how to best record one channal to both

[TambourineMan]

I recorded sound mixed from two mikes to just one channal. I want to copy that channal to both channals in a new recording with minimal loss of quality. That is I do not want output it to analog and then recapture it in digital. i want to do a digital dub. (I hope I am using the correct terms as I am a newbie to this.)

I have an original Audigy with the external bay on my desktop and an Audigy 2zs on my laptop.

I tried playing the sound on the laptop and recording "what I hear" but it appears the 2zs is not duplex capable.

So, I was thinking of playing the music on one PC and outputting it over an optical cable to the other and mixing the sound to both channals.

Will that do it? What programs should I use? Can I do this with the mixing capabilities built in to the program or do I somehow have to find a y splitter for the optical cable to feed the output to both channals?

[SaSi]

If I understand correctly, you have a single channel (mono) wav file and you want to make it a stero (two channel) audio file without re-capturing it.

There are several ways to do it.

1. Using a audio editor, open the file. There should be a convert sample type (or similar) option in the menu to convert it from single channel to two channel.

2. If you don't have an audio editor, you can trick VirtualDUB to do that.

Start VirtualDUB.
Open any AVI file (irrelevant which, just activates the required functions in VD).

Go to the audio menu and select WAV audio. From there select the WAV file you want to convert to stereo.
In the Audio menu select full processing mode and then in Conversion, select the conversion from mono to stereo.
From the File Menu, select Save Wav File and save the wav converted to stereo under a new file name.

[guns1inger]

Bare in mind that you are getting joint-stereo, not true stereo. Essentially a 2 channel mono track. It's a pity the two mikes didn't record to seperate channels originally.

[TambourineMan]

Thanks for the help.

Yes it is a pity one of the recordings is not in stereo. I was a last minute fill-in to record something that absolutely had to be recorded for my son to get credit in a college course. I recorded it in stereo on a brand new camcorder for which I bought a $50 stereo zoom mike which actually turned out OK.

But as a backup (in case the I scr*wed up with the camcorder I bought the evening before) I had also recorded it on my laptop with an Audigy 2zs. But without a mixer or pre-amp I could not get sufficient volume from the two higher quality audio mikes. I was not expecting that as the mikes had previously worked OK with the external bay for my desktop Audigy, but it must have better gain.

We borrowed a mixer from the school but I did not have the cables at hand, nor time left to buy them to record in stereo nor even to split the mono output signal to two channals. I figured the sound from two better quality mikes mixed to mono would be better than stereo from two cheap computer voice/chat mikes hooked direct to the laptop.

Maybe with further research I can learn how to sync the stereo camcorder recording with the mono laptop one and make a 2.1 recording and burn that with the DVD.

Luckily I got what was needed for the course. I am just trying to improve on it for "posterity."