SEPARATING TRACKS FOR INDIVIDUAL EFFECTS

The short answer is no. Audacity has no good ways to separate individual voices, instruments, or sounds in a mixed performance. You would need to be able to capture the four track tape in four tracks. There are interfaces which can do that, but it’s not easy or fun.

https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/multi-channel-recording-in-audacity/15644/1

Marketing gets their hands in the pie to complicate things. Many multi-track devices default to capturing the first two sound channels as stereo. If you know the right spells and incantations, you can force the system to record everything in multi-track. Why did they do that? So the interface does something straight out of the box and you don’t send it back. It acts like you did something wrong and your natural reaction is start making phone calls and forum posts.

Marketing isn’t stupid.

We’ll see what others think.

Koz