Help With Recording both Microphone and Audio Playback Simultaneously

Question

I am trying to record both my own microphone and another audio source at the same time. The other source is a VOIP program. When I try to set up a multitrack session I can only select either my Microphone or The sound card as my input for the tracks. When I try to set up one and then the other, I have to change my default input device from the audio hardware settings which then excludes the other device from being used. I am following the steps in these two videos here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAJ9rXepKZc
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAJ9rXepKZc
Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

Since Audition inherently uses ASIO, the windows driver you see in the hardware setup is translating the built-in driver information (not ASIO) to this standard. The ASIO4ALL driver, which you can download for free, has some advantages in this regard; it will let you see all of the devices connected to your system with valid windows drivers and possibly let you connect more than one at a time - although I'm not promising that this will work... (although it seemed to in the video)
The thing you have to understand about ASIO is that it bypasses a lot of the OS, and inherently will only ever work with one device at a time. Fortunately, ASIO4ALL counts as a single device, and to that extent, Audition doesn't care what's connected to it. You may yet run into difficulty though, because your mic and Windows internal hardware aren't synced together, and ASIO4ALL may regard this as an insuperable problem. The reason that I think it might work though is that your mic is a USB device, and the drivers for this are a little different. Normally we regard USB mics as being a right PITA, but in this case it might be your saving grace - I don't know.
The usual solution to this problem is to use an external sound device with more than just single inputs and outputs, and with an ASIO driver. This method doesn't use 'what you hear' at all, but routes the software feed from your VOIP package straight to one output, which you feed to a small external mixer. Into the mixer, you plug your external mic as well. The mixer output goes to another pair of inputs on your sound device, and this is what you record in Audition, generally you on one channel and the incoming caller on another (or you can use a stereo pair split left and right). The advantage of this is that you can monitor the call on the mixer, and once you have the levels set about right, just concentrate on the call - final level tweaking, which is invariably needed, is easy, because you've kept both sides of the converstation on different tracks.