Mono back to stereo

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Hi all,

I edited a podcast which was originally in stereo, and mixed and rendered it into a mono track. Problem is there’s some background noise on my guest’s audio at the same time as me speaking and so i need to unmerge the tracks again to silence it out. How do i unmono a track back to stereo?

Thanks

AM using the most up to date version for windows

2

Which versions do you have?
I presume that you don’t have the original recordings.
If you only have a mixed down mono MP3, then you won’t be able to un-mix it.

3

If you saved the Audacity project you may be able to “undo” or you can try [u]Make Stereo Track[/u].

If all you have is the mono track, you are out-of-luck… “You can’t un-fry and egg or un-bake a cake, and you can’t un-mix audio.”[/]

4

Audacity Projects do not save UNDO.

Keep original raw recordings as WAV or other uncompressed format.

Koz

5

Ok thanks guys.

One other thing - when I normalize it’s left a bit quiet. Current normalize setting is to -1.5. To make it a touch louder should i put it to -2.0 or -1.0? I cant figure out which direction makes it louder

6

0dB is “full scale”, so that’s the loudest you can get without “clipping” (losing the tops / bottoms of the waveform).
That means that -1.0 is a bit louder than -2.0, but not very much. A change of 1dB is hardly noticeable.

Note that both the Amplify and Normalize effects work on “peak level”, so if there is one peak that is higher than the rest of the audio, then that peak is responsible for how much the level can be increased. By reducing stray peaks so that the level is more even, it will be possible to increase the level of the track more without clipping.

Various tools are available for evening out the level. Here’s three:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/envelope_tool.html
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/compressor.html
http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/limiter.html

7

Thanks Steve, I find those written guides really hard to follow. They use terms way above my pay grade. I guess I’d like an easy to follow video guide on what to do when one guest is really loud and another is really quiet and how to even it out.

8

Trebor posted a demo of the envelope tool in this post: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/level-out-sound/44245/7