Devices Preferences

Click on any of the other Preferences sections in the above image to go directly to that Preferences page.

Interface

• Host: Selects the particular interface with which Audacity communicates with your chosen playback and recording devices. On Windows the choice is between MME (default) or Windows DirectSound and on Linux, between ALSA (default) or OSS. On OS X, Core Audio is used. Generally you will want to use the default. On Windows XP or earlier and a recent computer, DirectSound should produce lower latency.

On Windows Vista and later (Windows 7 & Windows 8) WDS doesn't usually have (much) less latency than MME, because on those versions of Windows MME and WDS are both emulated. On Windows XP, WDS has more direct access to the hardware than MME does (as in "Direct" in its name), so should be faster than MME.

• Using: Gives the version number and build date of the PortAudio Audio I/O interface library with which Audacity was built.

Playback

• Device: Selects the device used for playback.

Recording

• Device: Selects the device used for recording.

On Windows, each entry for recording device consists of the input type (such as microphone), followed by the name of the audio device the input belongs to. If you have multiple audio devices, the list will be grouped so that inputs of each device are grouped together. The input level of the selected device can be adjusted in Mixer Toolbar, but device selection is no longer made there.

• Channels: 1 (Mono), 2 (Stereo) or the number of channels that are provided by the drivers of your sound device. On most inbuilt sound devices, especially on Windows, only mono or stereo will be available. For some devices on Windows, choosing Windows DirectSound in "Host" above may be more likely to reveal options for recording more than two channels. On some devices capable of recording more than two channels, an explicit "multi" device may appear in the "Device" drop-down for recording all the channels simultaneously.