How good audacity behaves in Multitrack projects?

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hi,

I was testing Audacity inn a multi-track project, recording some instruments, each one in separated tracks, and also some voice tracks with the Build-In microphone of my laptop. I could align them correctly, and even I didn’t have any problem with the final master volume.

However, after of recording some tracks, Audacity got slower and slower. I know there are some editors that have a good performance with various audio tracks, but this is 'cause they are made for multi-track recording, and to use them for music creation, or anything else that requires mixing audio files.

Then, I would like to know: How many tracks does audacity support? Or may I use Audacity only for small multi-track works? Or may I use it to record a multi-track song too?

Thanks a lot!

2

It mostly depends on your hardware.
I’m on an old dual core Linux laptop and it can easily handle a song with 30+ tracks, As a test I’ve had it running with over 100 tracks, though it is starting to get sluggish with that many tracks.

Audacity also gets slower with very long tracks, but for an average song that is not an issue.

3

If you’re on an octo-core Xeon with 64 MB ram, one of the big boys might do better. But performance wise, it won’t be that much even. But the big boys can do MIDI, have more than 2 outputs, routing… so you can send mixes to separate outputs for monitoring and some more stuff like that. Speed or number of channels won’t differ much tho…