My problem was funny:
- First I wanted to work out an Ardour 4 project just with some mono files (clips from interviews, speech etc.) so I set up a one-channel-project with a mono master bus also.
- Those mono clips had to be combined with stereophonic music clips. I thought it might not be wise to set up a complete new project - why not modify the old one? So I set up two stereo tracks for the music. I made volume automation and finished the project after some hours.
- So I thought, everything is ready for a stereo export.
It wasn’t ready ;-).
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Directly from a mono master bus you can only make a monophonic export.
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If you want to export directly from the tracks and you have some mono tracks they also can only export one channel. this would not have worked in combination with the 2-channel-stereo tracks.
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I tried to add a new 2 channel master bus but this didn’t work.
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I added a second bus in stereo but learned that even this bus could only export one channel
After brooding a lot over it I took a solution inspired by the analog era ;-):
Instead of a stereo bus I set up a new stereo track and connected all the other tracks’ outputs to the new track’s input (the outputs of mono tracks to both channels of the stereo track of course). Then I just had to make this track ready to record, jumped to the beginning of the project and clicked on “play”.
It worked : a kind of “real-time-export” of the other mono and stereo tracks to the new stereo track.
Afterwards I just had to make a stereo export from this track.
Hope this might help anyone who has a similar problem in future
Here is a picture of it - you can see the new stereo track called “Audio” at the bottom:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/71967586/Bildschirmfoto-MDR%20Carrousel%20a%20Dresden%20avec%20l%20interview%20francais%20-%20Ardour.png
Michael