[Mark]

I'm wondering if anyone here has run across the problem I'm having. Someone emailed a song of theirs to me and my dad in mp3 format . Yesterday on his ( WinXP ) and my (Vista ) computers the vocals were playing very slightly distorted and only from the left channel while the music was playing fine in both channels. I thought that maybe we were sent the wrong test version of the song or something like that. We were told that it sounds just fine on the sender's computer running Windows 8. All of a sudden today while changing nothing on his computer the song started playing the vocals properly out of both channels on my dad's computer. The song is still playing vocals only on my left channel. This was tested with 3 different programs for playback. I even had my dad email me his now working version of the song and it still plays vocals only on the left side on my computer.I know there are many codec changes over the years with video formats like avi, is there a chance of this same thing for mp3's causing less than 100 percent compatibility across different Windows platforms? Neither of our computers ever had a playback issue before this song file.

[Hendricks266]

Post the file?

[Mark]

I'll see if I can get permission. In the meantime I'll fire it up on my old Win98 laptop tomorrow and see what happens.

[Mark]

I received another song from the artist and its the same problem. I'm now thinking its the fault of the program she is using called MixCraft 6.0

The program has a feature called mixdown which automatically combines all the tracks down to stereo then exports to the format of your choice. My guess is the mixdown process is screwing up the mp3 internally as far as left and right panning to the point where some sound cards or OS's can decode it properly and some can't.

[Mark]

Not that anyone really cares but I solved the mystery.

1. The artist that created the songs has her speakers under the computer table only 15 inches apart. She had no idea the vocals were panned all the way left on her recordings. She was assuming they were on both channels and assured me that was the case.

2. The reason vocals were heard on both channels of my dad's computer was because he had some sound card special effects box checked that widens the sound field and part of that process might be partially mixing the 2 channels together.

3. I spent waaayyy too much time figuring this out. But now I can spend time more productivly addressing the regular mistakes that rookies make when recording and producing their own stuff.

[Kathy]

Mark., on 22 November 2014 - 12:46 PM, said:

1. The artist that created the songs has her speakers under the computer table only 15 inches apart. She had no idea the vocals were panned all the way left on her recordings. She was assuming they were on both channels and assured me that was the case.