Can you record with two mics at the same time with Audacity?

Question

I want to mic up a piano. I currently use one mic on each side of the piano and then blend them. In Audacity, is there a way to have two tracks with different mics that you can record simultaneously?

Answer 1

According to the manual on multi-channel recording

Audacity supports recording however many channels the device offers (for example, 24).

but note the limitations on channel allocations and mappings to tracks.

So it depends on your audio interface hardware as well as the driver type that your hardware supports for the operating system you use. The list of OS & driver types are listed in that manual page.

Good hardware will support the ASIO interface for low latency, but it requires special effort (compile Audacity from source code to integrate the Steinberg ASIO SDK, sample instruction here) to make it work in Audacity (see manual page).

The next best would be using the WASAPI interface (native Windows interface, see this article). After you hook up your microphones to your interface hardware you would need to configure your hardware to present itself to Windows as a Stereo channel and then map it as a Stereo Audio Track in Audacity. See also Audacity support article.

If you are using an external USB audio interface that has a stereo line output such as the M-Audio M-Track Duo you have another option to avoid messing around with the USB interface driver: you can hook up its line output to your computer's built-in interface's line input, and select that accordingly in Audacity. But the quality will depend on your computer's built-in audio interface.

Although Audacity can meet your needs, I think Audacity is not meant to be a full blown multitrack editor that provides advanced nonlinear mixing control over the tracks (see the concluding paragraph of this PC Magazine Audacity Review, updated in Jan 2024).