…and, I might add, sounds bloody marvelous.
Its always man over machine though isn’t it?
You think MT sounds good recorded… you should hear him live and in the groove. Hes ridiculously good.
Thanks, MT! 
Or, more often, just ridiculous … 
And if you run into any bum notes - check this out:
Pinch me, I must be dreaming. That is almost unbelievable. “Is it real or is it Melodyne?” You could just play one note, only one, and generate any tune you like. It wouldn’t be as fun, but wow.
OK .. you can have a laugh at my expense. What on earth is a ‘click track’?
D
It’s a built-in metronome. It put’s the click in a separate track that you can mute if you want. You can also do more than one for things that change time etc. Pretty handy actually.
On the menu click “Generate” and you will see the “Click track” option. Fill in the parameters and you are off!
Right. When you’re multitracking, it’s like playing along with ghosts. A click track helps to tie everything together. And incidentally, this is another good reason to practice occasionally with a metronome. Learning to keep the lift and feel of the music within and despite the constraints of a mechanical click is definitely a skill in itself.
One of the most challenging recordings I ever engineered involved transitioning between a slower tune and faster tune by ramping up the tempo. This meant starting slowly against a fast click and accelerating gradually to target the exact change of tempo at the end of the ramp. I remember it took many, many takes to get it right.
From the replies here, it’s interesting how many people actually are multitracking for their own pleasure or practice.
well some of us think that it’s ridiculous to be good!
no, sorry…ah, yeah…
well some of us think that it’s good to be ridiculous!
another use for Audacity - it has a useful analysis function which will give you a harmonic analysis of a note and the frequency of the harmonics. So play a slow scale or piece and find out the pitch when you are not staring at one of those tuners. It does not tell you how far off your pitch is - you have to do some math for that, which if you do please consider NOT using equal temperment!
Just reading a thread on tuners on the flute forum and followed a link to ‘Taratini’ a tuner app for your computer. It does what I was suggesting you do with Audacity in real time, or you can study a recording. At first glance it does not seem to have different tunings but I’ve only spent a few minutes with it.
this one (scroll a bit down the page) 
also mentioned (the one from Terry McGee’s site)
will give you just or equal tuning and show harmonics
(click pic)
I did download ‘that one’ but unfortunately it does not run on an intel Mac with OS X - though I think there is a windows version and so if I installed windows with boot camp … too much work right now.
Not quite on the subject of multi-tracking, but on Audacity.
When I export a file and save it from Wave to Mp3, sometime the quality goes down (more than it should I think). I’ve got options to choose as far as Kbps and never know what to choose. And I’ve also got the project rate (I usually leave it at 44,000 Hz).
Where can I read up on this kind of stuff? Or am I in way over my head?
I left a clip on whistlethis.com recently, that had some noise after I made the transition from wave to mp3.
Michael
More links:
Audacity forum
Understanding Audio Compression: MP3, WMA, Ogg, and More
Professional Sound Editing with Audacity
I recommend encoding to ogg vorbis as it is much better at audio quality.
mp3 causes “artifacts” at the default encoding settings. I had to increase the bit rate to 4 times the default rate of 128 (IIRC) to get the same quality sound as with ogg vorbis encoding at the default rate.
Thanks Fancypiper.
By the way, MTGuru, that sounded real nice.
Michael
I never encode at a bitrate less than 192Kbps for files that stay on my
machine. If people have to download it, I use 128Kbps, which usually
results in acceptable quality-to-filesize ratio.
If you’re looking for a nice simple and cheap tuner for OS X, check out Vocal Lab. Does a really nice job.
Just beautiful, John! Great style! Thanks! Let me know next time you’re at the Dubliner, and I’d love to stop by and say hi.
Todd from Long Beach
I’ve been using Audacity for a few months now trying to make halfway decent recordings in my spare time, and your recording sounds terrific. It turned out a whole lot better than mine have.