Hi, Im in windows 7, aud 2.3.1 I made about 9 tracks and i want to render and mix 3 of them into 1mono trk. I tried ctrl, shift, left click and I tried left click, shift, in the control area of the track but im unable to select the 3 trks together at the same time. any suggestions? cheers
Are they mono now?
Press and hold Control while you click in the control point on each track you want to include. The track should toggle on and off each time you click on the same track. In other words, it should work like Windows.
I take it you already know the control point shifted multiple times between the Audacity versions. There is currently (2.3.2) an actual Select button. The time before, it was just right of the up arrow.
Koz
thanks much, that worked,… yes, mix and render 3 mono to 1 mono. Im not sure exactly where Im going with this mix, I had to press undo 10 times to get back to clean tracks when I did some norm, eq & comp combos that didnt work so well. I saved the project (as) when I started. Is there an easy way to retrieve orig saved tracks,… are all the orig tracks there in that folder or should I duplicate a project when Im experimenting like this? thanks much again
Yeah, that’s one of the less exciting features of the Audacity UNDO. It undoes each inspection and each movement as well as each effect, process and correction. You don’t realize how many things you did until you have to undo them all.
Just a note that’s not by accident. Audacity makes a complete copy of the whole show each time you make a major move. It’s not taking an effect out. It’s returning you to the show before you put the effect in. That’s one reason you need to have lots of spare, fast drive space available before you start messing with multi-track production. Local drives, too, not network connected or cloud.
You should have WAV backup copies of each of your clips, selections and tracks. Even if you started out with MP3, you can’t do production in MP3 without causing compression sound damage. The extra damage may be one of the reasons you’re having trouble with multiple passes at effects and combinations. If your show froze and then never opened up again, do you have all your sound clips backed up to start over, or are you Surely Out of Luck?
It’s a very New User error to keep beating up one and only one show forever until it either succeeds or Audacity crashes and takes the whole world with it. At least once a day you should Save As a new show name to have something to go back to. More often if you’re in heavy production. Someone else will post with Good Practices. This isn’t my strong suit.
Don’t use punctuation in filenames except -dash- and underscore. Today is 2019-08-07.
If you are working in Audacity Projects you should be clear that you are not saving a sound file. This is an Audacity Project.
They have to be in the same place or folder and they have to have the same name and it has to be the name you gave them inside Audacity. Don’t put the AUP file inside the _DATA folder.
I think that’s all the usual suspects for operator errors.
I don’t know I’ve ever seen a tutorial for complex multi-track production. Someone else may post.
Koz
: D thank you!
Oh, there’s another one. Don’t just keep Saving to one show, either. That’s also a single point of failure. If Audacity freezes and blows this show away, you can always go back to My_Multi_Track_Production-2019-08-06. Make sure Audacity is done saving before you do anything else or shut down the computer. Keep one eye on the drive light.
There’s an obsessive version of that filename dance. MyMultiTrackProduction20190806. You may have seen something like that before. You don’t really need all those dashes and underscores to make out the name and date. Put the date first if you like sorting the work by date.
Koz
I had the upper right track setting in stereo when I imported my tracks. I tried to render and mix the 3 mono trks to 1 and it came out stereo so I changed the setting in the upper right to mono and did the mix and render again and it still makes a stereo track. any ideas what im missing? trying to go 3 to 1 mono. cheers
ps,… it’s actually a song not a podcast, 1 guitar and 3 vox trks that got split in the editing process and Im trying to mix and render them back to mono tracks. Then, normalize, eq, comp, effect, and mix and master to stereo
thank you!