noob question

[Hantink]

All I downloaded audacity for was to overlay and instrumental clip with a vocal clip. Can someone tell me how to do that?

[kozikowski]

<<<overlay and instrumental clip with a vocal clip>>>

I'm divining that what you actually want to do is sing over an existing music bed? Splitting a machine like that isn't trivial, but you do need to wade through the basics first.

Combining two existing tracks--assuming they're in the same audio standard--should be easy.

http://audacityteam.org/manual-1.2/tutorials.html

You can get into serious trouble if your two tracks have different sampling and different bit depths. In Windows you can convert your two tracks in Super or Switch to both be the same, then edit your brains out. There is a posting of a user who is trying to combine two very, very different audio capture device products into one show. This is me being glad I'm not him.

Koz

[steve]

http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... h_Audacity

In Audacity preferences you need to enable "play other tracks while recording new one". To do that, Click on "Edit" and select "Preferences" then look in the "Audio I/O" tab.

To record from a conventional microphone (not USB) you need to use the Windows Mixer, or the sound-card control panel to select the microphone as the recording input. Help with this here: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... bar_Issues

If you are using Vista, read this page: http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... s_Vista_OS
Also for Vista, you may be better using Audacity version 1.3.6 (beta) rather than the old 1.2.6