****!!... somehow the topic title got truncated It was supposed to be "good FREE(!) simultaneous multi-track audio recording software? (I have Audacity but it only supports 2 simultaneous tracks)"

Hi all. I'm looking for some good free (NOT trialware) simultaneous multi-track recording software. I have Audacity, but it can only record 2 channels (1 stereo track) at a time.
My computer's on-board sound has 6 jacks in the rear, each of which (up to all 6 simultaneously) can be set as "line-in".
When I plug separate audio sources into each jack, I'd like each one to go on a separate track, not all get mixed onto one stereo track. What free software can I download that will do this?
I'm running Windows XP Home SP2 on a 2.1GHz dual-core AMD CPU with 2GB RAM, and slightly over 1TB HD capacity (using 3 HDDs).

I would like to use Audacity, but it only seems to support recording 2 channels at a time. Is there some other program I could download, or is there a plugin for Audacity that will enable simultaneous multi-track recording?

(A friend of mine uses SONAR, but it's $619 over my budget.)

Thanks to the unidentified mod who edited my topic, or was it automatically fixed somehow? Somehow the word "FREE" was omitted from the topic title, though...

http://www.reaper.fm/

If you ever get around to doing this on a Mac OS/X or Linux I can recommend Ardour to you. Other then that good luck in your searching finding open-source alternatives on Windows (If they even exist).

http://www.ardour.org/

Reaper costs $, and I'm looking for something that's no more expensive than Audacity.

I want a personal butler and a helicopter for free. iow: Get a job then.

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I like Audacity for what I can do with it (and some things it can do I haven't learned much yet) but I'd like to find some true multi-track recording software that's the same price as Audacity. No, it doesn't need to have all the effects / plugins / etc that Audacity has - I'll mainly be recording multiple sources simultaneously, saving the files as separate tracks, then when I want to edit them I'll import them in Audacity and work with them there.

Are you telling me that no multi-track recording software exists that's free? That would be like telling me that software like Open Office, Firefox, Audacity, GIMP, VirtualDub, etc, are not free.

Reaper costs only $50 for a personal licence, which is an absolute steal. Also, the demo is fully featured and not time limited so you can pretty much use it as long as you like without paying, although you will get nagged for 5 seconds every time you run it.

It's also awesome.

Kristal Audio Engine could be what you're looking for, I've never tried it though and from the feature list it looks quite limited compared to Reaper. Max of 16 tracks, etc..

Well.. in that case, seeing as I also use an older version of GoldWave (4.26), which is also nagware, I could try reaper I guess. (The version of Goldwave I use, after you use certain commands a particular # of times per session, nags you with a popup screen about every other time you use one. The newer versions of GW, like 5.x or something like that, are time limited.)

But... how do you call $50 an "absolute steal"? especially considering:
I generally like to spend no more than a small fraction (of the hardware costs) on the software I use for a project,
I prefer the hardware costs to be an even tinier fraction of the money I expect to actually make from selling finished copies (or whatever it is) (and that's assuming it's a bad enough commercial failure to make the Guinness Book of World Records in a category like "commercial failures so bad they can never again be matched, let alone bested")
in this particular case, it's a project I'm doing for free for my family.

I would be willing to invest some $ in some good software around the time I buy better quality audio hardware, seeing as I would like to sometime do some professional recordings, but that's still at least a year or more into the future. At the rate I'm raking in the dollars from my not-yet-finished piano music album that I'm in the process of recording with a Zoom H2 and a Baldwin Hamilton piano, that may as well be several years or decades. :| (But, while I'm not making money from what I'm doing with this, nor expecting to make money, I would prefer to spend (or not) my money accordingly. (About the in-progress piano music album - the equipment I now have seems to be working well enough - maybe it's that I've figured out how to use my Zoom H2 and Audacity effectively, and the piano's in excellent condition, especially for its age.)


I downloaded Kristal but have yet to figure out how to use it.

I only have six 1/8" jacks on my comp's motherboard, however each can be set as line-in, line-out, speaker out, mic in, etc, independently - they don't have to be assigned to the "defaults". So in that case 12 channels (would that be 6 tracks?) is sufficient for now. (However, if that means I can't IMPORT more than 16 pre-recorded tracks.... Audacity to the rescue.)

Are you *sure* your integrated soundcard supports more than one line in? Usually, onboard soundcards only support 3 stereo outs (5.1, 4 if it's 7.1), one stereo in and one mic.


If you really can record from more than one source as you say, here there's a possible (haven't tested) workaround:

Open several audacitys. Select a different source in each one, and start recording. (There's an option in the transport menu named timer record which you can use to syncronize their start of recording)

Of course, this gives you the extra job of putting them all in one audacity afterwards.

Unless you are using a special DAW-built PC, there is no way you will have more than 2 inputs on the Sound Card.

To multi-track you will need a multi-tracking sound card. The good news is many will come with bundled software.

Otherwise..

I use n-Track Studio for most of my recording needs. $64.

There are a few "projects" around (i.e Krystal) but with inexpensive options like N-Track and Reaper, I doubt there will ever be a freeware multi-track option that is worth the trouble.

There IS multi-track recording software that exists for free and is open-source, however it's not going to be ported over to Windows anytime soon. This is precisly why everyone should be dual-booting a second operating systems like Linux or have a dedicated machine that has something like Mac OS/X on it (especially geared toward audio production). I am not saying Windows is subpar, but you need to fork over some cash in this area if you want to do anything serious. Open-source alternatives already exist on the other two operating systems.

HotshotGG, I have Ubuntu also installed on this machine.

Problem is I haven't figured out how to run Linux and Windows simultaneously, yet.

(Not to mention I'm considering adding another 2GB of RAM to this comp (already has 2 - would make it 4) but that'll probably not be for a while yet).

I think what you are looking for is called "VMWare"

http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

Excellent! I just installed Ubuntu on a machine yesterday. I recommend you get yourself multi-track sound card. I can't think of any that specifically come to mind, but definitely consider looking into M-Audio. Secondly I recommend you check out Ardour. It's designed for the task that you specifically asked for above. Please let us know what your course of action is and how your project turns out!

Don't know if this will work with your hardware (I couldn't find anything in the manual about recording more than two tracks at once), but it's multi-track, free, and available for Windows:

http://traverso-daw.org/