How to Record in Audacity With Backing
Media-sharing sites such as Metacafe, Myspace and YouTube are allowing more people than ever to display their musical and singing skills. With a PC, a background track, a pair of headphones and a microphone, you can create your own demos and session recordings within minutes using the freeware recording application Audacity. Audacity has the ability to play one track while allowing you to record your voice from a microphone. However, before you can use Audacity to record over a music track, you must enable multi-track recording in the application.
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Instructions
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Connect your microphone to the "Microphone In" port on the computer. In most cases, the port has a pink ring around it or an icon of a small microphone device.
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Launch Audacity on your computer. Click "File," then "Open." Browse to an Audacity-supported audio file to use as your backing track. Audacity supports AIFF, FLAC, OGG, MP3, WAV files and all FFmpeg variant files. Highlight the file name, and then click "Open." Audacity adds the track to the project window.
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Click "Transport" on the menu bar, then the "Software Playthrough (On/Off)" option.
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Click "Edit," then "Preferences." Click "Recording" on the left side of the "Audacity Preferences" window. Click and enable the "Overdub: Play other tracks while recording new one" and "Software Playthrough: Listen while recording or monitoring new track (uncheck when recording "stereo mix")" options, if not already enabled.
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Connect the headphones to the "Line In" or "Headphone In" port on the computer.
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Click the red "Record" button on the Audacity toolbar. Audacity creates a new audio track beneath the backing track and starts playing the background music. Wait until the appropriate start point in the track to start singing or talking. Continue singing or speaking as Audacity records your voice and adds it to the recording project.
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Click the yellow "Stop" button on the Audacity toolbar after you finish recording. Click "File," then "Save." Select a folder in which to save the new recording. Enter a name for your new recording project, then click the "Save" button.
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Tips & Warnings
You can use Audacity to export your recordings to MP3 format. To save your recordings in MP3 format, though, you must download the Lame plugin for Audacity. You can download the plugin on the main Audacity support site.
