User Guide

4. You will now have data in the upper half of the data window (the left

channel) and silence in the right channel. Press the Play button and you will

hear “Wow, sound editing just gets easier and easier” in only the left

channel.

If your sound card supports only mono data you will still be able to play

stereo files if you set your playback device to Sound Mapper on the Wave

page in the Preferences (Options menu).

5. Now go back to a mono sound file, but do it in a different manner. Select

Properties from the shortcut menu that appears when you right-click on the

waveform display. In the Properties folder select the Format page. This page

allows you to change all the parameters at once. Set the radio button for

Channels to Mono and select the OK button. Select the Left Channel for the

source channel in the Stereo to Mono dialog and you’re back where you

started.

The above steps were used as an illustration. Using Undo would have

been the more efficient option.

CONVERTING SOUND FILES FROM 16-BIT TO 8-BIT

To save storage space, 16-bit sound files are often converted to 8-bit files.

However, when you represent a sound file with only 8 bits, an audible

distortion referred to as quantization error becomes very prominent. To

minimize quantization error, there are things you can do to the 16-bit sound

file before converting it to 8-bit.You can:

• Apply a Noise Gate (Effects menu) to completely mute out the silent parts in

a sound file. Often, a low level signal in a 16-bit sound file will become

noise after the 16- to 8-bit conversion, so it’s best to have complete silence

between the sound parts.

• Normalize (Process menu) the sound to 0 dB (peak). This ensures that the

entire dynamic range available in 8-bit samples is used and lowers the signal

to noise ratio.

FILE FORMATS AND ATTRIBUTES

NOTE