Why is L/R pan even available on a mono track?

I had the same problem as listed on this post, but I want to call attention to two things…

  1. Why is there even an option to have L/R pan on a mono track?

  2. I must have accidentally just slightly reduced the height of my mono track, but that made it so that I couldn’t see the pan slider… but if I double-click in that area, it pops up anyway - which is how I fixed my pan being off.

I’m not sure how I did it, but somehow I tweaked the pan on this track and luckily caught it before publishing my podcast. It was off just a bit, but it was definitely off. I have no idea how I managed to change the pan.

But more to the point, why is this even POSSIBLE on a mono track? The slider shouldn’t even be there - or it should at least be disabled, I’d think.

In this screenshot, both tracks are mono. The upper track has been shortened just a bit, till the slider disappears.

So that mono tracks can be panned. It is an important feature for many Audacity users.

Mono tracks by definition have no left/right to balance. It’s not stereo.

Okay… but I suppose if the overall project is stereo, then you might still want to pan that track within the overall project L/R balance… That’s what this is for? Man, that’s confusing, though.

My projects are mono and I almost screwed it up by somehow accidentally panning a mono track. I assume that if I exported the audio as mono that this pan would be ignored. It was also very confusing that the track was panned, but didn’t even show the pan controls - so I couldn’t see that it was off-center. I had to look up that I could double-click that area to bring it up. I didn’t realize that the reason it wasn’t visible was because the track UI height was just ever so slightly reduced, making that control slider disappear.

If you export your project as mono, all of your panning will be moved to the center again in the exported file.