I helped a friend out with a Final Cut Express problem yesterday. He was capturing footage from his camera and realized that the audio was only coming in in Mono. He had spent a few hours "googling", trying to find a solution but no luck.

It is possible to just de-link the tracks and copy the audio track and create (kind of) stereo audio and re-link them... except we had panned different microphones into different channels to be able to split them... so by losing the ability to capture stereo we lost one of our tracks which is a big problem!

Unfortunately, other that the method explained above there actually was NOTHING helpful in google! If you don't believe me try "Googling" for Final Cut Express Audio Capturing in Mono.

I spent a few mins just looking through Final Cut Express, I quickly came to the conclusion that the software actually tries to be a little TOO clever for its own good.
There is no way to specifically set how audio is captured.

Not very useful when its capturing in mono and you want it to capture in stereo!

Well to be fair... it's trying to auto-detect what you actually are using and need... unfortunately it's not quite clever enough. To cut a long story short the only way I could find to make the audio capture in stereo again was to restore to factory default settings. For us this wasn't a problem. We didn't have many preferences saved but if you have done lots of configuration I would recommend you write all your settings down before you continue!

You can restore to factory or default settings by...

1. First, go to User/Library/Preferences/ and remove the file called com.apple.FinalCutExpress.plist.

2. Then go to User/Library/Preferences/Final Cut Express User Data/ and remove the other preferences files, called Final Cut Express Preferences and any other that say stuff like Final Cut Express Cache.

3.Restart Final Cut Express.

That should have done the trick and fixed , let me know if it works for you. I'll put some screen shots up this week.