Audacity Forum

After having purchased a soundcard with asio and a reaper licence for 40$ for doing multichannel music recording in my home, and used it for some time, I must conclude that if you go out and buy some proper hardware for recording yourself, its a waste of time and poor economy to use audacity rather than reaper. I have used audacity a lot and enjoyed it and appreciate all the good work that has been put on it, as well as I have appreciated the good response in this forum.

As an introduction to digital recording and many kinds of manipulation that you may want to do on say a stereo track, its great. But if you start to get serious about music recording (although in a home setting) it doesnt deliver. If you are serious about recording, you want asio, which is not supported. That's a simple fatal fact for audacity for this kind of use. I recently did a multichannel project with audacity and was happy about it, because I didnt know of anything else. But after just playing around a bit with reaper, its plain to me that it was a waste of time to use audacity the way I did.

Buying expensive mics and expensive soundcards and use audacity instead of reaper just to save 40$? That doesnt make sense, in a 100 years that doesnt make sense to me. I dont say this to be mean, but neither can I be silent about this plain fact. Audacity is a real nice software, no doubt about that, but it also has clear limits, which might not be evident to you, if you have limited knowledge of similar products in the field.
/Jonas

I presume that you are talking about Audacity on Windows?

It is certainly true that multi-channel sound-card support on Windows is severely limited by the lack of pre-compiled ASIO support in Audacity and the lack of multi-channel WDM drivers from the sound card manufacturers or from Microsoft.

Audacity can use ASIO drivers, but cannot be distributed with ASIO support due to the license terms of ASIO.
This means that for ASIO support in Audacity it is necessary to build Audacity yourself from the source code including the ASIO SDK from Steinberg. Unfortunately doing so is beyond the abilities of most Windows users as Windows does not include the necessary tools for the job.

More information about ASIO and Audacity here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/ASIO_Audio_Interface

The other major limitation (for certain types of work) is the absence of real-time processing. This is not due to licensing issues, but simply that Audacity is not designed for real-time processing.

There is an lot of "serious" audio work that does not require multi-channel support or real-time processing. At work I use ProTools, Sonar and Adobe Audition, but the majority of the time I use Audacity as I can accomplish most audio editing tasks quicker and more efficiently using Audacity than with the other programs.

Even when using Reaper (or ProTools) Audacity is still very useful as an audio editor. For example, if using Reaper there are occasions when it is necessary to edit a track at "sample level" (for example, to remove a glitch on a recorded track). In such circumstances it is much easier to edit the track in an external editing application than to try and fix it within Reaper. Audacity can be configured as an external editor for Reaper, then all you need to do is to open the track in the external editor (Audacity), make the necessary edit, then Export from Audacity, overwriting the source WAV file and the track in Reaper is automatically updated.

At the end of the day it's about using the right tool for the job. For multi-channel recording, programs such as Reaper and Ardour2 are designed specifically for the purpose of multi-channel recording and real-time processing, though personally I prefer to record on a hardware multi-channel recorder rather than on a computer and then do the editing/mixing on a computer.

It's great to see a product as good as Reaper being offered at such a reasonable price and I would highly recommend it for any Windows user that wants to do "serious" multi-channel recording. For people that prefer open source software I would highly recommend Ardour2 (available for Linux and Mac but not Windows). For someone starting out from scratch I would recommend using Linux rather than Windows as Linux has native support for "jack" and so does not require a third party sound system with a restrictive license (ASIO). Using Audacity with Jack allows Audacity to be integrated with other software into the audio system, for example, allowing the output from Ardour to be (losslessly) routed through mastering effects directly into Audacity ready for the final top-and-tail and export into the required format.

Steve, thanks for a friendly answer, despite my criticisms. Yes, I'm talking about A on windows.
Im aware of the reasons for lack of asio support, and realise that under the cirumstances, there isnt so much that you can do about it.
Which also applies for me; Im sitting on windows and is not willing to start fiddling with Linux under the current circumstances.

I have tried to but failed to get asio-compiled A from other persons on this forum. I also contemplated to compile it myself but
its simply too much hazzle for me to start delving into that kind of stuff, altho I have done it alot in my previous lives. As you point out,
the needed tools is not supplied with standard windows. And After all
it was recording music I wanted to do, not so much trying to build my own executives.
I appreciate the various pointers that you supplied, but they all somehow requires that you enjoy to fiddle with your software
in a way that I dont want to engage in, at least not in windows.

Yes, its probably the real-time processing, with for example real-time manipulating of the plug-ins effects, that is one of the things I like.
Yes, that might be a good idea, to use A as an external editor. I noticed I couldnt edit the waveform with reaper the way Im used to with A.

As soon as you buy sound cards and want decent results from them, you very soon starts to lean towards asio, whether you want it or not.
As soon as you have any interface problems, everybody keeps telling you to use asio, and nothing else, to minimise any driver problems.
And I have to agree on that, the moment you install and use asio, its a relevation, for example any latency issues is just gone with the wind.
/Jonas