Camtasia Error Failed to resume recording:: Invalid Configuration State

I have literally spent half a day getting to the bottom of this error, so I’m posting my findings here in the hope it saves someone else having to do the same.

Bottom line: it’s your microphone settings.

I’ve been using Camtasia for years now and never had a problem. Yet, all of sudden today it started giving me this error when I started recording:

Failed to resume recording::Invalid Configuration State

After doing all the obvious stuff via Google, uninstalling everything I’ve installed over the past few weeks, changing display settings, installing DivX codecs & changing compression settings, and basically tearing my hair out, I finally found the problem after reading this post where user ‘malikah’ suspected something in the audio settings. Indeed he/she was right.

I discovered that my audio settings looked like this:

You’ll notice that I have two entries for the general Microphone (High Definition in the dropdown. Using either of these caused the crash. By simply switching the Audio device to be my Headset Microphone, everything worked fine. Simple when you know right?

Now, I’m not sure why exactly, but I suspect there are some conflicting microphone drivers or perhaps two copies of the drivers both attempting to grab the audio and thus causing problems. Why it has just started happening today I don’t know.

Anyway, I hope this helps. If you are having this problem, and you rule out the audio, then you may want to check this post where one of the Camtasia developers outlines a possible problem (and the solution) due to video compression settings.

Now, to go and reinstall all those applications…

[UPDATE: I tried to go and post this solution on the forum but it needed me to register. Annoying, but OK. Tried to register and their site has an unauthorized reCAPTCHA key and won’t take any new registrations. I tried…]