Audio Tutorial #1 - Howto: EASY simulated stereo from a mono audio file

In this video I show you how to take a mono recording and create a virtual or simulated stereo sound from it using Audacity.

The purpose of this is to have a recording of your performance that sounds more like it does in a live situation, or 'in person' since lots of audio recordings tend to either sound dry and stale or are dripping wet with overuse of reverb, and this is a simpler and cleaner way to liven up your recordings and make them sound better.

Hopefully the compression on YouTube will not mangle the sound here and make it sound less than how amazing it really is with the Apogee Mic.

The video runs for 9mins 16s.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pfud4AX9woo

I have also uploaded the video to Vimeo, as it seems there is some weirdness with the audio compression on YouTube. You can see that video in the message below.

[edit: I am NOT happy with the sound on either video service, as the 'stereo' version of the file seems to be sped up, and both versions of the recording have glitches where it sounds like I missed a strum here and there, therefore I have uploaded the MP3 files to my Google Drive, and you can listen to them there, for which I have added links in another post to this thread below]

I am applying what is known as the 'Haas Effect'. No third party plugins were used at all. The Desktop screen in the video was captured using Quicktime on a Mac, but the final video was edited and encoded on Kdenlive on Xubuntu Linux.

The music played in this video is for educational purposes only and Copyrights are NOT held by me, they belong to the songwriter(s). No infringement is intended.

For more info see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedence_effect
https://kdenlive.org/
http://xubuntu.org/
http://www.magicfluke.com/The-Flea-Ukulele-s/1513.htm
http://www.apogeedigital.com/products/mic
https://www.apple.com/quicktime/

You can also watch on Vimeo, but I am not sure of the audio and video quality is much better.



https://vimeo.com/136258121

Thanks for the tutorial. The results are pretty effective. A quick optimization suggestion. After track duplication instead of changing the pan slider, you can use the per track pulldown menu to change each channel to the left and right from mono respectively. if you really want to at the end you can also join the two together into a single stereo track using that same pulldown. I figured this out from working with files that only had sound in the left channel.

bnolsen said:

Thanks for the tutorial. The results are pretty effective. A quick optimization suggestion. After track duplication instead of changing the pan slider, you can use the per track pulldown menu to change each channel to the left and right from mono respectively. if you really want to at the end you can also join the two together into a single stereo track using that same pulldown. I figured this out from working with files that only had sound in the left channel.

Click to expand...

You're very welcome. And thanks for the suggestion.

The procedure you mentioned will also work, however I was trying to avoid complexity in the video, and did this without a script or much advance preparation.

The only issue I have with joining the individual left and right panned mono tracks into a single stereo track, is that if you want to go back into the Audacity project file later and make changes you need to split them first before doing so.

However, if you are layering with lots of tracks from over-dubbing, I can see how having discrete tracks for left and right can make the display very busy, so there is definitely a use case for condensing your tracks if you have many of them to deal with.

Prior to buying the Apogee MIC I was about to pull the trigger on a matched stereo pair of X/Y pencil condenser mics, but with all the cabling and hassle to set it up each time I wanted to record, I was really put off by this...(I no longer have a fixed 'studio' space in my house, so setup and tear-down of the gear becomes part of the recording process, without much chance of exactly perfect reproducible results)

So I had been looking for a way to achieve the same end result, with a single microphone, and the Haas Effect is more having to do with the way that we humans perceive sound, directionally with both ears.

There are a few different free software plugins, as well as paid ones too that do something similar, but the ones I tried had overly complicated settings, for what is really an impulse response reverb, or at least the way we hear such things.

I also wanted a method for achieving this result, no matter what software I was using, whether GarageBand, Audacity, Ardour or other programs - and knowing the science behind our hearing perception allows this to be done without 3rd-party add-ons to your recording software, since most multi-track recording programs have at the very least echo/delay, reverb, compression and EQ if nothing else.

I've become a huge fan of 'less is more', and as evident by learning all of this and sharing the video, I am able to put that into practice.

great tutorial!

As I said in my edit to the original post in this thread, I am not happy with how the audio is mangled by both Vimeo and YouTube.

There are glitches in both the mono and stereo sound version, as well as the stereo version is sped up, AFTER uploading the video files to BOTH services.

When I play the video locally, there are no problems at all, and I have encoded to settings specifically for YouTube and/or Vimeo.

I guess they just do not like me .

So to fix this problem, I have uploaded the 2 MP3 files to my Google Drive (dont have and dont know if I want to create a Soundcloud account right now), and you can hear them via the links below.

Original mono version:
[link removed - see Soundcloud post below]

Simulated stereo version:
[link removed - see Soundcloud post below]

Sorry for the confusion and/or poor audio, as all of this is outside of my control.

Please let me know if these files sound better, and also if you have any issues to hear them. :music:

Thanks Booli! I look forward to giving this a try very soon. I have been using a stereo expansion effect in my video editor to some success but it tends to make it sound somewhat more spatial but not really stereo like this track dupe and pan approach. If I am doing multiple tracks then panning and placing those different parts to provide some separation within the sound field give pretty decent results. I will give this a try with my main track in Audacity and see how it goes.

Well, the Google Drive file sharing seems to hate MP3 files, so I put them on Soundcloud after all. Link below:

https://soundcloud.com/boolideano/sets/simulated-stereo-from-mono-tutorial-raw-audio-files

Many folks sent me a PM that they could not play the files shared on my Google Drive, so this was hopefully a better solution.

bird's eye view of my ukelele said:

great tutorial!

Click to expand...

Thank you!

librainian said:

Thanks Booli! I look forward to giving this a try very soon. I have been using a stereo expansion effect in my video editor to some success but it tends to make it sound somewhat more spatial but not really stereo like this track dupe and pan approach. If I am doing multiple tracks then panning and placing those different parts to provide some separation within the sound field give pretty decent results. I will give this a try with my main track in Audacity and see how it goes.

Click to expand...

You're welcome !

If you read the Wikipedia link in the original post, you'll see that many 'spatializer' and 'expansion' or 'ambiance' effects are based upon the same principle. If you try this method, please report back and let me know what you think of it.

You might find this technique to offer a sense of 'live space' without overwhelming the original sound, like most reverb and delay that 'sounds great at home' but then on other equipment or different listening environments sounds either muddy or syrupy and the original music is kind of lost.

Maybe this tutorial can help to fix some of that? I hope so.

As always very helpful and thorough. Thanks for your contribution Booli! Great post and video!

MP3 is crap...I don't pretend to be able to tell the difference in quality butI can tell when it messes with the mix ....and it does because I suppose it has to rip chunks of data away ....and that might be the oooph of a bass line gone so despite the size I upload using the original WAV now and although it takes longer you get the best sound cos the mix stays as I produced it ("produced " :biglaugh...

I use Cubase AI5 which came free with my Yamaha audigram and often use that mono to two tracks technique, it's a good clear tutorial. Anyone dipping a toe into the water of home recording and without a stereo set up will get good info. The trouble with the software is that the writers think we are all desk bound technical geeks....not musoes who just want to get the next track down ....and they bamboozle us with their arcane and technobabblepiffle as BEVOMU would say .

Neato playing on "Ain't She Sweet " too....it's all good stuff.

Cheers

Jarvo

Olarte said:

As always very helpful and thorough. Thanks for your contribution Booli! Great post and video!

Click to expand...

Thanks Ivan! Mahalo brother :music:

CeeJay said:

MP3 is crap...I don't pretend to be able to tell the difference in quality but I can tell when it messes with the mix ....and it does because I suppose it has to rip chunks of data away ....and that might be the oooph of a bass line gone so despite the size I upload using the original WAV now and although it takes longer you get the best sound cos the mix stays as I produced it ("produced " :biglaugh...

Click to expand...

I understand your frustration with the poor and molested audio quality. You can see some technical info with source links regarding MP3 over in CactusWren's (Miguel) thread about pickups. The MP3 codec throws away sound frequencies that are either redundant harmonics, or otherwise such that the perceptual acuity of most human ears cannot tell a difference, unless the sound is really really bad in the end result.

Further, I have found that no matter what high quality audio or high quality video settings or which encoder format you use, when you upload to YouTube, both of them get munged, and it seems to be influenced byt the alignment of the planets, because a few times, it actually sounds decent to my ear, but most other times, it's all 'fuzzy' and NOT as good as I hear on my computer, 1 min before uploading.

CeeJay said:

I use Cubase AI5 which came free with my Yamaha audigram and often use that mono to two tracks technique, it's a good clear tutorial. Anyone dipping a toe into the water of home recording and without a stereo set up will get good info. The trouble with the software is that the writers think we are all desk bound technical geeks....not musoes who just want to get the next track down ....and they bamboozle us with their arcane and technobabblepiffle as BEVOMU would say .

Neato playing on "Ain't She Sweet " too....it's all good stuff.

Click to expand...

Senator Jarvo (I'm trying to be cute with you, no offense meant ),

I agree that most software is too difficult for a novice. That's probably why tablets and smartphones are so popular now, since all you need is a finger (WHICH finger is up to you LOL)...

I appreciate your kind and generous words too, so thank you!