Audacity Forum

I'm wanting to record to a podcast "as live", meaning I want to be able to trigger other pre-recorded sounds while recording vocals.

I've read http://audacityteam.org/wiki/index.php? ... h_Audacity, and it sounds like Audacity does *almost* everything I want.

Imagine there's been 10 minutes of discussion, and now I'm moving onto "news headlines", at this point I'll want to activate the news jingle, and news backing track. When I've finished reading the news, I want to stop the news backing and play the outro jingle, then proceed with the next segment.

I'd like these jingles to appear on another track, so volumes can be adjusted independently later. I'd also like to be able to hear the jingles etc while I'm recording to get the timings right. Basically, the same as a live radio show works.

From reading the url above, it seems like I can mix jingles in afterwards, but not while recording. Is there a way to add them in while recording? If not, is anyone aware of a piece of software that does this?

Thanks in advance!

You can do it with Audacity if you have 2 computers and both have multi-channel sound cards.

Failing that, you will need to use ASIO enabled software. Have a look at "Ableton Live" for the playback, and "Cubase", "Sonar" or "Reaper" for the recording.

Thanks, I'll look into those. I understand this is going slightly off topic, but do you think I'll need a soundcard capable of recording multiple tracks at once?

As far as I can tell, the tracking software would just have to place the desired sample at the point of the playhead while recording, it would be using an extra channel playing it, but it wouldn't have to use an additional recording channel.

This could be interesting if you're not using a mixer in the middle. That's how you do a real live show. The computer doing the playback is on one fader, all the microphones are on other faders and the master output goes to the second computer, recorder, network transmission system, or actual FM transmitter.

You cue up the next sound piece with one hand while you run levels with the other on the mixer so nobody overloads. Open up the fader for the sound clips and play them while you close the microphones of the people who want to cough or sneeze or make other embarrassing sounds. The sound clip concludes and you open up the microphones while you cue up the next clip.

Remember you'll also need someplace to plug the headphones. The Control Room Send on the mixer takes care of that as well as letting you "cue up" a sound clip that doesn't happen to start at the beginning.

If you don't do that, then yes, you're going to spend some quality time in post production putting it all together. The generally accepted production time alloted is 10 times the length of the show. A One hour show, on very fuzzy average, takes 10 hours to edit.

Koz

JaffaTheCake wrote:I'm wanting to record to a podcast "as live", meaning I want to be able to trigger other pre-recorded sounds while recording vocals....

Imagine there's been 10 minutes of discussion, and now I'm moving onto "news headlines", at this point I'll want to activate the news jingle, and news backing track. When I've finished reading the news, I want to stop the news backing and play the outro jingle, then proceed with the next segment.

I'd like these jingles to appear on another track, so volumes can be adjusted independently later. I'd also like to be able to hear the jingles etc while I'm recording to get the timings right. Basically, the same as a live radio show works

One of the set-ups that I use can do this.
2 CD players, microphones, computer, other sources running into a mixing desk.
Control room output from the mixing desk plays through the monitoring system.
Independent direct outs from each mixing desk input to separate channels of a Protools recording system.
Auxiliary outputs for custom mixes for the performers.
Aux send/return loops for live effects.
Output from Protools back into mixing desk on separate group fader to allow monitoring of any/all recorded channels without creating a feedback loop.
The system costs several thousand pounds and was built for the purpose of live show recording.

You are wanting to reproduce this on one laptop?

What you are wanting to do is complex and demanding for a computer system - Personally I wouldn't attempt it without a real (hardware) mixing desk. To accomplish the task on one computer, you will need to be able to map each output to a virtual channel and also map the live input to a virtual channel. If you require more than one external input (such as microphones or CD players) to individual tracks then you will require a multi-channel sound card. To map different things playing on your computer to different tracks requires ASIO (on Windows) or JACK (on Linux).

There are various software technologies for making virtual audio connections between different audio applications, such as "Rewire" (Windows) or Jack Connect (Linux). The software required on Windows is likely to be quite expensive, and you should study the subject in some depth before commiting to any particular system. On Linux, suitable software is available free ("Ardour" would be the recording software of choice).

Alternatively you can make your show by multi-tracking (not live) and in this case you just need a sound card, microphone and Audacity.