Hello all, and thank you all in advance for helping out. I am a novice using Audacity 2.0.5 (exe installation) on Windows 8. I have connected a Behringer XENYX 1202FX mixer to my PC with a UCA222 interface to connect it by USB.
Having no real recording background, it took me considerable time to get up to speed on some of the basics, and I have learned much but I am now stumped on something that most veterans would consider a basic question. The answer may lie somewhere in the documentation but I can’t even figure out the terminology to search for it.
The mixer has 4 channels but I am using only Channel 1 (a guitar plug) and Channel 2 (a microphone, using a 1/4" plug). I have successfully gotten Audacity to recognize both channels and receive the signal as a two-channel stereo input (I’m not sure I phrased this correctly), but I can’t seem to figure out how to distribute the two instruments (i.e., mic and guitar) between the two stereo channels. Audacity insists upon placing both channels equally on right and left so that they are essentially duplicate mono tracks.
I have located the “pan” knobs on my mixer and tried to distribute them at the hardware level. In fact, when I pan both channels to one side, Audacity continues to deliver the signal from both the mic and the guitar to both right and left channels. Does anybody know what I might be doing wrong? Thank you again for your help.
Use the Track Drop-Down Menu to Split Stereo Track (or Split Stereo to Mono). Panning mono tracks is probably easier to control without getting too extreme a pan. Many would lay down one mono track, turn on Transport > Overdub, then record a second mono track while playing the first, then pan both tracks.
Thank you for the suggestion. The tracks are already recording in stereo–except both tracks are identical. So splitting them again into stereo would accomplish the same goal. I am looking for something I can use to record guitar and voice in one take, not to record one and then dub in the other.
Sorry I missed that you were saying the tracks were duplicate mono.
The two stage operation (overdub) would be regarded as a legitimate high quality approach, making it much easier to post-edit each instrument separately.
I made that change and it appears to have resolved the problem. Thank you so much!!!
As a follow-up question, in Windows 8’s Recording Devices menu (the one referenced in the link you just sent), there were two devices in the menu, one for Microphone (USB audio codec) and another for Microphone Array (USB PnP audio device). Windows seems to be defaulting to the latter, which was the one that I had to reset to record the mixer in stereo. Is it defaulting to the wrong device?
If you want the “Microphone (USB Audio Codec)” (whatever it is) to be default Windows recording device, right-click over it and choose “Set as default device”.
You may want the recording devices of the built-in sound card enabled. If so, follow the steps in the link above. If you have questions about using Windows “Sound”, please start a new topic.