Audacity Forum

That Ctl + M is very cool! I played with it and assume you mean (since you typed a capital M) that Ctl, Shift M is what will do it. Just Ctl "m" doesn't seem to keep work. By the way, since we're here: when I export (save) as a Wav file, I always get Stereo. I've been working on Mono I've reduced my stereo original recording down to Mono, but can't find the place where I tell the Export that I only need Mono wave file. No big problem, I can convert it to Mono, but just wondered?

kdoc

Yes it's "Ctrl+Shift+M"
It is usual to write "Shift" and very common to use an upper case letter regardless. So "Ctrl+M" would be without the Shift key (which doesn't work) and "Ctrl+Shift+M" is with the shift key (and does work).

If you look in Audacity Preferences > Keyboard, you will see that all shortcut keys are written upper case.

kdoc wrote:assume you mean (since you typed a capital M) that Ctl, Shift M is what will do it.

Yes, my bad. And yes, Steve, I should have written CTRL + SHIFT + M if that's what I meant!

-- Bill

...and the response to the exporting question (above) being stereo?

kdoc

If your show is mono (tracks must be all centre panned mono), then the Exported audio will be mono.
What is telling you that the Exported track is stereo?

I start with a 4 track (mono tracks--they've been converted from stereo, one of the two tracks which were split from stereo to mono having been thrown away). When I File--Export, I get a message: "Warning: Your tracks will be mixed down to two stereo chanels in the export file". I do the export, and then open or import Audio into Audacity--and the wav file is stereo.

But 1. Remember this is 1.3.9 alpha. And 2. I don't know what centre panned mono is and/or whether my tracks are that. All I did was start with Stereo tracks, did a Split Stereo to Mono via the dropdown to the left of the audio tracks (where it says "Name", then deleted one of the tracks.

kdoc

kdoc wrote:one of the two tracks which were split from stereo to mono having been thrown away)

There are two options in the track panel drop-down menu: "Split Stereo Track" and "Split Stereo to Mono". You want the second option.

For your current project, look at the track panel menu for your current tracks. They probably have "Left Channel" or "Right Channel" checked. Change them to "Mono".

-- Bill

That doesn't seem to explain it: I do use Split Stereo to Mono, and Mono is checked in all 4 tracks, and I still get that balloon warning and stereo Wav files.

kdoc

kdoc wrote:I don't know what centre panned mono is

On the left side of each track you will see 2 sliders - one is for volume (-/+) and the other is for "pan" (L/R).
The pan slider must be central. If you carefully click on it without moving it you will get Tool Tip balloon that tells you the current position. You can also double click on it and type in the desired pan position (-ve for Left, +ve for Right, zero for centre.

kdoc wrote:I get a message: "Warning: Your tracks will be mixed down to two stereo chanels in the export file"

You should get a message saying that it will be mixed down to a single mono file. Something in your project is not mono - either one of the tracks is not centre panned, or one of the tracks is not set to mono. Perhaps you accidentally used "Split Stereo Track" instead of "Split to Mono" for one of the tracks - that would give you left and right tracks instead of mono tracks - you can check this by looking in the track drop down menu.

Yep; that explains it. One was off center. (note that the colonies spell center "er" rather than "re"