Today I received my new soundcard, which I bought for on-the-road use. It’s an M-Audio Fast Track II, super compact and cheap. My big disappointment when opening Audacity to record my first funky tones were to discover that the input selection was more limited then I remebered it. I can choose “1 Mono” or “2 Stereo”. The problem is that I want to choose “Channel 2 - mono”, because that’s how the soundcard splits the outputs (the soundcard mic input is on 1, the jack input on 2).
I found a work-around though, recording a stereo track and then pressing: Tracks > Stereo Track to Mono. But it would be so nice to hear the input signal in both speakers when recording. I don’t think this should be a big problem to implement… I really wish for it!
It is normal for external sound cards (and better quality internal sound cards) to use channel 1 for mono and “channel 1 → left / channel 2 → right” for 2 channel recording. That’s how the sound card drivers are designed to behave.
A better workaround is to record a stereo track then click on the name of the track and from the drop down menu select “Split Stereo to Mono”.
Doing it this way avoids adding any noise that may be present on the “silent” track.
It’s probably a bigger problem than it first appears. This would be part of a larger feature request to allow input channel mapping. That is, users with multi-channel sound cards can map specific input channels to the audio tracks that they want.
I’ve added your vote to this feature request: Allocate specific channels to specific Audacity tracks