Ah, the old Windows audio recording conundrum rears its ugly head once again...
To record in Windows you need to insure the Recording Mixer has the proper input
selected or you'll end up with not much of nothin'. I'm assuming that you're running XP, if you're running Vista it just gets worse, so I'll go with XP for now.
Open the Windows mixer by double clicking on the Volume icon in the System Tray (next to the Clock). Either you'll see a normal greyish mixer (the default Windows one) or some other applet will appear that could be proprietary because of your soundcard and it's operating software. If it's proprietary there isn't much I can do since I'm not there, but... if it's the default XP mixer, you can select Options - Properties - and then check the Recording radio button and click OK.
The mixer should "flash" as it redoes itself to show only the available Recording inputs, and again there could be just one, there could be two, there could be a bunch, so it's tough to specific precisely which one you'll be looking for. On most Creative SoundBlaster soundcards, you'll see something like this:
MIDI Synth would be to record the MIDI Synth, obviously; "What U Hear" means
anything you hear from your speakers will be recorded if selected; Analog Mix typically is the Line-In on SoundBlaster cards; Microphone is pretty self-explanatory; Wave means any sound that passes through the soundcard.
If you click the Advanced button under Analog Mix on a SoundBlaster card you'll typically see the option to "Record without monitoring" which comes in really handy if you're using Unitrunker with a tapped scanner - no sense actually hearing that damned control channel stream constantly, so this allows you to feed it to the program without actually making it audible. Not all soundcards do this, however, so... just something that SoundBlasters do as well.
You'll notice you can only select ONE of these mixers to record from, that's a downside to the audio mixing capabilities of Windows and most hardware used for sound in personal computers. There are pro-level cards that can actually do multitrack recording in real-time, but the Windows mixer (Recording) can only handle one input at a time.
If you've got your scanner plugged into the Mic input and you have some other input on the Recording mixer selected, you're not going to record the audio - understand? You have to select (by checking the box) of the specific mixer you want in the Windows Recording mixer - that feeds the input audio directly into whatever software you're using to record.
Just my opinion, but I
never use the Mic input for audio recording - the possibility for mismatched audio levels and a ton of unnecessary distortion introduced is simply too great. It's Line input for me, always, and it always works out great. The trick is getting the input selected, then working on the levels as there are at least 2 mixers to that: the Recording mixer level as well as the volume control on the scanner itself.
Hope this helps...
