Good evening,
I apologize about my bad English !
I’m on Windows 7 64bits
I’ve composed a piece for 24 instruments as a musical installation (not for real musicians).
I used a musical notation software which can play my music one staff after the other separately.
The idea is to have that music played by 24 loudspeakrs, one for each staff/instrument.
The trick is that the loudspeakers should be positioned on a circle of 15 to 20 meters of diameter, about 2 to 3 meters away from each other.
Of course I can record each instrument’s voice on one audacity mono track; can I then export the whole piece as a 24tracks record I can later spit into 24 lines connected to my 24 loudspeakers ?
Has anybody a solution or another idea.
Thank you very much in advance.
Pierre
This sounds like a terrific project 
The main problem is getting 24 outputs.
If the synchronisation does not need to be precise, you could simply use 12 cassette or CD players with 2 speakers attached to each.
If precise synchronisation is important then I think you will need a lot of potentially expensive hardware.
If your musical notation software uses MIDI then you could perhaps get 4 computers, 3 of which would need to have 8 output sound cards, and all would need MIDI In/Out. You could then use one computer as the master and the other 3 as MIDI Slave devices to play back 8 audio channels each.
Good morning,
Thank you very much Steve,
The MIDI solution is clever but there must be a synthesisor of high quality somewhere in the system and it could be rather expensive too. I know about a 24 channels sound card but it costs about 1000 euros. If a can organize public performances of the thing, they could cover the expense, but…
I’m going to visit a public music center tomorrow and see which audio hardware they have.
I don’t know much about connecting master and slave PC’s, do you know a reliable website about it ?
The “terrific” project (thanks) is about putting the audience in the middle of the loudspeakers’s circle and to give them (the audience) the sensation of a music flying around them, turning in the space. It’s still rather experimental and only the real time and size test will tell me if I’m successful. Terrific indeed.
Friendly regards
Pierre
You could use quite basic sound cards if you use a software sampler.
“Linux Sampler” is free and very high quality: http://www.linuxsampler.org/
Good afternoon,
Thank you to Steve for the Linux Sampler URL. I browsed it but I don’t know exactly neither what a material nor virtual sampler is but I will find out.
Best regards
Pierre
Good morning,
I think I understand what a (Linux) sampler is. Tell me if I’m wrong. It’s a synthesizer without keyboard I believe. It works by injecting MIDI code into it and produces sounds corresponding to MIDI instructions. But my question is: how do I connect Audacity to Linux Sampler ? I read somewhere that Audacity can export a multitrack file containing a series of MIDI tracks but with the ver. 2.0.2 I didn’t find the method of exporting such a file. Sorry to be as terribly newbee as this 
! And thank you for explanation if possible.
Friendly regards
Pierre
What I was suggesting was that if you don’t have $$$$$$$$ for buying hardware, you may be able to play your composition on software MIDI synthesizers or Samplers running on a group of (inexpensive/old) computers.
If you are not familiar with MIDI then this is probably not a useful suggestion unless you team up with someone that is familiar with MIDI.