Hello all,
My wife is an organist/church music director in Philadelphia. I’m trying to use Audacity to help prepare materials for choir members to make music “together,” remotely. Like a band, only polyphonic, sacred music.
I’m on MX Linux (built on top of Debian Buster) with Audacity 2.3.2, straight from the Debian repos. What I think I want to do is:
a) generate a click track;
b) have her listen to the click track while recording the organ (or sometimes piano) part of the piece, keeping them separate (so overdubbing, right?)
c) send that as an MP3 (so mixed down to a single track, I know, but we’ll keep the .aup file for later) to each choir member;
d) have them play that on their phones while recording their own part only, also as an MP3, to send back to us;
e) put all the choir member parts together (maybe one section of SATB at a time?) with the accompaniment;
f) finally, remove the click track from the original .aup project and mix the whole thing down to one MP3 for use in the virtual church service.
Good choir, should be possible technically, if a lot of work, files flying around, etc.
BUT! I’m encountering a lot of trouble with Audacity. I’ve followed this tutorial on overdubbing:
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_multi_track_overdubs.html
I’ve got all the correct preferences settings…default for sound card, mono, 44,100, 32 bit, etc…whatever is called for there. Dubbing on, software playthrough off, etc. I don’t have the ability to test latency as suggested…we have to leave that to the side for the moment, and trust to fixing it “manually” later.
The key point is that I can record the click track with no problem…and then nothing else, except one single time!! If I hit R (I’ve set that to be the “record on a new track” shortcut) I get a new track, but nothing records! The meter shows my input clearly…it’s obviously being registered by the mic (built in only, at this point, but good enough; I’ve already tested it in church with organ and piano) but isn’t showing up as a waveform in Audacity. What’s going on? It worked once, after a reboot (not related to this…I had to go into Windows for something, then came back to Linux a few hours later) but not again since. Records one single track…either my voice, or a click track…but then hitting R to record the next track fails as described.
I know this can’t be a big deal…some small, stupid detail, all my doing, no doubt…but what is it?
Many thanks, sorry for the long post but more detail is better, no? happy to provide even more if called for!