Well, I got the first three tracks back from the flautist, and I'm mixing them now. She made it really easy for me. I made a CD of the (spoken) vocal part, and she listened through headphones while playing her flute into my Zoom Handy H2 recorder. She marked where I was supposed to match the beginning of the music with the speech on each recording.

I had a little trouble opening both the music and the speech in the same file in Audacity. I opened the speech, and then added a stereo track. I tried to import the music into the stereo track, but I couldn't get it to work. I opened the music track in another window and edited it, then I selected [CTRL-A] and copied it [CTRL-C]. Then I went back to the speech window's added music track and moved the cursor to where the music was to begin. I put the cursor in the area for the added stereo track and pasted [CTRL-V] the music track in place. That worked just fine.

In Audacity, there's a selection under "tracks" for "mix and render." I did that, but I'm not sure what it did - there were still four tracks left on the screen, although the screen display changed somewhat. When I chose to "export" it to a WAV file, a box appeared that informed me that the file would be reduced and mixed to two tracks, so maybe I didn't need to "mix and render." I didn't do "mix and render" on the second track, and it turned out just fine.

I had the H2's microphone gain set to "low" for the speech recording, and that seemed to work pretty well - it didn't pick up background noises, which is what I was hoping for. We had a couple of annoying interruptions from the author's husband, but that was to be expected....

The flautist, whose husband didn't interrupt, suggested that "medium" was a better volume setting for recording the flute, and it seemed to work very well. She used a native American flute, a low 'D' whistle, and a Hawaiian nose flute, and they all recorded very well with the Zoom Handy H2. The Hawaiian nose flute was fascinating - sounds very much like tuva singing, with a dual sound. I think that perhaps the spouses of musicians know that they'd best not interrupt a recording.

So far, the recording process is going amazing well. I give most of the credit to the flautist, Paula Peach (Auburn, California), who seems to be able to play most any instrument exceedingly well. I thought at first that she played just the hammer dulcimer, but I've known her for 10 or more years now and never met an instrument that Paula couldn't play to perfection. I gave my Zoom Handy H2 to her, and she more-or-less figured out how to operate it herself. She improvised the melodies as she went along. I think I'm going to add flute-only tracks to the CD, because the flute music is so beautiful by itself. What a pleasure to work with an instrumentalist like her!

Hey, I'm a rank amateur, but the Zoom recorder and the Audacity editing software allow me to make a pretty darn good recording.

-Joe-