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[stanzani]

is there any option which force the flac encoding to store just a single (mono) track in the file? this is a huge space saving which will not affect the quality

[blgentry]

Chasing space saving by using non-standard formats or compromising quality is short sighted.  In 5 years you'll laugh at the space savings since drives will be 3x as big.

I've formed this opinion over a very long history with digital media.  But it's just my opinion.  There are others. 

Brian.

[ferday]

FWIW JRiver has all the needed tools in DSP....I just don't know if it works!  Try experimenting

Dbpoweramp can force a single channel mono by setting channel count to 1 before ripping

it should be technically possible to strip a channel from an existing flac in audacity or similar, I've never tried

[stanzani]

in fact i do this in audacity. since the stereo/mono presentation can be detected by the file i was wondering if this can be done automatically
p.s. flac mono is perfectly legal and works like a cake

[blgentry]

Some research indicates that FLAC can detect when you have a dual mono file and it compresses by 50% because the channels are identical.  However, if the channels are very subtly different, then this doesn't happen.  So it would seem that this is automatic for truly mono files.  If it doesn't happen, then the files are probably not really mono.

If you don't care and you want to make them mono anyway, you can almost certainly batch convert them with FFMpeg.

https://trac.ffmpeg.org/wiki/AudioChannelManipulation

The first example shows a stereo to mono conversion.

Brian.

[Antoine.]

Quick question: if I'm ripping my Beatles Mono albums with JRiver, I notice that they're encoded as stereo files. Does that mean that the encoding process try to modify the sound and make it sound like a stereo recording? Or is it "harmless" to the mono recording?

[Matt]

Quick question: if I'm ripping my Beatles Mono albums with JRiver, I notice that they're encoded as stereo files. Does that mean that the encoding process try to modify the sound and make it sound like a stereo recording? Or is it "harmless" to the mono recording?

A CD will always be stereo.  So they just probably put the same data in both channels.

[Antoine.]

A CD will always be stereo.  So they just probably put the same data in both channels.

Okay, thanks !

[dtc]

Mono is fully supported by both the wave and flac standards. I run into it in digitizing old mono records. I use Vinyl Studio which has an option to create a mono file by downmixing two channels.  This eliminates minor differences in the recording process. It also has an option to equalize each channel separately if you have a mono recording but want to keep the stereo format. It is also a good way to check your channel balance. Just record a mono album and equalize each channel separately.

[stanzani]

hello
how should I set the encoder settings with ffmpeg if i wanto to rip CDs in aac format with output file in mono?
thanks much