There is no way to add a mono track or a stereo track. There's just audio tracks of unspecified types. I'm guessing rather than mono or stereo you're referring to how high the track is. There is a way to change the default track height and you've probably done this, maybe without even realizing it.

Right-mouse-button click in the track header and choose Set default track properties. Select only Height from the dialog box that pops up, then check Restore original defaults and click OK.

You can also use this method to set up your own defaults for all sorts of track parameters. Set up a track the way you want it to be first, then go to that dialog and choose which of the parameters you want to keep. Click OK without checking the restore original defaults option.

So whatever I do to View > Minimise All Tracks - the now newly added "Height" ONLY Track (option) Audio is NOT increased or decreased in size. It remains minimised or "slim". But, as you say the Stereo option must still be in there?

My thoughts are this, that IF our friend WASN'T seeing the Stereo option BEFORE but now he IS, do you think that he adjusted using the HEIGHT option OR inadvertently switched OFF the MINIMISE All Tracks Options? Meaning he now SEES the Stereo.

Grazie

Ummmmm, what "stereo option"? What is that? It's not in any version of Vegas i've ever installed.

Showing the 2 Channels and the Panning Left<>Right plus its Panning Slider? That's what I mean. I guess I'm not using the correct terminology?

Grazie

. . and hence my reference to Paul's "new audio track I now get stereo size tracks" - yeah?

Grazie

So? "Ummmmm, what "stereo option"? What is that? It's not in any version of Vegas i've ever installed." Please educate me? I'm all ears?

Grazie

Well, except that seeing two channels in the track is based on whether you put a stereo audio event in the track or not. It doesn't have anything to do with the track height. Even when minimized you can still see both channels of a stereo track. As far as height and screen layout is concerned, there's no difference between stereo and mono tracks.

I will grant though that if the track height is small enough then the Pan slider is hidden. But, the pan slider shows up when the track is tall enough whether the clips on the track are stereo or mono.

I guess what i'm trying to get at is that in the original question, "Stereo" vs. "Mono" has absolutely nothing to do with the problem. it's one of those three-legged-dog* questions that my physics professor always liked to confuse us with on tests.

*The three-legged-dog question being along the lines of, "A dog runs off the side of a cliff that is 6 feet high while running at 11 feet per second. How far from the base of the cliff will the dog land if he only has three legs?"

LOL, sorry.
Sorry to have confused you people. Chienworks answered my problem at the top with:

"Right-mouse-button click in the track header and choose Set default track properties. Select only Height from the dialog box that pops up, then check Restore original defaults and click OK."

Thanks; I just learned to better understand how this works. My confusion with mono and stereo was caused by my sound man who up until this moment had been feeding me with mono tracks and just when I ran into my inadvertently changed height layer I happened to have been given a stereo track of a mono recording.

BTW, if you're worrying about how big audio files are, encode them to pca. Totally lossless, files can be any size and you save around 50% of the original file size. I use pca for archiving.

Bob.

I don't understand "encode them to pca". What is pca? I don't think my audio files are too big but maybe I'll find out that they are once I encode them to pca.

PCA is another audio format like WAV, MP3, WMA, etc. PCA is a lossless compressed format. It retains all the quality of the original file perfectly, but in about half the disk space.

Be warned though that it's a SONY proprietary format and can't be opened in any other company's software. But, if you need to do so it's pretty simple to load a PCA file into Vegas or Sound Forge or ACID and render it out to WAV again.

Note also that this "file size" issue has nothing to do with the "track height" issue either. ;)

PCA = Perfect Clarity Audio, goes WAY back to the Sonic Foundry days. Only reason I mentioned it is Paul said he was using mono files to save space and .pca is another excellent way to save space and get around the file size limitation with .wav files.

Bob.

Argh, terminology... when one works alone all his life as I have been doing, it is harder to always use the most appropriate expressions. By saving space I meant height of wav graphs. I can fit more tracks with nicely sized graphs at the same time on the screen without having to scroll, if kept mono. But also most of my tracks are recorded mono -- only music is stereo and music I receive in stereo.

As I follow these threads, and I read them all, I realize how differently I use an NLE compared to film/video editors. Vegas for me is an extension of Mirage. I don't work with cameras because I draw paperlessly, and most of the time (well, always) I have a soundtrack before I have a picture.
Therefore I need to keep the height of my tracks relatively large because I closely follow the shapes in the graph to both draw and edit and keep everything constantly in sync.

One thing that might be helpful for you then is to tell Vegas to use the stereo files as mono. Assuming that the content of the two channels is identical this won't matter at all. Right-mouse-button click on the stereo clip and from the popup menu choose "Channels / Left only". Now Vegas will access and draw only the left channel, filling the entire height of the track with that one channel.

If indeed the file really is stereo with independent left & right channels you can still use this method for viewing larger waveforms while editing, then change it back to stereo before rendering.

Well, again I slog through exceptions. I do work with left and right audio monitors, and as I have mentioned, my music is stereo, but keep I it on the bottom layer because I don't need to watch it that often -- just hear it. My film is HD 16:9 and there are times when I play with sound from one direction before a character enters etc. Maybe I should just upload a sample of what I'm working on.

EDIT: here's the link:
http://www.paulfierlinger.com/vegas/

. .and my physics master used to tell me, nothing is as straightforward as you think, sometimes it is simpler than that!

Maybe I should just upload a sample of what I'm working on.

. . eh, . .. yeah!!

-g

Grazie, I never learned how to upload something here so I posted a link to my FTP as an afterthought (in my previous post as an EDIT.) or here it is again:
http://www.paulfierlinger.com/vegas/