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 — /

 

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.

MuLab links

Link

This page lists links to several sources of information about how to use the free Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software MuLab.

You should first download the most recent version of the MuLab software. The MuLab Free version has some limitations but is quite adequate for this class.

The documentation for MuLab is available online or as a downloadable .zip file.

Sometimes you can learn just by examining the work that other people have done. For that purpose, MuTools provides several demo sessions, files containing complete compositions, which you can download, play, and examine to find out how the composer achieved particular sounds.

Here is a video tutorial on the features of the oscillator within the MUX synthesizer plugin that is part of MuLab.

Software

Link

The following applications are required for this class:
Audacity, free cross-platform audio recording/editing software
MuLab, free cross-platform music composition/production software

Audacity and MuLab Free are available in these labs:
Arts Media Center, AITRC 290, M-Th 11am-3pm
Digital Arts Teaching Lab, CAC 3006, MW 9am-9pm, TTh 12pm-9pm, F 9am-5pm

Headphones are supplied at the Arts Media Center. You will need to bring your own headphones or earbuds with a 1/8″ stereo plug to use in the Digital Arts Teaching Lab.


Other free computer music programs of interest include:
Csound, a free text-based computer music synthesis programming environment
Pure Data (Pd), a free graphical computer music programming environment
ChucK, a free realtime computer audio programming language