Exporting Audio To Mono WAV That Has Panned Mono Channels

Audacity 3 Help Forum
1

I’m using v3.7.5. I had a stereo track that I split into two mono tracks and I used the Split Stereo Track option which panned the mono tracks all the way LEFT and RIGHT. I wanted to export these tracks to a mono WAV output so I did that. The resulting WAV does NOT contain any of the audio that is panned to the RIGHT. I can only hear the audio from the track that is panned LEFT. Is this a bug? Is there something I don’t understand about panned tracks and exporting to a WAV file? Thanks for the help!

2

That shouldn’t happen but you can skip that step and just select mono when you export.

And if you re-open the true-mono file you should only see one wave and it will play through both sides.

3

Thanks for the feedback. I actually ALWAYS only export to a MONO WAV file, but I’m the station manager of an FM radio station and it turned out that one of the engineers exported to a STEREO voiceover PSA file while he had two mono tracks panned hard left and right. The output didn’t include the RIGHT channel and I wanted to know if I had incorrectly set Audacity configuration, or if this is actually a BUG that others have seen. Thanks again for the feedback!

4

Splitting the stereo track into mono tracks does generate one track panned all the way to the left and another all the way to the right. That is the way it is supposed to work. It is so you can re-mix them to a more centered stereo track if you need to. I do this all the time because recording two voices in separate stereo tracks ends up sounding like sitting in the middle of a room with two people far away talking to each other.

As DVDdoug said, you can export mono to fix your problem, but I wanted to emphasize that the panning left and right of the split tracks is the way it is supposed to work.

5

Thanks for the feedback! Actually there are two different ways to split a stereo track into two mono tracks. One (Split Stereo Track) will result in the resulting mono tracks panned hard left and right, the other (Split Stereo to Mono) will result in the two mono tracks panned to the center.

I do understand how to use the pan slider to correct this by moving it to Pan:Center. But, that wasn’t really my question. My question really is, in v3.7.5, when I export these panned tracks to a Mono WAV file, is it an Audacity “bug” that the track that is panned to the RIGHT does NOT make it into the resulting audio file?

Again, thanks for taking the time to respond to my post! I appreciate the info!

7

Yes, you are right, it is an Audacity bug. I just repeated your scenario and this is what happened:

  1. if you export as multiple mono tracks, the second track will be empty;
  2. if you export as multiple stereo tracks, the export will be correct
I'm using Audacity 3.5.1
8

Thanks very much for checking it out! I guess it’s been a bug in the software for a pretty long time – maybe as long as there’s been an option in the export dialog window to select whether the output is Mono or Stereo. Thanks again!