Recording with 2 mics (newbie question)

[daveytod]

hi all,

just got audacity today as part of the Pinnacle Podcast Factory set and am having great fun so far.

however, I have 1 mic which plugs into a tiny little mixer which then goes into the usb port, as well as a seprate Samson Q1U usb which which, rather obviously, plugs direct into my second usb port.

Is it possible to recored from these 2 seperate devices at the same time?

[steve]

No. Audacity can only record from one device at a time. If you need more than one microphone you will need to use a mixer, then record from the mixer.

[kozikowski]

And most mixers are analog, not USB. This is one of the serious drawbacks of USB microphones. They're aggressively non-expandable.

If you're on a PC (laptop or deskside) you should find a mixer with nice analog inputs and USB out. If you have a Mac, you can do that or analog in via the Stereo Line-In or the Optical Digital sound input or FireWire.

Koz

[JSO]

I've been experimenting with recording from Line In and Mic in to record at the same time. (Which is quite related to this topic I think) I found an older topic and the reply was the same as here, using an external Mixer.

After some experimenting I found out that it is possible to record from two (or even more) devices at the same time, using Windows' built in Mixer. (No need to pay and wait for a mixer! ) It's not a perfect aproach, but it works.

Here's what I did (Using XP, also works on vista but in different dialogs) :

• In the playback pane (double click the sound icon in the system tray) - set to advanced view and displaying all possible channels - I unchecked "mute" for both "Line In" and "Microphone", and I turned up the volumes.
• Then in audacity, I selected "Wave Out Mix" as the recording device (also possible by clicking File>>Options>>Recording in the sound mixer)

It works for me, at least. Some newer computers have multiple Line-In channels - they can be combined.

[steve]

That's a good point JSO, but it only works with some sound cards, and it is not suitable for two microphones as you cannot use most microphones directly with the Line-in socket (the signal level of a microphone is far too low). The other problem is that most consumer grade sound cards have terrible quality microphone inputs.

This reminds me of an old SoundBlaster card that I modified by adding a couple of leads to CD input and the Aux input so that I could have 6 line in sockets. Of course it only recorded to one stereo track, but as I didn't have a mixer at the time it allowed me to plug in several keyboard instruments simultaneously, and by connecting them together via MIDI,, generate some pretty awesome multi-layered sounds.