Most audio files are mono, or stereo but many professional recording systems can record multiple channels and it's common to have four or even eight channels in a clip.
This clip that I've opened up in the source monitor has six audio channels.
Some of the channels are very low volume or perhaps even silent and we definitely don't need them.
Sometimes multiple microphones are used on location and there's a preferred channel with the best audio and that's the case here.
If I add this clip to our Master Sequence, you can see that it's been configured so that each of the available audio channels creates a separate sequence clip so that we can work with them independently.
But again, I only really want one of these channels.
So, I'm going to right click on the clip in the Project panel, I'm going to choose Modify, Audio Channels... and choose some different options.
To explain the menus at the top of this panel, let's take a look at the matrix of connections in the middle, between the Media Source Channels and the clips that are going to be put into a sequence.
So, on the left here, you see we've got Clip 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so on.
And for each of those, we can specify a source channel that we want to be assigned to it.
Now, up at the top, you can see that we've got six audio clips to be created so that's why we have six clips on the left.
Each of them is set up as mono.
You can see here we've got Mono chosen as the clip channel format and so there's just one channel that we can add to each one.
This particular clip was actually configured to be 5.1 surround sound which is why we've got left, right, center, low frequency effects and so on available as source channels.
Those could easily be 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on in another clip.
It doesn't really matter what the channels are called, they're really just mono audio channels that we can assign to clips.
Put a check in the box to assign a channel to a clip and you can see we've got a straight line through here, assigning each channel to its own clip.
If I change the channel format to Stereo, you can see now we've got two channels available per clip that will be added to a sequence and we only need three.
But we've still got the Number of Audio Clips set to 6, I'll change that to 3.
Just click away from the box to apply the setting and it starts to make a bit more sense.
You can see Clip 1 is now left and right, Clip 2 left and right and so on.
If I click OK having assigned that, I get a notice letting me know that the changes I make are not going to update clips that are already in the sequence.
I'll say OK and let's put that in the sequence and you can see... you can just about make out there, we've got two audio channels per clip.
I'm actually going to go back into this dialogue, right click, Modify, Audio Channels... and I'm going to set the Clip Channel Format to Mono.
Notice you can specify presets if you want at the top and one of these interestingly is Use File, that'll just base the settings on the information assigned to the file when it was created.
I'm going to set the number of audio clips to 1, click out of the box to apply it and now I'm just going to take this second channel which is designated as Right here, but again that doesn't really matter.
I'll click OK.
Say Yes on this confirmation dialog and now when I add this clip to my sequence, now there's a bit of a gotcha.
You'll notice that when I changed into a mono clip, Premiere Pro CC wasn't clear about which audio channels I might want in the sequence and the A1 source selection button has been turned off.
I'll just click to turn that on.
Let's make a bit of space here and pull the clip into the sequence and now I've got that single mono audio channel and it's the one I want.
These timeline tracks are standard tracks which means they can take mono and stereo clips.
They have the correct controls to apply adjustments like panning for a stereo master and they'll give you the right options for both types of clip.
You can also have mono tracks, 5.1 tracks and adaptive.
And I want to show you what happens when you use an adaptive clip type.
I'm going to right click on this second clip, choose Modify and Audio Channels... and I'm going to use the Preset Adaptive which will configure all these options for me quite efficiently.
I'm going to have one audio clip in the adaptive channel format with 6 channels per clip, so all 6 will be in the clip, and I'm going to click OK.
And now, I'm going to drag that clip into my sequence and watch what happens.
Premiere Pro CC has automatically added a new audio track for me with the correct number of channels for my mastering, which is stereo in this case, so we just have two channels on the track.
You can see I get the number 2 there to indicate this and it's added the audio clip to that track.
I wanted to show you this so you can see that Premiere Pro CC will only allow you to add the correct audio clip types to the correct audio tracks, so don't worry about getting this right.
