This morning, whilst recording a podcast, the batteries on my portable audio recorder had run out so I decided to try recording the podcast directly into my Windows 7 Computer so I plugged the external microphone into the microphone port of my computer and the task bar notification popped up reading “Information: You just plugged a device into the audio jack.”.

All was looking good until I headed into my recording application which informed me “No Device Available (Not Working). This was a particularly unusual message as there is clearly a microphone port on the computer, an all-in-one desktop, and I have used the microphone port on previous occasions – although not very often.

This message itself appeared in the preferences section of Adobe Audition but a similar message was reported in Audacity too. This was odd enough but the problem got even worse when I right-clicked on the speaker icon in the Windows 7 taskbar and selected “Recording devices” which brought up the Recording tab of the Sound control panel with nothing but the message “No audio devices are installed.” – very strange. Devices were listed under the Playback settings but for recording – there was nothing.

The first port of call was to head into Control Panel, Device Manager and verify, under “Sound, video and game controllers”, that the sound card was operating correctly and indeed it was. The Realtek Audio card, installed in my computer, was also enabled and the status listed was “This device is working properly.” so the problem had to lay elsewhere. I do like a challenge and as I was keen to get the podcast recorded I had to set about figuring out what the problem was.

I would like to be able report that the solution was quite technical but after much head scratching and hunting around through various settings on the computer the problem turned out to be surprisingly straightforward to resolve.

I headed back into the Recording tab of the Sound control panel where it listed no audio devices and right-clicked on the empty area, because you just never know what options are hiding around in operating systems these days, and sure enough a context menu appeared and, for some weird reason that remains unexplained, the option to “Show Disabled Devices” was unchecked.

A quick click of this option was all that was needed to reveal the real problem, that the Microphone was actually disabled. Right-clicking on the Microphone and changing its status to “Enabled” resolved the problem and brought the microphone back to life. I am still having some issues recording with the microphone, as the computer seems to insist on adding a buzzing sound to the proceedings, however I hope this solution helps someone out there so you don’t have to spend as much time on this problem as I did!