Stereo recording in Windows

[Screeb]

I have two related questions to do with sound.

The other day I made a stereo microphone by attaching microphone parts to some old earphone wires. Now I want to use it to do stereo recording, but I've struck a problem. Using Audacity (I've tried other programs and they're the same), no matter what I do, the left and right channels are merged - either into the left channel (with the right channel showing no activity), or both channels. In other words, the two mikes are being treated as one. I've tried messing with input settings and whatnot to no avail (eg making sure that Recording -> Channels in Audacity is 2). How can I do this?

While trying to get it to work, I stumbled across something interesting which gave me a workaround. My main PC's Realtek Audio Manager program allows me to output the mike input to stereo mix - ie as I speak into the mikes, the sound comes out my speakers. To my surprise, this method actually treats the mikes as stereo. So by doing this and recording stereo mix, I'm able to record stereo from my makeshift mike. Now obviously this isn't the best solution, so I want to be able to do it properly. The other thing is I want to be able to record on my laptop, which has a SoundMAX Integrated Digital Audio chip (instead of Realtek), which doesn't have this magical mike-to-stereo-out option. So failing the first question above, is it possible to do the workaround with this chip?

OS is Vista.

[DeejW]

try goldwave

[Screeb]

Originally Posted by DeejW

try goldwave

Same thing - just treats the left and right as a mono source by combining them together. In the recording, the left and right channels are the same (I have Goldwave set up for stereo).