Re: [Audacity-quality] average number of tracks

[Bill W. <bi...@go...>]

This is a tough one. I can't recall anyone on the forums with a  
"large" project - more than 10 tracks or so. A lot of people seem to  
be working on one mono or stereo track - editing interviews,  
transcribing LPs, recording the sound from YouTube videos, trying to  
clean up a voice recorder/camcorder recording, that kind of thing. A  
few are recording live performances using a stereo mic. Those making  
podcasts should not generally need more than a few mono tracks and a  
couple of stereo tracks.

Back in the 1.2 days you had to have multiple tracks if you wanted to  
move clips of audio around independently, so in that case you could  
have lots of tracks for what amounts to a very simple production. With  
the clips in 1.3 that is not necessary.

I can recall only a few posters that were trying to do multi-track  
recording with overdubs. As I recall, those that were trying this were  
newbies with one or two microphones. I can't remember any of them  
reporting back on how far they got with their project.

Multi-track USB and firewire interfaces are problematic with Audacity,  
so we see hardly any of that - mostly people asking how to get them to  
work.

Of course, on the forum we only hear from those who are having  
problems. There may be thousands of savvy users building up enormous  
projects. Still, I can't see any need for more than a dozen or so  
tracks for music production among Audacity's audience. Those who get  
to that point and build up the knowledge, resources and skill to do it  
well will (should) probably move on to Ardour which is much better  
suited to multi-track audio production and mixing.

I can't speak to uses other than music production.

-- Bill

On 30-Oct-10, at 5:47 PM, Vaughan Johnson wrote:

> There's a thread on -devel where Michael is debugging tip panel
> slowness, and it turns out it's largely because of the huge "pool" of
> sliders that are created even where there aren't enough tracks to use
> all of them. The current pool size is 100, but I doubt many (any?)  
> users
> ever have 100 tracks up at once.
>
> So does anybody have any input on how many tracks the average user has
> up at once?
>
> How about for "power" users -- how many tracks is a reasonable (i.e.,
> not at the extreme, asymptotic tail of the curve) "maximum"?
>
> Thanks,
> Vaughan
>
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