As i bought myself a new audiobook yet I am again a bit puzzled.

Will there be an option with the cli encoder to encode in mono in the future?

And for the meantime maybe someone can help me - I am using EAC and it doesn't offer
(afaik) the ability to cooperate a conversion of the wav to mono.
I am thinking about adding another cli call to the cmd.exe call wich is mentioned in this thread, but am unsure what app to call with what parameters ?
- no further processing than just converting to mono
and the additional tricky-bit: filenames of in and out and further calls from the other apps to the converted wav? Tricky as EACs %s %d incorporates the path+file-extention...
maybe something like convertapp.exe %s %temp%\out.wav and instead of %s using %temp%\out.wav for further calls?

Or am I just blind and there would be an easier way (especially one that doesn't blow up the commandline in EACs optional cli field for the external compressor?

Thanks!

http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index....ighlite=%2Bmono

IIRC the next release will handle mono as expected, and also include a command line tagger.

From what I understand there are two tagging standards: Nero and iTunes. Atomic Parsley uses the iTunes format, and foobar uses Nero's. So it depends where you will be using the files.

Are you sure EAC doesn't produce a mono WAVE when ripping a mono CD? I find it difficult to believe that other users convert their stereo files back to mono. I suspect that EAC will output to mono if the CD is truely mono, but that's just an assumption on my part.

Pardon me if I'm out of it here... but How could EAC rip mono from a standard-locked stereo CD?
Not many rippers/CD-players I've heard of would realize somthing is mono and act on it since standard claims all is enforced stereo.
In this case it is useless for EAC to realize numbers of channels since it's built for redbook data which all looks the same.

Are you even sure you need to convert the file?
I'm pretty sure most encoders would compress this audio the same way it would compress a monofile, if infact, the data is mono.

Like David said, EAC isn't able to distinguish mono from stereo CDs. But stereo WAV files that have both channels identical compress very well into joint-stereo, though e.g. Lame encodes them roughly 15-20 kbps more (a rough estimate from what I recall from personal experience) as j-stereo files compared with when they're collapsed into mono (and encoded as pure mono) first.

Ah, yes, apologies. I was forgetting that the source would always have two channels.

I guess I was getting confused at what stage a mono recording is recognised. I suppose the encoder normally does the work of recognising that both channels are the same.

That said, if an encoder can, EAC could, if it chose to I suppose (Note to self: stop supposing things).

Anyway, sorry for the confusion.

Ok, so I am looking forward to it - and as already said, even "Mono" CDs contain 2ch material

Some Audio Books do contain sound effects that are stereo, but with just one speaker (yikes - context narrator, not device) I don't see a reason to keep 'em Stereo. Even with AudioPlays (hope the english words are correct - I am referering to german Hörbuch and Hörspiel) I am not that inclined to keep 'em stereo. That is material where for me as a listener I am not noticing any stereo, i am listening to the story not the effects (most of the time - some audio plays (like Newromancer (german radio production) or artistic audio books (like artificial head(?) productions (Kunstkopf)) are an exception). So for me listening, that material is "mono" even if from an algorythms point of view it may not be the case.
And even if the encoder should in theory don't waste that much of space with identical channels and as I was
curious I ripped one of the Cds additional as wav and converted those to mono before encoding again with the same option (q 0.3). For this CD tested (13 tracks) it was for each file something I would easily forget about at first thought, but for the whole it was for the stereo-wavs: 36.3 and for mono-wavs: 22.6 MB. Thinking again of adding that up over CDs it was an amount of space that had let me asked the question