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[~OHM~]

Is there a way to tell if a track is mono or stereo easily?

thanks

[blgentry]

If these are true mono tracks with ONE channel, then you can look at the [channels] field.  If it's 1, it's mono.  A value of 2 would be stereo.

If these are "dual mono" tracks where L and R are identical, then that's much harder.  I'm not sure how you'd do that without some external tool that did something like computing a checksum of each channel and then comparing them to see if they were the same.

Don't most early recordings in mono usually indicate that on the album cover, and/or album name?  Like early Beatles stuff that was mono.

Brian.

[~OHM~]

thanks Brian. I was confused on the dual channel ones, yes most covers do state if mono but I don't recall about the dual....

[dtc]

These are not definitive, but they work for most tracks.


Turn on Analyzer in DSP Studio compare the two channels. You might want to look at a frequency range like 100 to 3K rather than the whole range. The low frequencies are often a good indicator if there is distinct bass.

If your pre-amp, receiver has a balance knob you can turn one channel off and listen, then repeat with the other channel. This works when there are distinct instruments like a piano (or saxophone) and a bass in a jazz trio.

You can read the file into Audacity or Vinyl Studio and simply look at the waveform. If it is dual mono versus stereo you should be able to tell quickly.

[~OHM~]

thanks dtc will check those options out also

[dtc]

One more option is to open the file with a binary editor that shows bytes. Once past the header, look at the left right pairs (2 bytes per channel) and see if they are the same. Probably best done with uncompressed files, but compressed files should work also. Left and right are just consecutive 16 bit data values. This will only work if the files are truly dual mono, with not dither added separately.  My vinyl rips of mono albums would not work, because the two channels are not exactly balanced to 16 bits. But studio versions where they copied one channel into the other should.