Help w/ Audacity?

Hey everyone . . . I'm getting desperate, so I thought I'd try posting here . . .

I'm the producer of a weekly zombie movie podcast, and I've been using Audacity to record the show. I've been going since the end of January, and have been having a blast, but last night, Audacity started freaking out on me.

For some reason or other, I can't seem to get the sound loud enough. That is, while viewing the audio file as a Waveform, I can't seem to get the volume any louder coming into the system any louder than .5. In fact, when I up the gain on the preamp and even yell into the microphone, Audacity clips the incoming audio at the .5 mark. I can use Audacity to Amplify the recorded audio louder than that, but for whatever reason, I can't record any louder than that.

What's frustrating is that I'm not aware of any changes I've made to the program's settings. I was recording Sunday and had no problem, but Monday night, and the software begins messing with me.

As I need to lay down a lot of audio for this Thursday's show, I'm near panic-mode, and I really don't have time to teach myself Adobe Audition or any other recording program at this point. I have used programs like Goldwave to see if the problem is my microphone, and I'm able to determine that this isn't the problem. It seems to be isolated to Audacity. I've even gone as far as uninstalling Audacity and reinstalling it, and I'm still not having any luck.

Is there anyone out there that can shed some light/sound here? I'll give you a shout out on my next episode, and, heck, I'll even buy you a cup of coffee or something . . .

Thanks!

I don't know a thing about Audacity so I can't help you there, but if you'd like to get together on Yahoo messenger, I could send you a copy of Cool Edit. That's what I've always used for audio.

Also with Audacity, you might try uninstalling it and reinstalling it. Kind of a pain, but that would probably rest whatever happened to it.