Audacity is a DAW in that it is a digital audio worksation and it CAN record multi tracks simultaneously as per the Audacity wiki..pasted below..
That said in the free range, basically Reaper is the dream come true to home recorders and if you feel like you want to contribute to the maker you can pay the $60 and support the Reaper machine and community therein..
Or you can use it for free forever if you so choose..fully uncrippled other than a nag screen that pops up when you open it asking you to purchase it after x amount of days..
Reaper has sooooo much more to offer and is becoming an industry standard...Audacity is easy to use if you are just recording one or two tracks at a time...but is far less supported and when you want to use ASIO drivers you have to get techy as described below...
Anyway hope this helps in your quest to choose a daw...
Recording With Audacity
As distributed, Audacity comes with support for Windows MME and WDM drivers. MME drivers work fine for simple stereo recording and playback, and are available on all versions of Windows where Audacity will run. However, neither these nor most WDM drivers will provide multi-channel recording; if you try to send multiple inputs to Audacity with these, you will only be presented with a series of separate two-channel "recording devices" from which one can be chosen, instead of the number of input channels there actually are.
Suggested devices
Occasionally, sound card or device manufacturers provides full EWDM support in their drivers, and then multi-channel recording in Audacity should work. The following cards/devices are reported to provide multi-channel recording in "out-of-the box" Audacity:
Alesis Multimix 8-, 12- or 16-channel USB or Firewire mixers - supported on Windows XP (but not Windows 7 or Windows 8) for the first eight channels only. May require USB2.0 ports on the computer.
Echo Digital Audio: AudioFire8, AudioFire12 and AudioFirePre8 and Layla3G (Unconfirmed)
Edirol UA 101 USB interface
ESI sound cards and interfaces
M-Audio Delta 66 - With old drivers 5.10.00.5057v3, can record four channels at once using the "Multi" device. Later drivers 6.0.2.5.10.0.5074 reported not to allow more than two-channel recording with Audacity. A disadvantage of the older drivers is that it is not possible to adjust the input level in Audacity or the M-Audio patchbay - levels have to be adjusted externally before the sound card.
M-Audio Delta 1010
M-Audio Delta 1010LT - With drivers from August 2007 or earlier (5.10.00.5057), can record up to eight channels at once using the "Multi" device. Later drivers reported not to allow more than two-channel recording with Audacity.
Mackie Onyx 1640i with PC Universal WDM driver from the Mackie site
Presonus FP10 Firewire interface (formerly called "Firepod")
RME Multiface II + PCI
Tascam US-1641 (requires USB2.0 ports on the computer) - Reported that only 2 channels available in Audacity with 2.xx drivers under Windows 7 but 16 channels available using older drivers under XP.
Note that as Windows drivers pass sound through the system kernel, these solutions will all have latency issues if you record overdubs (the playback of the audio you are recording against and the monitoring of the audio you are recording will be audibly desynchronised).
Unfortunately, most manufacturers of sound cards/devices for the semi-professional or studio market see Windows drivers as only for the low level consumer market. Therefore they provide only a choice of a basic stereo MME driver (or no Windows driver at all), and ASIO drivers for multi-channel, low latency work. The problem is Audacity cannot support ASIO in released builds because ASIO is a proprietary technology. However it is now possible to compile Audacity yourself with ASIO support, as long as you do not distribute that build to others. For details, see our ASIO Audio Interface page. As noted there, you may also compile Audacity with DirectSound support (and distribute those builds to others), which might let some surround sound cards record multiple channels into Audacity.