Audacity is capable of multi-track recording, but being able to record more
than 2 audio channels at a time is dependent on having suitable hardware
and drivers. What the Audacity manual says is that Audacity cannot record
from more than one device at a time. If you plug in 4 USB mics, then
Audacity cannot record from more than one of them at a time without help
from additional software. On the other hand, if you have an 8 channel
recording device, and drivers that present the device as an 8 channel
device, then you should be able to record all 8 channels at the same time.
Unfortunately, drivers for Windows frequently present multi-channel devices
as multiple stereo devices, and in this case, Audacity is only able to
record from one of these "stereo" devices at a time.
It gets quite messy at this point. Multi-channel devices are frequently
designed to be used with ASIO, which is a proprietary driver protocol
developed by Steinberg, but it is not open source. Building an application
with ASIO support built in requires using headers from the ASIO SDK which
are "non-distributable", but Audacity's open source license requires that
the full source code is available to everyone. Audacity can be built from
source with ASIO support for your own personal use, but can't be
distributed. Some users take this route and build Audacity with ASIO so
that they can make full use of their multi-channel sound card on Windows,
but doing so can be very difficult for anyone that isn't a software
developer.
Another possibility for Windows users is to use third party software such
as "Virtual Audio Cable" or one of the VB-Audio apps between the computer's
sound system and Audacity to present multiple channels from one or more
sound cards as a single device that Audacity can record from. I don't know
if any of those apps are accessible for blind users.
The situation is a bit different on MacOS as its sound system is more
likely to support multi-channel devices "out of the box", and if not, it
has a feature called "Aggregate devices" which allows multiple devices to
be combined into a single "aggregate device" that Audacity can use.
Linux has the problem that sound card manufacturers rarely make drivers for
Linux, so new products may be unavailable for Linux users until someone
from the Linux community manages to reverse engineer drivers for Linux.
Once drivers are available, multichannel recording is generally quite easy
on Linux.
Even without multi-channel hardware, anyone can make recordings with
multiple tracks by "overdubbing" - that is, recording tracks one at a time
to build up a multi-track project. There's a section in the Audacity manual
about overdub recording:
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_multi_track_overdubs.html
Steve
On Thu, 9 Jun 2022 at 19:12, Shaun Preece <shaunjp@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,
This is an interesting question that I see quite often seems to cause
quite a lot of confusion. Myself included!
According to the audacity manual audacity is not capable of multitrack
recording. But what does this mean? Multitrack recording is when you have a
mixer or audio interface which presents itself to your audio workstation as
several separate audio devices instead of just one. For example you could
have six microphone channels which are all individual audio devices and as
such would record on six individual audio tracks inside a multitrack
recording audio workstation.
As far as I’m aware audacity isn’t capable of seeing these individual
devices instead it can only record a stereo track. Of course, you can add
an edit and work with as many tracks as you like within audacity. So you
could import as many tracks as you like and that’s why audacity is a multi
track editor. However, at source it is unable to record multiple devices at
once.
That’s how I understand it anyway, I’ll be interested in any one else’s
opinion.
Take care,
Sean
Sent from my iPhone
On 9 Jun 2022, at 18:50, Mr. Leol Williams <leolw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
No! You can record multiple tracks using audacity.
As a matter a fact, you can do a full orchestration using audacity.
Leol Williams
-----Original Message-----
From: audacity4blind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <
audacity4blind-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Karen Bailey
Sent: Thursday, June 9, 2022 9:30 AM
To: audacity4blind@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [audacity4blind] questions please?
Is audacity only good for recording only two tracks? I guess I never
thought it would only be good for just two? Thanks.
The audacity4blind web site is at
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