rick rubin can't program.
My studio's almost back together and I'm finally getting ready to (gasp) mix some stuff.
This stuff includes almost 300 tracks recorded as dual mono, and VST/SX hates dual mono tracks. And by "hates" I mean "has no idea how to work with". (Protools is all about the dual mono. Hates stereo.)
Right, so no way was I going to open all this shit by hand and convert it. I did four tracks that way and wanted to off myself. And then UNIX ENTERED THE STUDIO.
I found sox, a command-line audio converter. Sox has no way to do dual mono->stereo. But sox does have a way to combine 2 stereo files, and it has a way to convert a mono file to a stereo file. You see where this is going.
#!/bin/bash # usage: mono2stereo leftfile rightfile outfile SOX=/c/gse/tmp/sox12177/sox SOXMIX=/c/gse/tmp/sox12177/soxmix LEFT="$1" RIGHT="$2" OUT="$3" # build 2 temporary stereo files $SOX "$LEFT" -c 2 tmp-l.wav pan -1 $SOX "$RIGHT" -c 2 tmp-r.wav pan 1 # combine into one file $SOXMIX -v 1 tmp-l.wav -v 1 tmp-r.wav -v 1 "$OUT" /bin/rm tmp-l.wav tmp-r.wav
Only caveat: sox doesn't seem like the WAV files that come out of Protools. I guess it doesn't deal well with weird metadata in the headers. So I'm pre-processing all my files by running them through Sonic Foundry Batch Converter. Because this process needs more hoops.
Mac people! You can do this! OSX! Shell scripts! Except you're Mac people.