Audacity Forum

What's good, Audacity Forum?

New here, I was interested in your software when I noticed that while recording, I had background noise that was not enough to be a deal breaker, but enough to annoy me. I know Audacity has noise-cancelling capabilities so I jumped on board and will be recording sound with Audacity and visual with Bandicam.

That said, I've noticed that recording the sound aspect of Audacity is difficult. Basically, me and a few friends will soon be starting up a YouTube Channel that involves commentaries with video games. The idea is that...

1.) The sound of the video game will be hearable, but low as to not overpower the commentary.
2.) The sound of my voice in the mic, as well as the voice of others over Ventrilo will be the commentary.

The issue is that Audacity seems to ONLY record my voice and nothing that I'm actually hearing on my computer. I need Audacity to record what I hear and what I say simultaneously. Surely this is possible, so how do I accomplish such a goal?

I have:

Windows 7 32-bit
Realtek HD Audio (onboard sound card)

Thanks!

Probably not. Audacity is a very simple program and likes running in very simple environments -- like recording one guitar or one voice -- full stop. Under certain circumstances, it can perform multi-track by playing one track and recording another, but that's about the limit.

You can try recording Stereo-Mix or WAV-Out instead of your microphone, but you may find you have no individual control of volume when you do that -- and many computers don't have Stereo-Mix any more.

Ventrilo, no doubt has special audio pathway management to get that many individual voices and sounds to perform without interfering with each other. I would be investigating Ventrilo for recording software similar to Pamela which is the Skype recording software. Same problem. It's very difficult to record both sides of a Skype call because of special, custom path management. It usually requires special software.

Audacity does have noise reduction tools -- for post production, not live in real time. Audacity doesn't do anything in real time past certain timer functions. Everything is post production.

You are also warned against starting a job with less than perfect sound. Filtering noise doubles the production time for any show and is to be avoided.

Koz

Hm, what about running 2 Audacities? 1 to record what I say, and another to record what I hear, then syncing them after it's finished?

Sorry if I'm coming off as being silly at this point, just trying to figure things out. Looking for ways to make this work.

I can use Bandi to record what I need, but it's the issue of the noise that hurts it. When I try to edit the video in Audacity to fix it, it says it can't do videos, only audio. Would you know of any ways I can still accomplish this? Is there absolutely no way to mess with the audio in a video with Audacity?

I was going to suggest a desperation method of recording the voices and game sound on a separate computer, but I'm betting that's not going to work either because Other People's Voices and Game Sound are mixed by the time they get to you. No way to split them. Let us know how you get around this.

Koz

This is a lot more complex than you think. Computers have two stereo sound channels; Record and Play. If you're doing multiple jobs with multiple tracks and pathways (Bidirectional Game Sound, Game Volume Management, Each Individual Voice, Bi-Directional Control, Microphone Echo Cancellation, Auto Gain Control) it means software was used to create other, additional sound channels and processes. Audacity doesn't do that. And you can't run more than one Audacity. See: "Audacity is a really simple program." Koz

it's the issue of the noise that hurts it.

What sort of noise? Maybe we can get to something we can fix. Koz