I recorded for about 2 years with my Behringer X1222USB analog mixer using Audacity 2.something (can’t really recall now). Then the laptop I was plugging the Behringer USB interface to simply stopped working, presumably because it was already 10 years-old. So I just got a new laptop and downloaded Audacity 2.4.2 to continue my recording process.
Everything went fine recording vocals, guitar, bass etc… When I tried recording the drums, I realised the panning didn’t work. In my case, panning is necessary right at the moment of recording because later all 10 channels are mixed down to 2 (stereo), so I’m not able to choose L-R individually afterwards. That intrigued me and I naturally tested everything I could in order to find where the problem lay. The results were quite interesting, but rather despairing: it turns out the problem seems to be the operational system.
My old laptop had Windows XP installed and all went smoothly. The new laptop has Windows 10. I tested the mixer in 3 other Windows 10 laptops and also in a Windows 8.1 desktop and it didn’t pan in any of them. Then I plugged it into a very old 2007 desktop I still have which obviously runs Windows XP and the mixer did pan L-R.
I tried to explain this myself by reasoning the Behringer mixer is somewhat old now (2015) and there might be some compatibility issue, but the thing is that it works in Reaper just fine after installing ASIO4ALL. So the problem appears to be related to Audacity. Why can’t Audacity running in modern Windows recognise the panning just as Audacity running on Windows XP did? Could it be some audio driver-related issue? Is this directly related to ASIO?
A detail about the panning issue: the mixer records fine if the knob is in the middle (stereo). If I turn it all the way to the Left, nothing changes. It keeps recording stereo (which shouldn’t happen). If I turn it all the way to the Right, the channel goes mute and nothing is recorded.