True Stereo Track

Hello all.

I'm playing around with Autotune Evo, which only works with "true stereo" tracks. When I arm a vocal track for recording, I have 3 choices (Left/Right/Stereo), but when I select stereo, it only records on one side of the track. I have tried bouncing the track to a stereo track, but am unsure if this qualifies as a "true stereo" track.
  Do I need to get a "Y" connector to plug my mic into both inputs on my Focusrire Saffire 6 interface in order to get "true stereo"?

Sorry for such an inane question!


Regards,


Bob

I'm curious what they mean by true?
In Sonar a stereo track simply means two lanes of data linked in one waveform. (Actually all (or most(?) of the signal paths in Sonar are dual/stereo even if there's only one data set flowing through it.
 
In a broader sense true stereo can mean with differences in the two sides that allows the sound of stereo, as opposed to recording the same thing to both sides- which is mono sound. 
  
"...  Do I need to get a "Y" connector to plug my mic into both inputs on my Focusrire Saffire 6 interface in order to get "true stereo"? "
To get input to both sides of the input pair- and fill both the left and right sides of the track- yes. It will be two mono files playing together = mono (and a bit louder than it would be otherwise..
But even if you slect this 'stereo input#x' and only record to one side.. it will still be the same double file size, and will play, act and except for the sound be.. a 'stereo track'.
Enough flipping 'round there for one day?

You don't need any Y cable for this. Record it to a mono track (using Left input), then just Edit-Bounce to Track(s) and select Stereo as the Channel Format on the popup dialog.  

You cannot pitch-correct two uncorrelated channels. That's true for any pitch editor. 

Imagine if you recorded two separate, unrelated mono tracks, panned them hard L-R and then bounced them to a single stereo track. You wouldn't expect Evo to make sense of them, would you? However, if you recorded a vocal onto a stereo track, even if the two channels are differently-treated they'd still have the same pitch and could be edited simultaneously.

You're going to be better off recording your vocals in mono anyway. There is no benefit to recording a vocal track in stereo unless you're tracking two or more vocalists at once, like a choir. But don't expect to be able to pitch-correct that, either.

I find that more than strange. A VST that is meant to be used mostly on vocals, which are, almost as a rule, recorded in mono,...only works on stereo tracks. Does it make any sense to you??

bitflipper


Kalle, it's not that it only works on stereo tracks, but rather that if you do use it on a stereo track it has to be a "true" stereo track. I'm sure it works fine on mono tracks.

Oh! Thanks for correcting.

One pitch source at a time

Exactly.


I would add, though, that pitch editors may also have difficulty with stereo files whose channels are wildly different spectrally from one another, even though they share a common fundamental frequency. You don't want to make the task any more difficult than necessary for the pitch-extraction algorithm, which is why you want to start with squeaky-clean mono recordings.