Set output device for each track

Special Interest Groups Making Music
1

Hey to all,

searching for a while and wondering if it is possible to choose a output device for each track seperately.

Why?

I use Audacity as a playback source. Means, I mute the drum track, for example, and play my own drums while recording the result in an other programm.

Unfortuneatly sometimes I wish to have a metronome at the beginning. Of course I can add it in one track to the audacity project. But I do not want to hear it in the recording… so my idea is to put this metronome track on a different output device which I can send to my earphones but not to the recording device…

Any hints on that are highly appreciated! :slight_smile:

Yours Schrat
(Newby)

2

Yes, you can listen to a backing track while recording something else,a nd you can optionally mix them later. [u]Tutorial - Recording Multi-track Overdubs[/u]

3

Thanks for your reply DVDdoug,

yes, overdubbing is well known and often done… my point is a different one. I will try to make it more transparent with following workflow description:

Audacity Tracks (one of them is a metronome track) → USB-Audio Out → Mixer (add drums to audio stream) → USB-Audio In → Recording with OBS Studio
Result: Metronome is in recorded file :frowning:

Audacity Tracks without metronome track → USB-Audio Out → Mixer (add drums to audio stream) → USB-Audio In → Recording with OBS Studio
AND
Audacity metronome track → Audio-Out (not USB-Audio!) → Mixer → Headphone (together with audio stream)
Result: Metronome is not in recorded file, but was in headphones together with audiostream :slight_smile:

So after all there is a need to allocate the non-metronome tracks to USB-Audio Out and the metronome track at the same time to Audio-Out (not USB)

The possibility to allocate every single track to a specific audio output device would be a great feature!

4

Audacity can’t do that. Audacity can only record from one device at a time, and play back through one device at a time. Playback is currently limited to a maximum of 2 audio channels.

Support for more output channels may be added in a future version of Audacity, but doing so will be a big and complex job so I doubt it will happen any time soon.

5

OR

  1. Audacity Tracks (one of them is a metronome track) → Audio-Out (not USB-Audio!) → Mixer → Headphone (together with audio stream)
    AND
    Drums → Mixer → (drums only) USB-Audio-In → Audacity (adding new track to project) (latency compensation and/or Time Shift Tool (F5) to precisely align tracks). Delete (or mute) metronome track (replacing with newly recorded drum track). Export (optionally to OBS)

(Thousands, if not more, do it this way, and are quite happy with the results!)

I hope this helps. :smiley: