I taped three bands at a small local venue last Sunday.
CA-14 cards > SP-SPSB-11 (no bass roll-off) > Roland R-05 (24bit, 44.1k)
The venue has a decent PA and I was recording centrally approx 6ft back from the stage. I've got some decent captures from this position in the past but this time there's a noticeable split between the left and right channels - for example, the first band are a three-piece and the left channel has more guitar and vocals, the right channel has more bass and drums.
Playing with a few functions in Audacity, the best mix I've managed to get out so far involved using the Compression function (I used the Audacity presets), limiting a small number of peaks and then using the Mix And Render function, which has produced a far better balance between the contents of the two channels but without creating two identical channels.
So - what does 'Mix And Render' actually do? Is its use regarded as some sort of cardinal sin?
Any suggestions on tweaks in what I've done which may produce better results?
I haven't done any EQ because I have absolutely no idea where to start with that.
Whilst we're on Audacity - I have an *ancient* copy of Soundforge which I still use primarily for the one thing I haven't managed to work out how to do in Audacity - scanning recordings to get guideline RMS figures. The Normalize function in Soundforge allows me to Scans Levels, returning Peak and RMS figures for the whole recording or each channel if selected. I find the RMS figures give me an effective guide in balancing the volumes of the two channels, but I can't work out how to get them out of Audacity. Anyone?