How to mix more than four tracks in MuLab Free

To mix more than four tracks together in MuLab, you’ll need to use the same trick the Beatles did when making the Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band album with 4-track tape recorders.

Once you get up to four tracks (but not more than four), and you have something that you like (with all the panning, volume control, etc.), save that session, then choose Mixdown Audio from the Session menu to mix what you’ve done so far down to a single stereo file. Then close that session (quit MuLab entirely and then reopen it), open a new empty session, and drag your mixed-down audio file into your new session. That will be one track, but you’ll now be able to add up to three more tracks to it. (And if you decide you want to change something about the mixed-down audio, you can always go back to your first session, make whatever changes you need to make, then repeat the Mixdown Audio process to get a revised version.)

You can repeat that process as many times as you need to, in order to mix together as many sounds as you want. There’s no loss in sound quality because it’s rendering everything exactly as you specified it in your original session.

Track 1 — \
Track 2 —  \ ___mixed down to … Track 1 — \
Track 3 —  /                  and add … Track 2 —  \___mixed down to … Track 1 —
Track 4 — /                                      Track 3 —  /                 and add … more tracks, etc.
.                                                         Track 4 — /

 

Some significant dates mentioned in the history of music technology

Here is a list of dates that were noted as being in some way significant in the recent history of music technology. A good way to get a sense of the historical timeline of events, not to mention to study for the final exam, is to identify what events or pieces of music correspond to the dates given here. The process of doing that will help to register in your mind the approximate time of events and their sequence relative to one another. Make a copy of this list of dates, and place events or titles of works on the list next to the appropriate dates. Start by working from memory, and then consult your class notes and the posts of this website to refresh your memory.


1787

1877

1887

1896

1899

1920

1924

1928

1948

1950

1956

1956

1956

1958

1958

1950s

1950s

1964

1968

1968

1960s

1972

1976

1977

1978

1978

1980

early 1980s

1980s

1985

1989

1991

1994

1995

1997

1998

2000

2003

MuLab instructions

The complete documentation for MuLab is available as a set of HTML pages.
Much of the information provided here is extracted from that manual.

Audio Setup

When you first open the application, you may need to set up the communication between the application and the audio driver for your computer’s sound card (audio interface hardware). If the Audio Setup window is not opened for you automatically, you can click on the MuLab button and choose Audio Setup from the menu.

On OSX, choose the Core Audio device driver for the built-in audio of your computer (or for another audio interface, if you have one). On Windows, choose an ASIO or MME device driver. On Windows it’s best to use the specific ASIO driver that comes with your sound device. If no such driver exists then you should try the free device-independent driver Asio4All. Please note that Asio4All is not a MuTools product, if you need support on Asio4All please go to the Asio4All website. If Asio4All isn’t working for you, then select Driver Type = MME Audio, Driver Name = Sound Mapper.

Menus

The menus in MuLab don’t appear in your computer’s main menubar. There are menus that pop up when you click on one of the two buttons labeled MULAB and SESSION, for access to global program settings and operations. However, most of MuLab’s functionality is accessed via the contextual menus that pop up when you right-click an object (control-click, on Macintosh). You can never do something wrong by right-clicking somewhere. On the contrary: try right-clicking every possible object on the screen and you may discover extra functionalities.