To record audio in Audacity 4, plug in your microphone and pick it under Audio setup ▸ Recording device. Set the level so your voice peaks between −18 and −6 dB, select a mono track and press Record (R). The take lands on the selected track; Record on new track leaves the existing tracks alone, which is how you layer a second part over the first.
Audacity 4 has no vocal remover effect, so here are the three routes that work: the built-in center-cancel with Invert, the free OpenVINO Music Separation effect in Audacity 3, and a stem-separation plugin from MuseHub — with the exact menus, one comparison table and an honest account of what each can and cannot do.
Turn one long recording into separate files in Audacity 4.0.1. Find the boundaries by eye or with Label sounds, put a named label over each song, export every song in one pass, and get the file names, tags and formats right.
Every Audacity 3 feature that is missing or changed in Audacity 4, what came back in 4.0.1 and the workaround for each one, plus whether to switch now, how to run Audacity 3 and 4 side by side, what happens to your projects and where to get an older version safely.
Which FFmpeg to download for Audacity on Windows, macOS and Linux, where Audacity looks for it, how to fix “FFmpeg library not found”, why Audacity 4 won’t import M4A files yet and what to do instead, and whether to convert M4A to WAV before you edit.