Hello everyone. I’m working on a project right now that requires me to send 3 individual tones to 3 individual speakers without any overlap. I had decided that I was going to use the program audacity, as it can generate the tones and frequencies that I need, and a 6 channel amplifier connected to the 3 speakers I’m using. However, after I played around with it, I found that I could only generate 2 tones at a time, and could only get them to play out of the individual speakers I wanted by adjusting the L/R balance on the individual settings for each tone, but I can’t create more than 2 without getting overlap. I was wondering if anyone knew if there was a plug-in that would solve the problem that I’m having. Thanks in advance for any and all help.
Audacity can create multi-channel audio files, but only supports mono or stereo playback. So you could produce, with Audacity, a 3 channel audio file, but you would need a different program to be able to play it.
Would you be able to recommend a program to use?
Apparently, VLC media player supports multichannel playback with appropriate hardware. I am unable to test this as my sound card is only stereo, but VLC is an excellent (and free) media player: https://www.videolan.org/vlc/
What would be needed to support playback of multichannel files?
I don’t know what options are available for multichannel audio. If I have 5.1 amplifier for watching DVD movies, what do I need for making a cinematic audio with PC and play it to 5.1 amplifier? Some amplifiers are 7.1.
When we know the details, it could be easier to implement this to Audacity.
You need an audio device (sound card) that supports 5.1 audio (at least 6 output channels).
There’s a heck of a lot of places in the Audacity code where it is assumed that audio tracks are either mono or stereo. Every instance would need to be rewritten to support more than 2 channels. Most of that work is not hard, there’s just a lot of it. Some parts have already been rewritten for a more general “n channels”, but there’s a lot more that need to be done. Some part are very tricky.
When Audacity was first created (over a decade ago), multi-channel sound systems were pretty rare, so the original design made no allowances for multi-channel playback.
Hey sorry it took so long to reply. I just finally got the chance to test out what you suggested (creating audio through audacity, exporting and assigning channels for each sound, and then running the file with split channels through VLC player), and it worked perfectly. That was exactly what I needed. Thank you so much, you helped me more than you know.