…or at least convert them to mono after recording? when doing a lot of takes (or having a lot of them active) they take up a lot of space, and when recording a single instrument the signal on both sides is identical anyway, so it’s just a waste of memory & disk space.
The only time this isn’t a problem, is when i have L/R doubled riffs, with 2 mono tracks that are panned hard left and hard right.
AFAIK the only way to convert a stereo track to mono easily is to bounce it to a new mono track and then delete the stereo one.
But that begs the question why you’re using a stereo track in the first place?
Just record your mono instruments in a mono track…
Because i use effects on that track that give a stereo output (delay, reverb, chorus, …) even though the instrument input is mono. A pretty cumbersome workaround would be to have each (mono) instrument track double/output its signal to a stereo track where i’d put these effects, but that would be pretty fugly…
You can use stereo plugins on a mono track.
Ardour will connect the track to one of the inputs and then create two track outputs for the left and right plugin outputs.
Alternatively you can set up a stereo bus, add the plugin there and add a send from your mono track to the bus.
Doesn’t work. Output of the (stereo) plugin is still mono on a mono track.
There is a setting called “strict I/O” that enforces a simple rule: plugins have the same number of inputs as they have outputs (see The Ardour Manual - Track/Bus Signal Flow). So mono tracks remain mono, even when loading stereo plugins.
You can disable that
Yessssss thank you kind sir, this seems to work perfectly!!
I’ll also have a good look at that, thanks again for the link.