

There are several ways to create multiple clips in a track. Those are good candidates for splitting the track into multiple clips, allowing you to move or otherwise manipulate those clips independently. In many cases, there are natural gaps in the audio - silence between sentences or pauses between phrases in music. When you record some audio or import audio from a file, you get a single track. The new track only contains that single clip, so again you can only move that whole track unless you split it into multiple clips. Or you could move a clip to another track that is panned further right, or split it to a new, empty track. For example, you can split an interview into separate clips for each sentence then move them around individually although they are all from the same track. A clip inside an audio track is a separate section of that track which has been split so that it can be manipulated somewhat independently of the other clips in the track.You can move the whole track along the Timeline so that it plays at a different point in time in the mix, but until it is split you cannot move individual parts of it around.

If you have background music, that could go in a third track. If you have an interview recorded with two microphones, each one can go in a separate track. You can add more tracks, and all of them will be mixed together to create your final output, but during editing you can manipulate each track independently. An audio track is like one instrument in your symphony, or one voice in your podcast.Audacity supports only two channels of playback (output), no matter what kind of audio hardware you have. Audacity can record two channels of input (stereo), and more if you have a special sound card or audio device that supports more than two simultaneous channels. A channel is for audio recording (input) or playback (output).Within Audacity, the meaning is as follows: The terms channel, track and clip can be a little confusing, especially because some applications may use them to mean slightly different things.
