First of all, I want to thank Alex Ratchov and Jacob Meuser for the work
on aucat and the underlying sndio audio framework. I am using aucat as
a poor man's recording studio.
Let me start with the simplest example:
$ aucat -o background.wav
$ aucat -i background.wav -o solo.wav
$ aucat -i background.wav -i solo.wav
This is how I record a basic background track (say,
an accompanying guitar); then record a solo track in
sync with the background; and play the two, synced.
Now, I can record further tracks with e.g.
$ aucat -i background.wav -i solo.wav -o vocal.wav
I can specify relative volumes with -v (or even control
them with hardware knobs when using a midi controller);
what I miss is stereo panning.
Without further options, all the previous tracks are "mixed" as 1/n,
and positioned in the "middle" of the stereo panorama; that's doable,
but the musical experience would be very much enhanced with stereo
positioning. I mean e.g. hearing the drums in the left and the bass
in the right while recording the vocals.
I realize that this can be considered "mixing" already, and aucat does not,
by design, use a full matrix mixer: it uses a 0/1 matrix (controlled
with the -C/-c ranges).
There are workarounds: I can pre-procces the existing tracks
with e.g. SoX to attenuate/amplify the left/right channel of each,
and then play these preprocessed streams.
Am I right at thinking that there is currently no way
to do that in aucat directly?
(Because if there is, I don't need to reboot into MacOS
to use ProTools for comfortable multitrack recording.)
Sincerely
Jan
