Issue w/stereo track & "one track per channel" quality

So I'm working on a project right now, and I've encountered a problem with a stereo .wav music track I added, where it's fine in the timeline, but upon exporting as an mp4, only renders one side of the stereo. As per this thread, I unchecked "One track per channel," which fixed this problem, but introduced another. It made the audio basically unusable-- low quality and very compressed and artifacty.

I've tried different render settings as well as a bunch of different formats in the clip attributes(like switching to 5.1 and muting unused channels), but nothing seems to work to where I can have both stereo channels and in good quality.

DaVinci Resolve Version 16.2.7, Windows 10

QUICK UPDATE:
I tried it in VLC Player, and uploading to YouTube, and both of these play only the LEFT side of the stereo clip through both speakers, while Windows 'Movies & TV' app seems to do the RIGHT side stereo through both speakers. The audio cutting out and video skipping seems to only happen in 'Movies & TV' when I set clip attributes of each side of the linked group to the corresponding half of the stereo signal instead of the default Mono.

Use the following settings.

Audio Output.png (12.7 KiB) Viewed 2158 times

Use the following settings.

Audio Output.png

These are the exact settings I used, actually. Out of curiosity, I also tried the other ones, but to no avail

And although unchecking "One track per channel" fixes my stereo problem, it makes the audio far too low quality and compressed to use.

Hi Cliff,

Have you tried to "convert to linked group" on the edit page under the audio tracks? Just right click the A1 track thta your stereo is on and click that. Make sure your audio is hitting the correct channels and re-render it as a stereo pair. Sometimes this clears it up.

Hi Cliff,

Have you tried to "convert to linked group" on the edit page under the audio tracks? Just right click the A1 track thta your stereo is on and click that. Make sure your audio is hitting the correct channels and re-render it as a stereo pair. Sometimes this clears it up.

Just tried it, and I'm still getting just the right side audio of this clip playing through both speakers.

In the clip attributes, the top one is Mono format embedded channel 1, and the bottom one is channel 2. So, it should work, and it still plays fine in the timeline, but when I export things are still funky.

QUICK EDIT:
So I just tried going into the clip attributes and making the clips stereo and muting the opposite channel. On playback, it seemed to have worked, but then the audio started cutting out completely at certain spots.

it makes the audio far too low quality and compressed to use.

Can we hear?

Can i see a screen shot of your clip attributes as well as your edit page audio config?

192 is not going to be audiophile quality, not even close. It's the standard for multi channel, but for stereo anything less than 320 will be noticeable even on cheap speakers. I find that resolve overall doesn't do a great job exporting mp4's. It's getting better of course, BMD is working hard at improving all kinds of things.

One option would be to export it to Cineform with PCM Audio, then use AME with TMPGEnc to create your final deliverable if quality is of concern and it needs to be compressed. That's the only way I have gotten an acceptable result to date. I don't have the patience to use the open source codecs, others here have used them and do have their methods as well that will get as good or better results.

Can i see a screen shot of your clip attributes as well as your edit page audio config?

Also, sorry but I wasn't exactly sure what you meant by edit page audio config. Would that just be a screenshot of my timeline?

I made an edit to the original post, but just to be sure, I'm commenting here for a quick update. I was able to export it as a different format, specifically quicktime, with linear-PCM audio as opposed to AAC audio, which allowed me to uncheck "render one track per channel" and still maintain good quality audio.

For whatever reason, with the mp4 exports that had been affected by the setting's effect on stereo clips, different players would play different sides of the stereo, but never both (VLC the left channel, 'Movies & TV' the right, for example).

maybe you could try to set all audio channels/tracks in the timeline to mono and pan the channel that will be the left one of your stereo track to -100 and the right one to +100

Maybe it will solve the problem