A couple of months ago, I bought myself a condenser microphone to improve the quality of my recordings in my Minecraft videos. However, such microphones require a XLR connection sending phantom power. An audio interface or mixer is required to power such microphones and get captured audio out of them. My first setup was a bit convoluted and required two cables going from my computer desk to the table on which I installed my music production gears:

1. My microphone is on my computer desk and linked to my mixer with a cable running on the floor.
2. My mixer is sending phantom power and getting the microphone’s audio. It gets a mono signal and spreads it to its two output channels. From the mixer, it is possible to adjust the microphone’s volume as well as its position in the stereo image.
3. My mixer is sending output, including microphone and other sound devices, to my Novation’s Ultranova.
4. My Ultranova is linked to my computer through a USB cable which also has to run on the floor.
5. The audio interface built into my Ultranova is used to turn analog sound coming from my mixer into digital audio.

After some changes in my home office, I had to move the table with music gears further from my computer desk, which prevented me from using this setup until I get longer cables. I may instead end up with a second computer dedicated to music production, which will make controlling Ableton’s Live easier than having to go back and forth between my music table and computer desk. I then needed a new solution for my microphone setup.

Luckily, I have a M-Audio FastTrack Pro interface I decided to give a new shot. The interface had issues with Ableton’s Live, making the software crash and misbehave intermittently. The issue can come from the interface itself, the ASIO driver, Windows 10, Ableton’s Live or something else. There is no way to track it down, this is why I switched to using my Ultranova as the audio interface. But maybe, I thought, the M-Audio FastTrack Pro would just work for that simpler application.

I thus put it on my computer desk, plugged it through USB, plugged my microphone in the first input and turned it on. I made sure the first input was configured in Instrument mode, turned on phantom power and then performed a test. I had a voice over to record at the end of an in-progress Minecraft video. For this, I usually use Corel’s VideoStudio X8.

However, when I listened at the recording, sound was correct, but it was coming from the left channel only. It didn’t take me long to realize Corel’s VideoStudio was accessing my audio interface as a stereo device. The interface was then simply and predictably providing stereo information: the left channel coming from the first input, right channel coming from the second input. Nothing is plugged in the second input? No problem, the interface just provided silence. This is simple, logical, but today’s software expect more chaotic behavior: VideoStudio was assuming the interface would magically duplicate the two inputs! Apparently, some low-end USB microphone just do that! I also realized that my recording software would react the same way; my voice would play just on the left side.

Searches on Google only gave me unacceptably complicated solutions.

• Post-process audio in another software tool like CoolEdit Pro, Audacity, Sound Forge, to turn the stereo file into a mono one. That would have forced me to figure out the name VideoStudio gave to my voice over, maybe even exporting the clip manually from VideoStudio to a WAVE file, find the file in the audio editor of my choice, search forever to figure out how to make the file mono, save the file back somewhere, return to VideoStudio, find the file there, import. If I had to do this one time, I would do it and that’s it. But I would have to repeat all that for any voice over I make with that new setup!
• Encode the video with mono audio. Besides requiring a lot of tedious manipulations in VideoStudio (click there, find that option, click there, there, there, there, etc.), this is unacceptable as my game sound is stereo and I want to keep this.
• Insert a Y splitter cable linking my microphone to both inputs of my audio interface. That could work in a RCA or jack world, but I’m not sure at all about the results with XLR plugs delivering phantom power! Of course, nobody will have accurate information about that. According to my very far memory of electricity I learned in physics, both XLR inputs would deliver a 48V signal, resulting into a circuit with two parallel paths delivering 48V, so the output of the Y would get 48V, not 96V, but maybe I was wrong, and that would just blow up my microphone. I would also have to order this Y splitter cable on eBay or Addison Électronique and wait for it several days, or go at Addison store, which involves a never-ending bus trip for me.
• Some forum posts were suggesting that the software tool is responsible for correctly configuring the audio interface. If it doesn’t, I have to switch to something else. That would mean I would have to use one tool to capture video, a second tool to capture audio and manage to sync up the tools in some way or another. That means having the two tools side by side and rapidly clicking on the record buttons, hoping they start simultaneously. That’s stupid, crazy, inefficient, and I really hate that people propose, adopt and accept such solutions, because that’s not so bad for them. This is bad, because computer is all about automation, and should not force human beings to repeat stupid and brain-killing tasks!
• According to my research, some USB microphones will deliver a stereo signal to Windows, which will just avoid this issue. I could thus switch to such a microphone, forgetting about my actual device. I really disliked that, because I didn’t want to replace an already-working microphone with a potentially inferior one. And what would happen with my actual microphone? Well, maybe my brother would make a use of it in his jamming room. Quite little consolation…
• Maybe another audio interface would provide a better treatment of this issue. I could for example try with the FastTrack Solo interface which has a single input, so no obvious reason to deliver stereo data. However, I  had no certainty about if and how that would work, I would have had to try my luck. Maybe my brother could help me out if he has the Solo M-Audio interface, maybe not, I didn’t remember which one he had.
• My friend suggested me to use my mixer as before. That would require me to unplug all wires from my mixer, moving it on my computer desk for recording stuff, then moving and plugging my mixer back on my music table to play some music. Quite annoying.
• My friend suggested me to use the inserts on the M-Audio interface. This quickly appeared to be an hard task, as making use of this requires custom cables designed for inserts. In particular, I would need a Y splitter starting from a TRS balanced jack into two separate mono jacks! Most jack Y splitters just duplicate a stereo signal. The only TRS Y splitters I could find were on eBay.

I was quite desperate and about to give up on recording or switch back to my H2N, which works but gives recording with a lot of background noise. My last hope was Virtual Audio Cable. Tailoring it to my needs required a bit of trickery, but that ended up working, so I purchased a license for it.

From stereo to mono with Virtual Audio Cable

First piece of this intricate puzzle can be found by right-clicking on the Windows mixer in the task bar and selecting recording devices.

Double-clicking on the M-Audio’s line device and accessing the last tab results into the following.

The default input setting is on two channels, thus stereo. Interesting. What if I switch this to mono? Wouldn’t this be enough to indicate both VideoStudio and Bandicam to record a mono track? If they simply use default settings, that could work, no? Well, no, because the M-Audio driver doesn’t accept other settings than 2 channels! I tried with both Windows builtin driver and the M-Audio one: same result. I probably need a better audio interface. But that is enough for DAWs such as Ableton’s Live, who are able to pick and choose which channels to record on.

I thus had to implement a patch using a virtual cable. For this, I accessed the second tab of the M-Audio line device which allows to listen to the captured audio. However, instead of feeding the captured audio to the default device as most people would do, I routed it to a virtual device provided by Virtual Audio Cable.

That Line 1 entry appears in both playback and recording devices. This is a virtual cable that can be used to transfer audio from one process to another. Based on this reasoning, I found the Line 1 entry in my recording devices and made it the default recording device. In my case, it is called Mic 1 because I messed in the control panel of Virtual Audio Cable, but that’s not necessary.

Hoping for a miracle, I double-clicked the virtual recording device, accessed the last tab and clicked on the drop-down menu for channel selection. I was then able to select a 1-channel input!

I then tested and that finally worked! Windows “plays” the captured audio into the virtual cable, which coerces it into mono, which can be “recorded” by software programs. After a lot of frustrating research with less and less hope for a solution, I ended up with stereo recording again. I had to purchase the full version of Virtual Audio Cable for this to work without the annoying “Trial” message in my recorded sound, but at least, I didn’t have to wait for a Y splitter cable ordered from eBay or try my luck with USB microphones or new audio interfaces, without being sure it would solve my issue.