Pan and Mix to mono

The Mix section places a clip’s sound between the speakers. Pan moves a stereo clip’s balance, and Mix to mono folds its channels into one.

Where: Clip tab ▸ Sound ▸ Mix
Agent tools: set_audio

The section’s header summarises it: “centre”, “mono”, or the pan position. Detach Audio and Attach Audio are on the same section, and have their own page.

Pan a clip

Drag Pan, type a number from −100 to 100, or use a quick pick: −100, −50, 0, 50 or 100. Negative numbers go left, positive numbers go right, and the default is 0.

Position, under it, reads the result in words: “centre”, “left 30” or “right 100”. It’s a readout, so there’s nothing to set there.

On a stereo clip, Pan is a balance control. It doesn’t move the left channel’s sound across to the right:

At the centre, nothing changes.
Moving it one way turns that side up and the other side down, keeping the total power steady.
At −100 or 100, the side it went to is about 3 dB louder than at the centre, and the other side is silent.

Pan has no effect on a mono file. See Good to know.

Mix to mono

Mix to mono averages all of the clip’s channels into one and sends that to every channel. It’s off by default.

On a one-channel file it does nothing, because there’s nothing to fold.

If only one channel of a stereo file has anything on it, use Channels instead. Averaging a voice with a silent channel halves its level.

Place a stereo clip’s sound anywhere

To hear a true pan, tick Mix to mono as well as setting Pan. The fold happens before the pan, so both channels carry the same sound, and Pan places that one sound anywhere from left to right.

Animate them

With an action selected, both controls write what the action changes to. Pan glides there across the action. Mix to mono is a switch, so it changes at the action’s end, and its row says “at end”. See Animate sound with actions.

Reset the section

Reset on the section’s header sets the pan back to centre and turns mono off. It appears while the section differs from its default and no action is selected. See Reset a section.

Good to know

Pan has no effect on a mono file, with or without Mix to mono, because the file still has only one channel when Pan acts on it. A track’s pan can’t move it either.
On a nest clip, Pan has no effect. Set it on the clips inside.
Mix to mono on a nest clip does work: it folds everything inside the nest, and that flattens any panning on the clips and tracks in it.
The Volume section’s Loudness readout counts Pan and Mix to mono on a stereo clip, and so does Normalize in Loudness mode.
In the clip’s chain of sound processing, this section comes after the compressor and before the limiter.

With an agent

set_audio sets these with pan, from −1 for hard left to 1 for hard right (the inspector’s −100 to 100), and mono, true or false. See Tools: clip sound.