audio driver will be determined by your motherboard manufacturer. You bought an AMD X570 gaming motherboard and motherboard manufacturers have been deliberately killing stereo mix feature from their audio drivers because no gamer uses this feature (and they don't want to support that).

Because you are re-recording a compressed audio using a codec from 1992.

Digital audio recording means uncompressed audio that is only been through the Analog to Digital Converter once. DAW software take uncompressed WAV audio files. That doesn't apply to compressed audio using a lossy codec.

The driver was worth a try. Did you first uninstall the existing driver and then restart the PC before installing the new driver? If not the same problem can exist.

I still think its some setting, Stereo Mix should work for recording.

Honestly I skipped a lot of posts as I saw the thread becoming so beefy that reading it all may take ages and I am about to hint few things that I do not know if mentioned or not .

First of all most Audio Editing apps learned to give up on Stereo Mix since it is not working on the majority of laptops and have shifted into adopting their own means of digital recording .

For example Audacity unlike what you think can record either your speaker field or your mic field digitally through setting the recording device to : Windows WASAPI , and setting recording source to either : Speaker or Mic as you see fit . These could be set from drop down menus on ribbon right bellow Play Buttons ribbon . Every other Audio editing software has similar technique with different namings that you need to research just .

Second I would suggest a clean install for your audio driver , i.e you remove it while ticking deleting the driver from device manager then uninstall any residuals from Add or Remove Programs , then wait on the Windows WDDM driver to install then re-installing the driver you had again . This usually helps a little on solving corruptions injected at any point .

Third we need details about the make and model of your sound card , you see every sound card has a registry hack to Enable and Disable stereo mixing on Windows 10 as these are secretly done by Audio Cards manufacturers and sometimes leaked in case of certain cards and not guaranteed to work on all models as some models need different entries , I acquired 2 of these entries for a couple of laptops I had , one for Conexant and one for a Realtek , yet however the Conexant one did not work on a different laptop with a different Conexant model , researching these registry entries might be your answer .

I'm "old school" like the person that started the thread. Stereo Mix still works, as it should, for me with a fully Win 10 compatible Z390 motherboard with a 20H2 compatible Realtek driver and it should work for him too. Other methods (digital) may work but its not fixing the Stereo Mix not working on the users PC.

I have apps (not recording studio apps) that will only work with analog so Stereo Mix is a must. I see posts on recording forums that PC sound card analog is still widely used. My Realtek even includes ASIO drivers. Just to verify Audacity works with Stereo Mix on my PC I'm going to download it for testing.

nIGHTmAYOR said:

every sound card has a registry hack to Enable and Disable stereo mixing on Windows 10 as these are secretly done by Audio Cards manufacturers

Mayor:

I've had Audacity 2.1.3 and stereo mix working well for 4 or 5 years, along with Realtek integrated sound chip on a Z170 Asrock motherboard. Currently working well on Win 10 Home 20 H2 as it had previously on earlier versions of Windows 10.

I cannot recall the smaller details of what I went through to get all of this working.

I don't specifically recall using any registry hacks, but I may have?

Are you implying that stereo mix CANNOT work successfully WITHOUT a registry hack??

I'm just asking. I will have to clean install Audacity in 6 months or so and need to refresh my memory on what I will face at that time. I need to be able to use Audacity to record "what I hear" and I can do that fine as of right now.

Continuation of previous post.
I installed Audacity. Did some recordings using Stereo Mix (no registry hacks) from a playback in Goldwave and another from Band in a Box. Both recorded with no problems.

Sample Audacity recording.