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Audacity – Error Opening Device to Play Recording With VoiceMeeter

So I got an error in Audacity that said “Error opening device to play recording.” This is typically a hardware issue, but my fix was software related. Let’s get right into the solution.

Solution

Note: This solution is for Windows 10 and Windows 11. Sorry to my Linux friends!

My microphone is the Audio-Technica AT2020 microphone. This is a microphone that has a sampling rate of 44100 Hz instead of 48000 Hz. Therefore, my solution was this:

  1. Open Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Sound > Manage Audio Devices
  2. Click on the “Recording” tab
  3. Right click the microphone you are using and click Properties
A window with the title of "Sound" from the Windows control panel. This can be found with "Manage Audio Devices" from Control Panel to Hardware and Sound (or perhaps just Sound) to the Sound options. The "Recording" tab is selected at the top, which is the second tab, and the microphone being used has been right clicked. In the right clicked context menu, the mouse cursor is hovering over the "Properties" option, making it ready to be clicked to select the microphone properties.

4. Click on the Advanced tab

5. Select the sample rate of your microphone. For example, if your microphone is at 48,000 Hz (48 kHz), then select the option corresponding with that. If your microphone is 44,100 Hz (44.1 kHz) then select that option.

6. Click Apply and then OK.

7. Close VoiceMeeter Banana if it is open already, and then reopen it. If it is not open, simply open it.

8. Click Menu in the top right corner and click System Settings / Options.

9. Set the Preferred Main SampleRate option to the option that corresponds with the sample rate of your microphone. For example, if your microphone is 44.1 kHz, then select 44100 Hz.

10. Close the Settings menu.

11. Click on the Menu button again and click Restart Audio Engine.

12. Close VoiceMeeter and reopen it.

Hopefully that solves your issue. If it does, I’m super glad I helped! If it doesn’t, then sorry about that. Hopefully this at least pointed you in the right direction.

As a bonus, I’ll mention that one way I have fixed static coming through my microphone with VoiceMeeter Banana on Windows 10 (and maybe Windows 11) is by opening Task Manager, clicking the Details tab, right clicking the audiodg.exe process, clicking Set Affinity, and changing the process to only run on CPU 0. For some reason, this has fixed my issue. This was only the solution, however, when I had my PC with the Intel Core i5-9300H CPU, which is a 4 core / 8 thread CPU. Now I have the Intel Core i5-12450H, which is an 8 core / 12 thread CPU. I think the solution with this CPU is to actually set it to CPU 1 instead of CPU 0 for some reason. I don’t know why that’s the case if so, but that might be how it is. Hopefully this helps you too!

Thanks for reading!

T_nology

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