MonoMate Featured in TapeOp — Larry Crane Reviews

If you’ve been in professional audio for more than five minutes, you know TapeOp. Getting reviewed there isn’t a marketing checkbox — it means someone who genuinely cares about the craft picked up your tool, used it in a real session, and decided it was worth writing about.

MonoMate was reviewed in TapeOp Issue #172 (Feb/Mar 2026) by Larry Crane, TapeOp’s editor and founder. Here’s why that matters, and what he had to say.

About TapeOp

TapeOp has been running since 1996. It’s a free print and digital magazine — no ads, no fluff — written by and for working recordists, engineers, and producers. Larry Crane built it into one of the most trusted voices in audio engineering by keeping it grounded in actual studio practice. When TapeOp reviews something, it’s because someone used it on a real session and had something worth saying.

A mention there carries weight that a press release never could.

The Problem Larry Crane Describes

Before we get to what Larry said about MonoMate, it’s worth reading how he describes his current workflow for dealing with dual mono files. Because it’s a pain that almost every mixing engineer knows:

“Do you get sent folders full of audio files from other recordists to mix? If you do, I’ll bet there are frequently stereo audio files in there that are actually mono. Apple’s Logic DAW seems to be the worst culprit, organizing sessions in an ‘always stereo’ way that confounds less experienced track exporters and leads to so many mono-as-stereo files. I’ve been putting NUGEN Audio’s SigMod on my master bus with a left channel polarity flip and mono sum on; then I import all the audio tracks, solo the stereo ones, and see if the track cancels itself out. If it does, I’ll split the track into mono and then delete or hide the stereo track and one mono track. What a pain.”

That’s a lot of steps. Load a plugin on the master bus. Import every track. Solo each stereo file. Check for cancellation. Split the ones that cancel. Delete the duplicates. Repeat.

And that’s just one approach. Some engineers do it visually — staring at waveforms, comparing left and right channels by eye. Others just leave the dual mono files as-is and deal with the CPU hit and doubled drive space. None of it is great.

What TapeOp Said About MonoMate

Larry’s review is direct and practical, which is exactly what you’d expect from TapeOp:

“MonoMate is a very specific app (not plug-in) that will check all the audio in a folder for stereo tracks that are really mono and convert them to mono. It’s so easy. Select the audio files folder, and it loads them in. The interface displays every file’s bit depth, sample rate, length, size, and Status. MonoMate also looks for and converts files in which one side is complete silence, or left and right have inverted polarity.”

“Very specific” is a compliment here. A tool that does one thing well — and does it without requiring you to open a DAW, load plugins, or manually compare channels — is genuinely useful.

He also noted that MonoMate goes beyond simple left-equals-right detection. It catches files where one side is silence, and files where the channels are polarity-inverted relative to each other. Those edge cases trip up manual workflows and simpler tools alike.

The bottom line from Larry:

“MonoMate will speed up the beginning of all my mix sessions. Less guesswork, less searching, less splitting to mono and deleting.”

That’s the whole pitch, really. Less of the stuff that slows you down before the actual work starts.

Why Dual Mono Is Such a Specific Annoyance

The files aren’t broken. They play back fine. They pass a casual listen. But they’re carrying twice the data they need to, and when you start stacking tracks in your session — especially on larger projects with SFX libraries or foley — that bloat adds up fast.

Dual mono files take double the hard drive space. A stereo plugin instance on a dual mono track uses double the CPU. And if you’re the kind of engineer who’s meticulous about track layout and routing (most good engineers are), having a mix of true stereo and fake-stereo files in your session is just sloppy — even if you didn’t create the problem yourself.

The Logic “always stereo” export behavior Larry mentions is the most common culprit, but it’s not the only one. Other DAWs, field recorders, and poorly configured export settings all produce the same result. If you receive files from a wide range of collaborators, you’re going to see dual mono regularly.

What MonoMate Does

You drag a folder in. MonoMate analyzes every file — instantly — and shows you the status of each one. True stereo, dual mono, silence on one side, polarity-inverted. You see exactly what you’re dealing with before anything gets changed.

Then, one click converts your dual mono files to proper mono. No DAW required. No plugin on the master bus. No soloing tracks one by one.

It handles WAV and AIFF, works on macOS 13+ and Windows 10+, runs natively on Apple Silicon, and costs $29 — a 2-machine license.

There’s also a free trial if you want to run the analysis on your own files before committing.

Try MonoMate

If Larry Crane’s workflow resonated with you — if you’ve done the “polarity flip on the master bus” trick or spent time manually checking stereo files before a session — MonoMate is worth five minutes of your time.

Download the free trial at monomate.app and run it on your next set of session files. See exactly how many dual mono files you’ve been working around without realizing it.