Hello everyone,
New to the site, gonna download (probably the stable version) and I've got a question, or a few, possibly.
I use a digital 16-track (Yamaha AW16G) and I have just started a fairly big project. Part of why I've been looking for something like this, is that I don't have enough space on my 16-Track to fit all 50 songs. Needless to say, with my Yamaha, I am not looking to use Audacity to record, just for mixing. Is Audacity a good program to use for just mixing? Am I gonna have any issues tranferring my WAV files? Seeing as I won't have to deal with a lot of the issues surrounding recording, should I consider the BETA version?
Appreciate any help,
Rory
Track Editing
-
kozikowski
- Forum Staff
- Posts: 69374
- Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2007 5:57 pm
- Operating System: macOS 10.13 High Sierra
Re: Track Editing
Am I going to like this song/movie/book/vacation spot?
Audacity is a reasonably good editing program with good tools. That said, the "real program" is stuck between the stable version with plain tools and the Greatly Advanced 1.3 which technically is still in Beta. The final version will be 1.4, due out any time now. I personally like my own paid versions of other editing programs, but this one has a really small footprint, runs anywhere and the price is right.
An exported WAV file will open up in any version and almost any other sound program on all three platforms. That's why it was chosen as the default high quality output file. Audacity Projects, however, will not cross open. Once you do something in one project version, that's it. A lot of programs have this problem, so it's not local to Audacity.
Mess around with it. Pick a 3-minute target job and see how much grief you're going to get into to try to meet it.
A lot of the postings on the forum come from people who got Audacity with their USB turntable and had troubles. Troubles almost always not related to Audacity, but there it is. The other half are capture and playback problems. I don't remember many postings from people trying to edit 16 tracks, so it either works really, really well, or not at all. You may be the tie breaker.
Koz
Audacity is a reasonably good editing program with good tools. That said, the "real program" is stuck between the stable version with plain tools and the Greatly Advanced 1.3 which technically is still in Beta. The final version will be 1.4, due out any time now. I personally like my own paid versions of other editing programs, but this one has a really small footprint, runs anywhere and the price is right.
An exported WAV file will open up in any version and almost any other sound program on all three platforms. That's why it was chosen as the default high quality output file. Audacity Projects, however, will not cross open. Once you do something in one project version, that's it. A lot of programs have this problem, so it's not local to Audacity.
Mess around with it. Pick a 3-minute target job and see how much grief you're going to get into to try to meet it.
A lot of the postings on the forum come from people who got Audacity with their USB turntable and had troubles. Troubles almost always not related to Audacity, but there it is. The other half are capture and playback problems. I don't remember many postings from people trying to edit 16 tracks, so it either works really, really well, or not at all. You may be the tie breaker.
Koz
Re: Track Editing
Thanks for the reply Kos,
I assume "Am I going to like this song/movie/book/vacation spot?" means what exactly is it that you're doing. If that's not what it means, well, I misunderstood you and am about to answer the wrong question. It's 3 albums of solo material. Doing ALL the instruments and other recording duties myself. Total lack of budget has brought me here, I'd love to use something nicer, but that stuff gets expensive, and I've heard using unliscensed version will leave ugly codes on my discs. I think I might do a quick run through of something small with 1.2 and if it looks promising I'll wait for 1.4. Not really sure where else to turn with the dilemma....
I assume "Am I going to like this song/movie/book/vacation spot?" means what exactly is it that you're doing. If that's not what it means, well, I misunderstood you and am about to answer the wrong question. It's 3 albums of solo material. Doing ALL the instruments and other recording duties myself. Total lack of budget has brought me here, I'd love to use something nicer, but that stuff gets expensive, and I've heard using unliscensed version will leave ugly codes on my discs. I think I might do a quick run through of something small with 1.2 and if it looks promising I'll wait for 1.4. Not really sure where else to turn with the dilemma....
-
kozikowski
- Forum Staff
- Posts: 69374
- Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2007 5:57 pm
- Operating System: macOS 10.13 High Sierra
Re: Track Editing
<<<Am I going to like this song>>> The unanswerable question. "Does this dress make me look fat?"
If this is what you can afford, then this is what you use.
The setups for Audacity claim multi-tracks and I've seen illustrations with at least four tracks on the screen at the same time. Do you have experience with any other package? Multi-track management can be very interesting and there are some really amusing problems. There was another posting a while back of someone with too much of the song on the screen at the same time and the computer couldn't keep up. They had stuttering playback. Is your computer up to cutting 16 tracks at once, and keep the un-do files current, and draw the blue lines on the screen, and cut and add effects?
Are your hard drives? I understand that your stuff is 4.7MB of work in MP3, but you can't edit in MP3. You have to edit in WAV--uncompressed wav--and suddenly your hard drives aren't big enough.
You should be totally loading a short segment and telling us how it went.
The AW16G claims to do everything from picking the grapes to selling the wine. What step does Audacity play in all this?
Koz
If this is what you can afford, then this is what you use.
The setups for Audacity claim multi-tracks and I've seen illustrations with at least four tracks on the screen at the same time. Do you have experience with any other package? Multi-track management can be very interesting and there are some really amusing problems. There was another posting a while back of someone with too much of the song on the screen at the same time and the computer couldn't keep up. They had stuttering playback. Is your computer up to cutting 16 tracks at once, and keep the un-do files current, and draw the blue lines on the screen, and cut and add effects?
Are your hard drives? I understand that your stuff is 4.7MB of work in MP3, but you can't edit in MP3. You have to edit in WAV--uncompressed wav--and suddenly your hard drives aren't big enough.
You should be totally loading a short segment and telling us how it went.
The AW16G claims to do everything from picking the grapes to selling the wine. What step does Audacity play in all this?
Koz
Re: Track Editing
Well, one issue with the AW16G is it's only got 20GB of space, fine when working with 10-15 songs, but not with the amount I'm doing. The other, well, I've lost the disc that came with it, that had a bunch of what I assume are demo versions of ProTools, Logic etc...
That really bothers me that I lost that. Maybe I can contact Yamaha and get them to send me a new copy....
That really bothers me that I lost that. Maybe I can contact Yamaha and get them to send me a new copy....
-
kozikowski
- Forum Staff
- Posts: 69374
- Joined: Thu Aug 02, 2007 5:57 pm
- Operating System: macOS 10.13 High Sierra
Re: Track Editing
<<<Maybe I can contact Yamaha and get them to send me a new copy....>>>
They can only say no. It's been my experience that the demo versions of the programs always do something so you can't perform a completed show. Over on the video forum, we always get the person who complains that a software package only saved half of their show. Yes, that's correct. Write a check for the other half. I have one package that will only let you use one of the 6,000 tools at a time in the demo mode and then won't let you save anything. Etc.
Tell me again how you're going to get all that stuff into Audacity?
Koz
They can only say no. It's been my experience that the demo versions of the programs always do something so you can't perform a completed show. Over on the video forum, we always get the person who complains that a software package only saved half of their show. Yes, that's correct. Write a check for the other half. I have one package that will only let you use one of the 6,000 tools at a time in the demo mode and then won't let you save anything. Etc.
Tell me again how you're going to get all that stuff into Audacity?
Koz
Re: Track Editing
Well, by the looks of it, I am probably just gonna do it all on the AW16G. Gonna have to skip the idea of doing 3 albums at once, and do them one at a time. Bit of a pain, I have to get in and out of drum playing/recording mode 3 times. Almost a good thing I suppose, gives me more time to make adjustments/fix things so by the last of 3, I should have any bugs worked out. I just wanted to record drums for the metal album last, as they will be the most difficult, but because I wanna do all the other tracks for my acoustic album last, I am gonna have to do the metal first. Soooooooo, yeah, anyway, I guess anything that could really help me here is gonna cost me, let's hope one (or all) of these 3 albums can put me on a path to having the flow for something fancy.
Appreciate the help Kos, when I'm done with my project I'll come back here and find you, send you a link to some of it.
Cheers,
Rory
Appreciate the help Kos, when I'm done with my project I'll come back here and find you, send you a link to some of it.
Cheers,
Rory
Re: Track Editing
13zombies,
Are you planning on using the Yamaha to do the mixing for each track and sending a stereo signal to Audacity? Or are you going to record each track one at a time into Audacity from the Yamaha?
The first option is totally do-able.
The second is going to make you pull out your hair unless you can either pull the files directly off the Yamaha or your Yamaha can output all 16-tracks at once, and your computer can record 16-tracks at once. If you have to record each track into Audacity separately, you'll have to go back and line up all the tracks perfectly in order to do the mixing in Audacity.
For the record, my old PC was an 800MHz Dell, XP, with a Turtle Beach card. The biggest project I ever tried had about 20 tracks playing at once, and I was limited to recording 2 tracks at once because of the soundcard.
My new computer is a 3GHz Gateway (from TigerDirect, best store ever), XP, with an M-Audio Delta 1010LT. The biggest project on this is 25 tracks (though I'm sure I could go much higher), and I've successfully recorded to 6 tracks at once (the card's limit is 8).
Are you planning on using the Yamaha to do the mixing for each track and sending a stereo signal to Audacity? Or are you going to record each track one at a time into Audacity from the Yamaha?
The first option is totally do-able.
The second is going to make you pull out your hair unless you can either pull the files directly off the Yamaha or your Yamaha can output all 16-tracks at once, and your computer can record 16-tracks at once. If you have to record each track into Audacity separately, you'll have to go back and line up all the tracks perfectly in order to do the mixing in Audacity.
For the record, my old PC was an 800MHz Dell, XP, with a Turtle Beach card. The biggest project I ever tried had about 20 tracks playing at once, and I was limited to recording 2 tracks at once because of the soundcard.
My new computer is a 3GHz Gateway (from TigerDirect, best store ever), XP, with an M-Audio Delta 1010LT. The biggest project on this is 25 tracks (though I'm sure I could go much higher), and I've successfully recorded to 6 tracks at once (the card's limit is 8).
Re: Track Editing
I just wanted to record drums for the metal album last, as they will be the most difficult, but because I wanna do all the other tracks for my acoustic album last, I am gonna have to do the metal first. 
Re: Track Editing
Audacity will be fine for editing your Yamaha projects as long as your computer is fast enough to handle 16 tracks at a time without glitching. With a reasonably modern machine running Windows XP this should be no problem.
The Yamaha AW16G will allow you to export (onto CD) all the audio tracks of a project as WAV files. Each wav file is one audio track and begins at time=0 so there is no problem getting the tracks to line up correctly in Audacity. Note that the raw recorded audio will be exported, so any real time effects, pan positions, volume levels, post-recording Eq, etc will not be exported.
The Yamaha will allow you to do editing and processing within the machine, but I find it much easier on a full size computer monitor rather than the little LCD on the Yamaha.
For mixing and using effects, I prefer the low cost program "Reaper", but Reaper is not an audio editing tool, so you will still need to use a program such as Audacity for editing. Audacity is quite capable of doing the mixing and has many free effect plug-ins available, but VST support is minimal, so if VST effects are important, I would recommend reaper for doing the final mix down.
Audacity 1.3.4 is much better for this kind of thing than v.1.2.6 and most users find it stable, but it would be wise to test it out on a small projects before you start on anything too big and complex - this will also help you to learn your way round the program.
The Yamaha AW16G will allow you to export (onto CD) all the audio tracks of a project as WAV files. Each wav file is one audio track and begins at time=0 so there is no problem getting the tracks to line up correctly in Audacity. Note that the raw recorded audio will be exported, so any real time effects, pan positions, volume levels, post-recording Eq, etc will not be exported.
The Yamaha will allow you to do editing and processing within the machine, but I find it much easier on a full size computer monitor rather than the little LCD on the Yamaha.
For mixing and using effects, I prefer the low cost program "Reaper", but Reaper is not an audio editing tool, so you will still need to use a program such as Audacity for editing. Audacity is quite capable of doing the mixing and has many free effect plug-ins available, but VST support is minimal, so if VST effects are important, I would recommend reaper for doing the final mix down.
Audacity 1.3.4 is much better for this kind of thing than v.1.2.6 and most users find it stable, but it would be wise to test it out on a small projects before you start on anything too big and complex - this will also help you to learn your way round the program.
9/10 questions are answered in the FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS (FAQ)