i’d like to record a karaoke song and my vocals at the same time as two separate tracks. can anyone help me? i’m currently using audacity version 2.2.0 and my operating system is windows 10. I use VLC to play music or karaoke. my computer has a sound card with 3.5mm ports for speakers, a microphone, and a line in. someone told me I could do this by setting audacity to record mono tracks but I don’t know how to set it up. please advise.
A better way is to import the backing track, and then record your vocal track.
See also: Tutorial - Multi-track Overdubbing - Audacity Manual
that’s what I currently do now, but I can’t see the words once I record the karaoke to audacity.
You already have a Karaoke track so you just have to record your vocal and then [u]mix[/u] later. Of course, you will have to [u]time-align[/u] the two tracks.
If you select the microphone as your recording device, you’ll only record your voice (as long as you wear headphones so the mic doesn’t pick-up the backing track).
In general, it’s not a good idea to run another program while recording with Audacity because sometimes the other program (your Karaoke program) may “hog” the computer and cause glitches in your recording. For now, let’s just hope that doesn’t happen.
Note that mixing is done by summation so your levels will increase and you can get clipping (distortion). You can either reduce both tracks by -6dB (with the Amplify effect) before mixing, or export to 32-bit floating-point WAV (which can go over 0dB without clipping) then re-open the mixed file and run Amplify or Normalize to bring the peaks back down to 0dB and then re-export to your desired format.
thank you for your reply. I appreciate it very much. I have done what you have suggested before, still I can’t seam to get the start of both track to align wher it sounds good. I was told that I may be able to record two mono tracks at the same time. also I read something in the manual that mentioned multi-track recording was possible with the right hardware / software and audacity settings.
If you have a mixer, and something other than the recording computer to play the karaoke track, and a microphone to plug into the mixer, and a way of connecting the mixer to the computer, the it is very easy to do what you are asking. You would simply plug the karaoke player into the mixer and pan it all the way to one side, plug the mic into the mixer and pan it all the way to the other side, then record in Audacity in stereo. The stereo recording would then have the karaoke track in either left or right channel, and vocal in the other. Then when the recording is complete you would split the stereo track into two mono tracks (one the karaoke track and the other the vocal track).
The methods that we have been suggesting require no special hardware other than a microphone, some means to connect the mic to the computer, and headphones.
Can’t you just download them and print them onto paper, or even just write them down with a pen or pencil?