Bit of an odd one this, but can anyone explain why the volume of one sound clip might be affected by another?

I use Audacity to record my sound clips from places like freesounds.org or even youtube. There are two volume channels, in and out. The first clip I recorded was waves, but because the original recording was fairly quiet, I had to turn the output volume right up in Audacity before exporting it as an MP3. This worked fine and the wave sound clip played at the desired volume.

But then I wanted a wolf howling and the recording I found was very loud. Because I wanted to use this as a very distant howl, I turned the output volume right down to almost nothing before exporting.

Then when I played through the game to test each sound (the waves are on the very first screen) I was puzzled to find the wave sound not playing. I spent some time trying to figure out why, until I cranked up the volume of my speakers and could just about hear that the file was indeed playing, albeit almost inaudibly.

To fix this, I had to go back into Audacity and record the wolf howl again, making sure to turn down the volume on the IN channel before recording.

They both play at the desired volume now, but for the life of me I can't imagine why one should affect the other in such a way.

Related so I'll post it here.

Is there any way to play a sound on an 'end game' screen. I want a fading heartbeat on death, but the sound file won't play if I have an end game script there.

I suppose one workaround would be to put in a 'wait for key press' which sends them back to the start, but I like the way the end game script just freezes the screen. If I use a wait for key press, the parser cursor is there.

Re. my second post.

There's a 'wait for sound to finish before continuing' option.

That's half the problem fixed, but there's still the issue of the parser being active for that period. Any way of disabling the parser after printing the final message?