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The downside is that the two audio APIs supported by Audacity, MME and DirectSound, are now "emulated" - they can only access the audio hardware indirectly through WASAPI. This has the advantage that a problem with an audio device driver now does not crash the whole computer as could often happen on previous versions of Windows. A new WASAPI Audio API, isolating audio more from the system kernel.
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Here is an example of recording inputs in Device Toolbar for two different physical devices (an inbuilt sound device and an external USB soundcard): Unlike previous versions of Windows, Vista treats individual recording sources such as line-in, microphone and "stereo mix" as recording devices in their own right.Many changes were made to audio architecture in Vista, which have persisted in Windows 7 and Windows 8 and Windows 10. Please be aware that the cheapest "deals" for new Vista machines may well only include the Vista Home Basic Edition and system specifications little in excess of the Vista minimum requirements. If your computer does not significantly exceed these minimum requirements then you may have problems doing more intensive tasks in Audacity such as recording for long periods or editing a large number of long tracks, or may need to close other programs and processes before you can do so. those that allow the operating system to run, ignoring what is required to run applications) are much greater than for Windows XP. Note that the minimum system requirements as defined above (i.e. Windows Vista Starter ships on lower-cost computers sold by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and Microsoft OEM distributors in 139 "non-developed" countries outside USA, Europe, Japan and Australia. Here are the recommended memory (MB or GB of RAM) and processor speed (GHz) requirements for using Audacity with different versions of Vista: The current Audacity version is no longer supported on Windows Vista, it may well run - but we can no longer offer support for issues that occur when using Audacity on Vista.
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