11) Converting Stereo to mono

Converting Stereo to mono

Before export to MP3 format- convert a stereo file to a mono file. Before doing this, understand few nomenclature used in Audacity.

• Tracks – Tracks are individual pieces of audio. They can be either stereo or mono.
• Channel – Channels refer to either the right (R) or left (L) speaker.
• Stereo – Stereo refers to a track where there are two channels that are distinctly different. It will appear as one track, but with two waveforms in it.
• Mono – Where a single track is distributed to both channels.

Some digital audio recorders have stereo microphones and will record two tracks of audio as a stereo-pair. You will know this when you import your audio and you see a single track, but with two waveforms, as in the image below (a single track with two channels- left and right)

You first have to decide if you want your project to be a stereo project or mono project. A stereo project might sound a little more realistic because it mimics how sound is interpreted in real-life. However, the sound file will be twice as large and that can cause slow loading speeds on the Internet. So it is recommended to convert the stereo file to mono file (i.e, merging both channels to one).

To convert, click on the track you want to combine, and from the track menu, select Stereo Track to Mono.

You can see that the two channels gets merged into one as given below. There might be some slight quality loss in combining the channels, although if there is, it would only be very slight.