import & export of tracks

[macstaq]

I'm a new user of Audacity. It seems to be doing what I need - which is non-professional work for personal enjoyment. That being said, I do want to eventually send these multi-track compositions to others who use Cubase or ProTools, so that they can overlay tracks and send back to me.
So far from reading other entries it appears Audacity is a very "fragile" system as far as its ability to successfuly import & export track data; but I haven't experienced those challenges YET
Assuming that Audacity can accomplish that goal mentioned above, what is the best way to record so that I can eventually export to .wav for others to import into a separate system and send back to me? I prefer the education now before I get so far down the path of what I'm doing that it becomes impossible or at the very least very painful to undo.

[kozikowski]

<<<it appears Audacity is a very "fragile" system>>>

I would have stopped the sentence there. 1.2.x is quite an old software package. It is two major versions old counting 1.3 Beta and the soon-to-released 1.4. Vista and Leopard (Windows/Mac) did result in a few interesting challenges for the users and we can't automatically assume that the user or machine is misbehaving any more like we used to.

As far as I know, we can't export more than two sound tracks from Audacity, so no, you can't send someone a 16 track mix and have them sweeten it.

If you really enjoy pressing hot pins into your flesh, you can try to ship an Audacity Project. But all that will do is give the people at the far end the ability to play the original 16 tracks (if you're extraordinarily lucky), not export, manage, and import them.

So unless somebody stops me, you can't do this.

Koz

[kozikowski]

Windows, as of Windows 2000 supports Wave Format Extensible which will cheerfully support 18 sound channels. They label them Top-Left-Rear and stuff like that, but there's no reason you couldn't use that to transmit your 16 track mix back and forth--assuming you could get Audacity to support it.

Someone covered this once before. I think Audacity automatically does a stereo mix on export no matter now many tracks you started with.

Why don't you contact your target production people and see which formats they support?

Koz

[steve]

So unless somebody stops me, you can't do this.

Hopefully not too late for my cue

Professional DAW's are able to import WAV files and we are able to export WAV files from Audacity. We can even export single tracks as WAV files by select a track and choosing "Export Selection".

The problem with importing these files into ProTools, or some other DAW, is getting the tracks to line up with each other.
As long as all the tracks start at exactly zero seconds, then they can be lined up accurately in another editor.

This is where the problem lies - some of our tracks may not begin at t=0

The solution to this is for any track that does not begin at zero, select that individual track and then do a "Quick Mix" (Mix and render in v.1.3.4). The resultant "Mix?" of that one track will be a continuous track starting at t=0 (with silence at the beginning.

This is a little laborious if you have 16 tracks or more, but the benefit is that you have nice robust WAV files that can be imported into just about anything. (keep a written record of what is on each track for future reference)

One little note of caution - if you are backing these wav files up onto a CD, make sure it is a DATA CD not an audio CD. You won't be able to play it in a CD player, but that's not the point of the backup. Burning and ripping audio files can do nasty things with silence.

Also, if you need to compress the files (to transport on a memory stick for example), do not use mp3 format - as well as the loss in sound quality, the beginning of the track will have an additional bit of silence added to the beginning (something that mp3's just do). So if you need to use compression, use FLAC.