Greetings Fellow Humans,

In these times of crisis I hope to find You all in the best possible spirits.

Meanwhile more time available has made me spend some time practicing a real instrument and found a hurdle seemingly impossible to overcome while trying to play along hard panned records:

How do I balance (pan left/right) audio on a Mac that is using spdif output?

A plugin would also do.

Thanks in advance and healthy vibes to You all.

 

https://www.waves.com/plugins/s1-stereo-imager#s1-stereo-imager-plugin-overview

 

Thank you dabugen!

Of course this plugin from waves is more oriented toward production.

My needs are much simpler: an audio player to easily balance left/right like an old(?) amplifiers so I can play along the Coltrane rhythm section (when there are no witnesses within earshot :P ) or some Doors songs.
Bonus feature would be to take a channel and make it come out from both channels.

On the Mac if the audio output is analog there is a native balance control; if you use spdif you're out of luck as far as I can tell.
Why make such a simple feature so elusive?

I use CogX as a quick-and-dirty player and itunes isn't even authorized on my mac :/ as i loathe it.

Thanks again

 

I don't know if I have understand your question but... download Audacity, it's free. open it and choose New .. drag the file in the window. go in the inspector there's a little black triangle, choose split stereo to mono .... now you have two mono files and you can solo the one you need

 

What device is connected to your spdif port?Doesn't it have any L/R knob?

Or what software are you using in your Mac?It probably has a L/R knob too,I guess.

 

Thanks for all the replies.

Blue:
I have a benchmark audio dac1 that does not have a pan/balance knob. Also the software (CogX) does not have a balance control.

Angie:
Thanks for the Audacious advice. Useful but clunky as I'd just like to play through music files (Stereo mp3/flac) and when something strikes my fancy just pan out the channel with the part I'd like to transcribe so I can play over the original rhythm section. Also Aebersold (for example ) have splitted files for playalong as do many others.

tzzsmk:
Eureka! thanks! that really does the trick (and many others)

I remain surprised that such a fundamental function is absent from system audio controls and most audio players that I tried.
My suspicion was/is that I was overlooking something basic. Maybe not.

Thanks again and Healthy vibes to All Humans.

NeXT

 

Just a quick follow-up:

The two built-in effects to use are: Balance(self explanatory) and Channels where you can duplicate, invert etc.
Actually just use channels, super nice!

Still wish for player integration but happy camper now.

Thanks again.
Cheers.