There’s Always a Workaround

I got an interesting question from a student recently. She'd read my article about making surround-sound DVDs at home and wondered about one step, which apparently required the high-end BIAS Peak audio editor:

"I used BIAS Peak to split each stereo file into two mono ones, and then converted the sample rate to the DVD-standard 48kHz."

The student had Ableton Live, so I gave her this recipe, which should work in many programs:

1. Load the 44.1kHz stereo WAV file into a Live track.


2. Switch to Arrangement [timeline] view.


3. Pan the track all the way to one side (50R or 50L).


4. Export [render] the panned track using the Convert to Mono/48000/WAV settings (see graphic).


5. Pan that track to the other side and export again.

This kind of situation comes up all the time — you're on an unfamiliar computer and can't use your normal tools, so you have to improvise. When I was in Japan a couple of months ago, I didn't have Peak, so I edited my entire podcast in Live by splitting the waveform next to unwanted sounds and dragging the edges inward to snip them out.

Last month I wanted to create a layered graphic, but my normal image editor inexplicably refused to launch. So I pasted the graphics into QuickTime Pro (!), specifying Add Scaled so they'd be simultaneous instead of sequential on the timeline, and used the Offset box in the Properties screen to arrange the images.

Another time, my wife had to make a long PowerPoint presentation, but forgot to bring her laptop's AC adapter. Noticing that the facility already had a computer wired in to the projector, I pulled out my digital voice recorder (on which I'd saved a backup of the file), plugged it in via its built-in USB plug, and ran the show from that.

What are some of your sneakiest workarounds?