Tagging mono albums

Just as “DSD” and bitrate are labeled in album titles, so should “mono” albums… How about it?

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This is a very logical idea.

Not sure I even have mono digital files, but if I did I totally agree with the suggestion.

The rules could be:

If the audio file only has one channel.
OR
If two channel, that audio analysis spots that the two channels have the same content.

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As a stop-gap you could always add a mono tag in Roon, then sort and bookmark it to maintain your collection.

It’s what I do with the Late Night Tales compilations and box sets because the original source tagging for these is all over the place and I like to group them together as a complete series.

I am unsure how effective analysis would be for ripped CD content. Since the Red Book standard supports two and four channel standards but oddly not a one channel standard, any mono is dual mono. And a lot of that mono content was transferred during the first decade of CD. Any mono tracks run through a splitter upstream of a stereo ADC will not be digitally identical on both dual mono channels. A null test will not work, though analysis still might be able to detect the correlation between the dual mono channels.

AJ

That’s the direction I was thinking of …

When I created my library, I took a few of my mono albums and converted the flacs to single channel (keeping the originals of course) . Roon flags them as mono.

I did this as an experiment for the reasons mentioned about the two channels not being identical. When I have time I’d like to have a discussion about how one might compute the “mono-ness” of a track.