Comment by gyan
5 months ago
The dupe is what I linked. The orig is https://superuser.com/questions/601972
The orig wants a mono output with one of the original channels as signal source. This involves downmixing i.e. rematrixing the audio.
The dupe want to just mute one of the channels, not repan it. One can't apply map_channel to do what the dupe wants.
One can use a couple of methods to achieve the dupe, including pan. But the syntax of pan needed for the dupe case is not the same as the orig, or deducible from it. They need to consult the docs (fortuitously, the dupe case is an illustrated example) or get a direct answer. The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe - one needs to know about the implicit muting that pan applies, which is not documented or evident in the orig answer. So it's not a duplicate of the source Q.
> The dupe is what I linked. The orig is
Ah, I don't actually have a SuperUser account, so it was automatically redirecting me.
> The 'technique' shown in the orig is not intuitively adaptable to the dupe
IDK, it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there, and I'm not by any means an ffmpeg expert.
> it looks to me like I could figure it out pretty easily from what's written there
Really? Wanna give it a try then, without looking up any other documentation? I've used ffmpeg plenty of times, but it doesn't seem obvious to me how I'd mute one audio channel.
From your other comments it sounds like you believe SO should have less content. Why? How would SO be improved by forcing people to figure something like this out from the existing answer? I just don't understand the benefit to having that question marked as a duplicate and deleted.
I've long wondered the same thing about wikipedia. Why does wikipedia delete well written pages about obscure topics? Is their hard disk full? Does every page cost them money? Does google search struggle at scale? I don't understand the benefit to deleting good content.
> Really? Wanna give it a try then, without looking up any other documentation?
I mean, that's not the point of SO or any of the SE sites. It's not there so you don't have to do some more work to get to an answer.
From that answer, if you're still having issues, you form a question around:
"I found this answer on [SO](link), which lead me in this direction and found these [documents](link), however I am still having issues with getting the thing to work correctly when i run this bit of code, ```code```, from the output it says it's doing this or that, but when i check something, i find that it's not doing what it claims in the outputs. What might I have missed?"
And even then, that's still a fairly shaky question.
Most people don't know how to write questions, which is most of what this whole comment section is complaining about.
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