Audacity Forum

steve wrote:auzer666, please get out of your mind that what you really want to do is simple - it's not. The Windows sound system is a basic in/out affair, and that is fine for what it is designed for. Skype works, Audacity works, and your voice changer program works. They are not designed to all work together.

Gale Andrews wrote:I'm not quite following either.

Going back to the original question:
"Can I use Audacity to record my mic and stereomix at the same time, putting my voice from the mic into it's own channel, and putting the stereo mix in a separete channel, so that I can go back and edit them individually?"

This is not a question about Audacity, this is a question about routing sound signals and as I wrote previously, the Windows sound system probably can't do this without a lot of help.

The approach that I would take is not to use Stereo Mix at all, but to run all of the audio that I want to record through a mixing desk. Then I can pan each audio source left/right as required.

If auzer666 has a really fast i5 computer (with hardware virtualization), then he can probably do what he wants by running Linux as the host system, with Jack audio system, and running the voice changing software in a virtual machine under Windows, and then using "Jack Control" to route all of the audio signals as required *** but this is not simple ***

auzer666 wrote:Also, as far as quality goes, I've read that MP3 compression affects mainly the highs and lows in a file. So, since I'm gonna be recording voices, would the quality still be good as an MP3?

steve wrote:

auzer666 wrote:Also, as far as quality goes, I've read that MP3 compression affects mainly the highs and lows in a file. So, since I'm gonna be recording voices, would the quality still be good as an MP3?

MP3 is a lossy compression format. In order to make the file size smaller, some of the information is discarded. The damage that is done by MP3 compression may be very small provided that the bit rate is high enough. However, the damage is permanent and irreparable. If an MP3 is decoded for editing (Audacity always uses uncompressed audio data) and then exported as an MP3 file, there is some damage done to the sound quality by the export encoding. Each time it is encoded the sound quality deteriorates a little more. For this reason, whenever possible you should avoid using lossy compression during the production process - if you need the final format as MP3, then encode to MP3 once for the final export, but stick with uncompressed formats up to that point. The damage is most commonly heard as a metallic "zingy" quality.

kozikowski wrote: One of the guys at work recommends Kristal Audio Engine for recording odd multiples of different sounds on your computer. I've never used it. Write back.

http://www.kreatives.org/kristal/

Koz

auzer666 wrote:
This was taken from the Kristal website:


----KRISTAL Waver

-the sequencer Plug-In for KRISTAL
-multichannel harddisk recording via ASIO/MME
-ASIO input monitoring
-audio clip arrangement
-audio clip fade-in/fade-out/crossfade
-unlimited undo/redo
-AES31 Export

I don't quite understand these features...is it saying that it can do what I wanna do?

ragnar.jensen wrote:Here's a recording I did just an hour ago:

Kristal_recording.png

The top track is a mono track recorded from my microphone.
The bottom track is a stereo track recorded from "Stereo Mix". It is the sound from a movie playing on Youtube in my web browser.
Both tracks were recorded at the same time.

ragnar.jensen wrote:That is exactly what I'm showing in my example above.
The movie soundtrack is a separate stereo track (or channel, as you call it), there is only the movie sound in it.
The narrator's mic has it's own mono track.
The movie soundtrack and the narrator mic are not mixed together.

auzer666 wrote: You're saying that you got it so that whatever you say into your mic is only heard on either the left or right channel/speaker, and nothing else is heard on that channel/speaker....and every other sound coming from your computer EXCLUDING your mic is going into the other channel/speaker?

Because I haven't tried using Audacity and Kristal together, but when I tried them each individually, I couldn't record just my mic by itself on one channel because the only options I saw for inputs was mic and stereo mix...and if I do mic, then it records my mic, which is fine. But, if I choose stereo mix as well, well then it will record EVERYTHING my computer hears, including my mic....which is not what I want. I want my mic to only be recorded on one channel/speaker, not the other.

ragnar.jensen wrote:After Mix and Render:

Mixed_and_Rendered.png

One stereo track with Mic in the left speaker, everything else in the right.

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Ragnar