Hi everyone, it’s me again.
If this is is a known issue, that has maybe been fixed with a later version of audacity, that would be cool. But as of right now, i am not sure if anyone has noted this down.
I’m on macOS High Sierra, and my audacity project is very specific, i’m sure nobody is doing what I am! But that’s besides the point. Anyway, for this project, I need to be able to pan globally so that when I press “play”, only the left channel plays. It’s not feasable for me to just take my right earphone out when I am listening, for reasons not worth going into.
Mac has a global pan function in the “system preferences”, with a simple balance slider. But, here’s the thing, whever you slide the pan all the way to the right or left, the playback volume in audacity automatically sets itself to zero. Audacity volume is completely unaffected until you get all the way to the left or right, (a little or mostly left or right does not do anything to audacity’s volume).
And if, when my channel is panned all the way to the left or right, I choose to bring the output volume back up from zero in audacity, the panning that I did in system preferences will reset itself to the middle! So this is really some sort of odd incompatibility that’s volume related.
I urge anyone with a mac to try this. Open up a blank project, generete some noise or something for a few seconds. Keep audacity open, go to the system preferences and slide the volume pan all the way to one side. You can see the master audio in audacity become zero.
My only workaround to this, is to plug my mac into my pioneer amp from the 80s which has a proper volume slider, but this is obviously not ideal!
Audacity version 2.2.2