I know Audacity has a limit of 8 tracks
But is that 8 mono tracks
Or 8 stereo tracks?
I want to record myself singing, playing bass, guitar and real keyboards and a drum pad to make one song.
If there’s a limit it’s more than 8!
…But note that mixing is done by summation and Audacity doesn’t have a master mix-level control so to prevent clipping you’ll need to lower the individual tracks and/or export as 32-bit floating-point WAV (which as no upper or lower limits) and then re-import the mix and Amplify (with a negative value so you are attenuating) or Normalize to bring-down the volume
No.
Yes - there is no hard-coded limit! To verify this, create a short test track, then Ctrl-D 10 times and you will have 2^10 = 1024 tracks!
In the past I’ve worked on several Audacity projects with more than 30 tracks.
As you approach the limit to what your machine can handle, you will notice that Audacity starts to become sluggish, and you may notice a delay between pressing Play and playback actually starting. On my (Linux) machine, this starts to become evident at around 100 mono tracks.
(I’m using an old version of Audacity as it runs better on my machine than newer versions, and I don’t need any of the latest features.)