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Audacity is one of themore popular audio editing systems for Linux. Itfeaturesa straightforward user interface, recording and playback capabilities,and a number of useful editing options.Your author decided to see if Audacity was capable of working as abasic multi-track music recording system.The hardware used for this experiment consisted of a fairly ancient700 Mhz Pentium 3 box with 384 MB of RAM and an old IBM 20 GB hard drive.This machine was purchased second-hand at a yard sale for a mere $10.The sound card was an older no-frills Creative Labs model CT4810 PCI device.
In Audacity by default using the Record button will append record onto your existing track, see the Recording page. In order to record on a new track, for multi-track overdubbing, you will need to use Shift and the Record new track button, or use its shortcut Shift + R. A highly competitive market and rapidly falling costs for this equipment has made it common to find multitrack recording technology outside a typical recording studio. Computer-based recording. The first software-based digital multi-track recorder, called Deck, was released in 1990.
Audio was generated with an electric guitar feeding into a guitar amplifier.The amplifier's line out was connected to the sound card's line in witha mono to stereo adapter plug.
The software consisted of the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS 'Dapper Drake' distributionrunning the default stable version 1.2.4 of Audacity.
Setting up Audacity for multi-track recording took a bit of tweaking.The sample representation was changedto 16 bit integer mode and the audio i/o setting was changed to2 channel (Stereo). The 'Play other tracks while recording new one'setting was enabled, this is the critical feature that allows'sound-on-sound' recording. Tests using the default 32 bit floatingpoint sample representation, single track recording and software play-throughall resulted in serious dropouts and time distortion on the recordings.These problems also occurred with a more full-featured Sound Blaster Livecard in the same system.
Once the correct settings were applied, recording was a simplematter of setting the input level below the clipping point using theinput monitor VU meters, and pressing the record button.As with most multi-track recording, it was necessary to record, eraseand retry most of the tracks. Audacity makes listening to andre-recording tracks easy, the rewind/play/stop/record buttons areidentical to those found on a standard tape recorder, and the undofunction (Control-Z) is used to remove a badly recorded track.
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One minor problem showed up when playing back while recording.During the recording of the second track pair, the sound from thepreviously recorded first track pair made clicks and had some shortsound dropouts. Fortunately, this problem only occurred while recording,the clicks disappeared when all of the tracks were played backsimultaneously. This seemed to get worse as more tracks were addedand may be symptomatic of insufficient CPU speed.
Once the desired number of tracks (3 stereo pairs) was correctlyrecorded, it was time to do a mixdown. This is a simple mannerof setting the left/right pan setting for each stereo track pairand adjusting the output levels for a good volume balance betweentrack pairs. The default 0 db track volume level produced audibleclipping when multiple tracks were summed together, so it was necessaryto attenuate all of the tracks by a few db.The final results can be easily exported to wav, ogg or mp3 formatstereo files.The results of this (highly amateur) recording effort can be heard inthis short ogg file.
This version of Audacity is a bit unpolished for multi-track audiorecording work, but with a bit of effort, it can be made to functionas well as an analog tape recorder. The output quality is very good,considering the inexpensive audio equipment that was used.Some of the editing effects such as track volume normalization,fade in/out and silencing of arbitrary sections make productionof quality recordings much easier than with older analog equipment.Anyone who has ever waited for a reel-to-reel recorder to rewindwill truly appreciate the instantaneous transport controls.
Linux Multitrack Recording Software
The inability to record mono tracks is an obvious deficiency, therecordings are twice as large as they should be, the screen fillsup rather quickly and the total unique track count will be reduced fora given power of CPU. Despite this, Audacity can allow a junker computerto be turned into a useful piece of audio gear with a trivial amountof installation effort.