[CentOS] Recording piano and voice

[Lamar Owen]

On 06/22/2015 07:20 PM, Frank Cox wrote:
> The last time I wanted to record a voice announcement on my computer was a few years back, and as I recall I hooked up my Microsoft Lifechat headset and used Audacity to do the recording.
>
> Now I want to record a "recitation", which consists of me playing my piano and talking over it.

The USB MIDI port won't give you audio, just MIDI text.

What sort of sound card do you have?  While most consumer PC sound cards 
won't let you mix one channel at mic level and one channel at line 
level, yours might actually be an exception, but the model of it would 
be needed to make that determination.  Most pro-quality audio interfaces 
will let you do this, or are line input only.

To do this with a consumer card, you could set it for line level input 
and then run one channel straight from the piano's audio output and one 
channel through a mic preamp hooked to you microphone, with the output 
hooked to the other line input channel. Now, if you want to do stereo on 
the voice and piano, you'll either need a four channel card or you'll 
need to overdub, which Audacity among other programs can do.  Ardour and 
Mixbus can do latency compensation for overdubs, but I don't know if 
Audacity can or not.

A Zoom H4N works well for this wort of thing, either doing its own 
recording or being a USB-connected soundcard, which is supposed to work 
ok even in a Linux.