Topic: Converting to dual-mono

[santiam]

I made my first recording at a recent rock concert, and it turned out surprisingly well for my first attempt.  The only problem was the drunk on my right who insisted on clapping out of rhythm and singing out of tune through the whole performance.  The seats were assigned, so there wasn’t much I could do.

The noise is much less noticeable on the left channel, so I would like to delete the right channel and use the left channel to convert the recording to dual-mono.  I’ve heard this is pretty simple to do in programs like Audacity, but I’ve never tried it before.  I would greatly appreciate any instructions or advice on how to do this.  Is there a preferred program for this type of editing?  Thanks.

[brad.bartels]

I've done this several times in Audacity. Usually when one channel is trashed but the other one is good for whatever reason and I've had a couple of cable issues where one mike dropped out for a majority of the recording. Sounds similar to what you have. It is very easy in Audacity (even I figured it out). Will post a quick step by step later when I can sit down with Audacity and walk through it. I just did it a couple of days ago with a couple of mono recordings for somebody else - same process with the exception of deleting the bad channel first. There are some other threads you can find here about converting mono to stereo (which is basically what you'll be doing once you delete the bad channel) - some tricks like adding delay, reverb, eq'ing the 2 channels differently, etc. Basiclly some tricks you can do to make it sound a little more like a stereo recording.

[brad.bartels]

Here's how to do it in Audacity:

1. Just to the left of your waveforms / audio, you'll see a down-arrown next to the filename, click that down-arrow and select "Split Stereo Track".

2. Select all the audio on the channel you want to remove (the easiest way I've found to do this is to zoom out so you can see all of the audio and click past the last audio in the channel you want to delete and drag all the way to the beginning). Make sure you just have the audio selected in the channel you want to delete (and not both channels) - then just hit the delete key.

3.  Now select the audio from the good channel in the same manner and copy it (either Edit->Copy or just ctrl-C). Then click in the channel you deleted. I always do "Edit -> Move Cursor -> to Track Start so that you're channels will be synced. Now just paste (either Edit -> Paste or ctrl-V).

That's it - now you can edit each channel individually if you want to do some effects to make it sound more like a stereo track (add some delay to one channel, something in the 5 to 10 ms range usually works OK, add reverb to one, EQ them a little differently, etc.). When you're done, just go back to the down arrow to the left of the audio and click it and select Make Stereo Track and you're done.

[runonce]

That looks about right -

One tip for selecting tracks in Split Stereo mode:

Click anywhere in the track you want to work in and hit the << button to put the cursor at the beginning of the track

Edit>Select>Cursor to Track End...copy and/or paste

A little safer than drag select.

[santiam]

Thanks so much!  This is a huge help.