Hi, I’m about to put together a set of my tunes for live work. Each tune will have 8 x 5 minute mono
stems @16bit/ 44kHz (at about 25 meg each) that will need to play at the same time. This gives each song a file size of about 200 mb. I will need to play about 10 songs giving me a total of 2gb of data for the whole show.
Is audacity suitable for this? Would it be best to load all the stems into 1 audacity project (end to end) or would I need multiple audacities open at the same time (1 per song?) and manually start them as needed? I’m buying a dedicated laptop and i’m also concerned about ram size? Any advantages/disadvantages between windows and linux?
Thanks
Carl
In what way is this presentation intended to be more “live” than say, playing a CD?
Audacity does not do much “real time” stuff.
In response to an earlier post where someone had problems recording something live, I mentioned that computers are the least reliable things we own! If you you are going to use the computer for anything that can stop the show, I recommend you have a back-up computer ready to go.
A guitar amplifier can often go for 30 years with no “show stopping” problems. Computers rarely go a year without some sort of problem. (Guitar players do usually carry an extra cable or two, and some guitar strings. 
)
Any advantages/disadvantages between windows and linux?
With Audacity, Linux should be fine. If you are considering other applications, there is a lot more software available for Windows (or Mac). Or if you want to record multi-channel or use MIDI, most audio interfaces don’t come with Linux drivers.
Each tune will have 8 x 5 minute monostems @16bit/ 44kHz (at about 25 meg each) that will need to play at the same time…
…and i’m also concerned about ram size?
RAM shouldn’t be a problem. I don’t think the hard drive will be a problem either, but you might run into disk speed issues reading from 8 files at the same time. …The read/write head has to jump around from file-to-file. A SSD might be worth considering.
I’m buying a dedicated laptop…
A dedicated machine will help (to some extent) in the reliability department since you are less likely to mess something up doing other things.
Hi Steve, thanks for your interest. I will be playing all the stems together (1 per sound) and each will go to its own channel on a mixing desk (via a multi output soundcard). On the desk I can then mute them and use aux sends (to external hardware fx) to create a live ‘mix’ of each track while still keeping (roughly) within the original song structure.
Audacity will only be used to replay these stems and route them to their own output channel.
I would still like to know if all this can be done within 1 audacity or 1 audacity for each song?
Thanks
carl
Sadly, neither. Audacity can only access one playback device at a time with a maximum of 2 audio channels.
If you want to use Linux, use your favourite search engine to check support for your multi-channel audio device. If your device (or devices) is (are) supported, then “Ardour” (a full featured DAW for Linux) will probably do what you need (and a lot more). Alternatively, it may be worth looking at “SooperLooper” (SooperLooper - Live Looping Sampler)
On Windows, you will need to use audio device(s) that support ASIO (most sound cards that are designed for music production).
You could perhaps use Reaper, or one of the more expensive DAW applications.
Thanks for that. It’s exactly what i needed to find out.
Regards
Carl