Convert Track To Mono?

This is an odd little problem i have. I can’t seem to convert a track to mono, by mixing left and right channels equally. It’s gotten to the point where i’m really frustrated by this. There is the stereo expander dsp device, which can be set to “mono”, but by doing so, it basically just plays back the right channel in mono. Useless!

So, how do you convert the audio in a track to mono? It has to be possible somehow, right?

It depends what you want to pan to the center.
If you have different instruments in the same track (subchannels) it might be an idea to separate them to different tracks and use a send-device to send those tracks to a sendchannel. Use the stereo expander in both tracks (before the send-device) to bring the channel in mono mode, not to it’s full minimum, use the stereo expander again on the send-channel to completely monaurise the full stream.
I’ve read elsewhere that the stereo expander doesn’t exactly mix a stereo channel to mono when set to minimum value.
But you might also be able to accomplish something using the HRTF plugin:
http://www.savioursofsoul.de/Christian/VST/HRTF3D.EXE
Or another plugin that really converts a full stereo stream to mono.

Note, i found out the HRTF plugin has been renewed and seems to install as designed as a Winamp plugin, but when moving the HRTF3d.dll to the VstPlugins folder, Renoise detects it and enlists it.

I made a very simple little VST effect for this purpose (and a bit more) quite recently.

http://illformed.org/downloads/dblueMonophob.zip

It has 4 modes:

  • Normal stereo
  • Left channel is output to both left and right
  • Right channel is output to both left and right
  • Left and right channels are mixed down to mono

Thanks for your replies vvois and dblue. I’m going to try the VST plugin you linked to there dblue. Thank you very much for that.

I’m going to post about it in the suggestions thread on this forum too, since i think something like that should perhaps be a part of renoise. Can’t understand why the stereo expander works like it does. Should re-read the manual again, because i can’t quite figure out how that stereo expander works and what it’s supposed to do… especially at negative settings :)

edit: bad spelling :confused:

I think this post by dblue was made before the birth of the Stereo Expander device, am I right?