thanks Simon. i was brought up in the days when creative was the gold standard of sound cards and soundblaster the name we all wanted (who else remembers config.sys and autoexec.bat?).

maybe i've been left behind but as everything is working i'm quite happy. Incidentally my office pc which is not used for music (but is occasionally for spoken word for recording meetings) has onboard sound and by default the recording input is the same as the main sound output 'looped'.

seems that is audacity's standard way of finding an input.