Wow...that was impressive!

glennstanton
reading up, it appears that even Logic requires you to bounce the tracks as behind the scene it still retains the two mono files as mono files...

Really? After merging/joining and selecting "stereo"? Well I guess it doesn't matter anyway as the whole point is to be able to treat them as a stereo file in the DAW quickly and easily.

Even if you add a button or context menu selection for convenience, in the end it's still a bounce.

I'm not really disagreeing with any of the good comments here. But I'm thinking there appears to be some flexibility with Sonar's steps where some of the others in a one step merge don't tell exactly how they're merging?

If they all are automatically panning hard L-R then merging that would be good. Or does the User still have to pan hard, then save as a mono then select both to merge?

I've merged / stereo in Sonar quite a bit and it seems to work well. Of course less clicks are better, I'm not saying that's not. Convenience it's always good!
But IMHO I've not really thought this as too much an issue.

Sanderxpander
Really? After merging/joining and selecting "stereo"? Well I guess it doesn't matter anyway as the whole point is to be able to treat them as a stereo file in the DAW quickly and easily.

it "looks" stereo in the DAW, but according to the docs it's split mono until you actually take the step to bounce to a single stereo file. understandable, this split mono makes sense since on tape, you need 2 tracks to make a stereo recording... so perhaps some DAW use this to keep things tidy for people used to tapes? :) or it's more flexible?

Yeah like - in old sound forge - you could just right click a waveform and choose "seperate to Dual Mono" - or the reverse... that would be REALLY helpful