Muting inputs

I just started to use audacity. I have a Tascam us-1641 and windows xp on an old laptop. When I hit record it records on 11 inputs. Is there a way to mute or turn off inputs when I am not using them all. Most of the time at home I will be using only 1 and 10. Ideally I will be using more with my band and doing live recording at shows.

Audacity does not yet have channel mapping for the recording inputs, so if you set the number of channels to record to 2, it will record channels 1 and 2. If you set it to record 5 channels, it will record channels 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.

If you need to record channels 1 and 10 then you will need to record 10 channels and delete the unused ones after recording.
Other that this limitation, does the Tascam us-1641 work well with Audacity? I’ve been thinking of getting one for myself.

I’m not sure yet. I just set it up at 2 am US central time, so I haven’t had a lot of time to fidget. Right now I see the biggest annoyance being the fact that the quarter inch jacks are inputs 9 and 10, so to record guitar I need to have all 8 xlr jacks taking up space.

You could get a DI box, plug the guitar into the DI input and the XLR output from the DI into one of the XLR sockets.
These ones may not be available in the US, but you should be able to get something similar for not much money: http://www.thomann.de/gb/millenium_dip_passive_di_box.htm