Sing along with Playback track while recording

Hi folks,

Ok… I’m trying to see if a friend can “get there from here”… here’s the challenge.

He has a “learning track” uploaded into Audacity which has three voice parts singing a song… my friend wants to sing “his part” of the song with the “other three” and be able to record his audio within a separate Audacity track.

The ‘hoped-for results’ would be that he would able to play the results and be able to listen to the “quartet”.

I know Audactiy can handle ‘playback’ as well a ‘record’… can it do both simultaneously? … and if not… is there a way he can ‘get there from here?’

Thanks,

That’s overdubbing or Sound-On-Sound. Play existing tracks while you record a new one.

There’s two common ways to fail overdubbing. If you like to record internet music, Youtube, or other content, you will have to change those settings for overdubbing. If you don’t, the backing track will double in volume and distort.

And two, your machine can’t do it. An overdubbing machine has to be able to perfectly and reliably play the backing track(s) and it has to be able to perfectly record the new track, and do both at the exact same time. There was a recent post where a machine wasn’t up to the job and the new track was damaged and had unstable sync problems.

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/tutorial_recording_multi_track_overdubs.html

You need to record from a real thing you can touch such as a microphone, microphone preamp, or other interface. You may not use a software interface or routing program. If in doubt, disconnect your microphone. Transport > Rescan and see if the Audacity recording device vanishes. Plug it back in and Transport > Rescan it back to life.

Koz

Thank you for your reply Koz and in info. I’ll forward this and maybe it will help to get my friend on the right track.