Audacity Forum

I want to record an album doing multi track recording with external sources. I can't figure out how to get a click track going and it doesn't recognize my guitar when i plug it in to the mic input. what do i do to get started?

Step one is to get at least one USB sound card. If you're on a Windows laptop, chances are there's no place to plug in your guitar. Serious guitar work will overload the Mic-In of a laptop.

Then there's the matter of hearing the click track while you also listen to your live performance mixed. For that you need a sound card that has headphone monitoring and an "aux" sound input.

Of course, you'll need to be in Audacity 1.3 because 1.2 does not support computer latency delay adjustments.

You're building a simple Digital Audio Workstation and it's not easy. The computer will not handle most of the jobs needed because of delay. It's very common for people to complain that they can't perform because the headphone on the laptop is playing the show off time with the live performance.

Yes. That's correct. They do that.

So if you want to continue with your current path, you need to select the microphone input in the Windows Control Panel. It's not normal for it to be dead. It's normal for it to only record Left and be horribly distorted.

Windows Control Panel
http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... trol_Panel

I've searched for this multiple times, but nobody has written a convenient how-to about this, even though everybody wants to do it.

Koz