Audacity stereo recording needs steel overdub

Tony Palmer · Post by **Tony Palmer** » 5 Sep 2017 3:39 am

The sound man made a great stereo recording of our live gig but grrrr totally left out my steel feed! All I hear is bleed through from the vocal mike so it varies between barely heard to non existent.
I imported the cd into audacity and it shows two tracks. I also have an old Tascam DP-01 which can only record two tracks at a time but has eight tracks.
Should I convert the stereo tracks into one monaural track in audacity then output it to track one on the Tascam and record my steel part on track two? I would then mix it to one monaural track but lose the nice full stereo sound the original CD has.
I'm scratching my head on this because there's so many options but they're tricky and I'm not sure how to go about it.

Jack Stoner · Post by **Jack Stoner** » 5 Sep 2017 4:53 am

Your best option appears to be using the Tascam. Copy (record) the two tracks you have to two tracks on the Tascam. Record the steel on a third track and mix them down to stereo. You can then "record" that back to the PC (Audacity) and do whatever you want to do with it (save the Audacity stereo file as a .wav file so you maintain full fidelity. If you want to make an audio CD you will need wav file.

PC sound cards are (mostly) notorious for having high latency so trying to record along with something pre-recorded would be way out of sync.

There are trial versions available for recording studio programs, such as Cakewalk Sonar, Presonus Studio One 3, etc but without some external recording interface unit you are faced with the high latency PC sound card.

Tony Palmer · Post by **Tony Palmer** » 5 Sep 2017 11:10 am

Thanks Jack...that makes sense. I have used the Tascam extensively but for some reason never made stereo recordings...always up to 8 channels, then mixed into one master monaural track.

ajm · Post by **ajm** » 6 Sep 2017 6:43 am

If the gig recording is in a WAV format you could probably import that to the Tascam. That would keep everything digital, and that would be different than "recording" a CD to the Tascam.

You didn't say how many tracks made up the gig recording. That could possibly give you more flexibility as well.

Tony Palmer · Post by **Tony Palmer** » 6 Sep 2017 10:41 am

AJ it is in wav format but the Tascam won't import stereo tracks, just single tracks. So I have two mixed tracks I will get into the tascam probably from the CD player.
Then, as Jack said, I will record a third track of steel and mix the three all together. I will need to read up how to do the final mix in stereo on the Tascam however.