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[p7389]

One of my acquaintances is half-deaf (i.e. she doesn't hear on one side). She remarked today that she just realized that she should have the music on her iPod in mono, which makes sense.

MC do various things on-the-fly when transferring to portable players (and I love it for it!). Could convert to mono be one of those? I wouldn't need it, but if it's not too much work, it'd seem like a cool feature.

Imagine saying something like this when talking if favor of MC "yeah, well it can do anything you need basically - if you're deaf on one ear, for instance...". (Furthermore imagine if this person *is* actually deaf on one ear - admittedly not a large demographic (I would assume).

Just putting it out there.

[HiFiTubes]

This would actually be a neat feature to have in the DSP. The accessibility angle is interesting. Also, many DACs and phono preamps have an analog switch switch for mono, and many mono cartridges are still sold of course.

[gappie]

you can set mono in dsp, its under output format> channels.

i dont know if that helps for file transfer to a ipod.
a friend of me, also deaf on one site, has this small plug between his mp3 player and his headphones, just puts the two signals together. not ideal maybe, but it suits him..

 
gab

[Alex B]

One of my acquaintances is half-deaf (i.e. she doesn't hear on one side). She remarked today that she just realized that she should have the music on her iPod in mono, which makes sense.

Your request makes perfect sense. If the user cannot hear with one of the ears and the track happens to have a significant stereo effect part of the content is lost. In addition, if the player is only in personal use it would be advantageus to save some storage space by encoding the content in the mono mode.
  

MC do various things on-the-fly when transferring to portable players (and I love it for it!). Could convert to mono be one of those? I wouldn't need it, but if it's not too much work, it'd seem like a cool feature.

Actually, you can easily do that by specifying mono encoding in the LAME encoder's settings. The command line switch is -m m (which means "mode: mono")

For instance, if you prefer to use "High Quality Portable" you can first select that setting and then change to "custom". The displayed command line is what HQ Portable uses, i.e. -V 5 --vbr-new. You can change it to -m m -V 5 --vbr-new and it will encode in the mono mode.

The resulting files will not be half the size of the stereo files because also the LAME encoder's default stereo mode can effectively "combine" information that happens to be identical in both channels, but they will still be significantly smaller.

If the files are already in the MP3 or other supported format you must use the "always convert" mode in order to always force re-encoding.

EDIT

It might also be good to use a setting like VBR "High" (-V 2 --vbr-new) when re-encoding MP3 or other lossy file formats. "Lossy to lossy" causes always some additional audio quality loss which may become audible at lower quality settings/bitrates. "High" with the mono switch would probably result files that are approximately the same size as stereo "HQ Portable" files.