Audacity Forum

When I import my stereo wav files into audacity (1.2.6), They open as a mono 1 channel files. In preferences, I have 2 channel and 48Khz, 16 bit selected.
Two days ago, everything was fine. All my music and Zoom H2 files opened as stereo but not now. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

daqddyo1

Try this file - does this open as mono or stereo?

Hi Steve,
I opened this file in Audacity and it opened as a stereo file.
This must mean that there is a problem elsewhere.

daqddyo1

Looks like it. The obvious thing to check first is that you've not accidentally switched the H2 into mono recording. (See page 43 of the Zoom H2 user manual.)

Will do. I think that I may have memory issues with my laptop as I have ProShow Gold open to follow the slide show as I build the sound program.
I'll keep plugging along. Thanks for your suggestions.

daqddyo1

I have a similar problem.

capone_adam wrote:I have this exact same problem

I suggest the exact same answer - check page 43 of the Zoom H2 user manual.

I looked into H2 zoom, this is a phone or something? I don't have this? I was just playing around more and actually got an mp3 to load in 'stereo' with 2 tracks BUT there is a real loss of quality when playing it in audacity compared to playing the exact same mp3 in Windows media player. Any ideas why?

capone_adam wrote:this is a phone or something? I don't have this

It's a portable recorder - the problem being discussed in this topic concerns importing tracks from an H2 recorder and using them in ProShow Gold for creating a slide show.
We try to keep discussions to one topic at a time so as to avoid confusion. To create a new topic find the most appropriate section from this page: http://forum.audacityteam.org/index.php then in that section click the "New Topic" button.

I suspect that the MP3 sounds "different" in Windows Media Player because you have some "effects" enabled. WMP includes a graphic equalizer, "wow" effect and various other effects to "enhance" the sound of your music. Audacity on the other hand plays the sound exactly as it is without any "enhancements". This non-enhanced sound may sound better or worse than the enhanced version, but is more accurate and so more helpful for music and audio production. Try turning off all of the effects in WMP and it should sound pretty much the same as it does in Audacity - if there's still a problem you are very welcome to start a new topic.

While combining several files, I hadn't noticed that a couple of my music files were mono. This caused the final saved file to be mono. To fix this, from each mono music .wav file, I created a stereo music track consisting of identical R and L channels. This kept the final result as a stereo sound show.