Exporting (bouncing?) a podcast as mono mp3

How do I export my podcast as a mono mp3?

I've searched and searched and either I don't actually know what I'm asking and/or looking for or I just can't find an answer so hopefully you guys can help me.

I changed all of my channel inputs other than the stereo music track to mono but the outputs are "stereo out" When I change the outputs to mono I only hear audio from the left channel. Why would mono not just combine the left and right? When I change the master track to two mono output tracks, it creates a Stereo Out, and an Output 2 and my loudness instantly drops from -19 to -29, and I can't get it back to -19 without changing the master track back to stereo and then everything sounds great again.

One more thing, if my original tracks were recorded in mono in Garageband, why would they have all defaulted to stereo when I opened the project in Logic?

Thanks for any help you can give me. I'm a professional video editor but this audio routing and bouncing stuff has me so confused.

The default for LPX is typically an interleaved stereo file. Stereo is also pretty much the default for anyone listening to a podcast, such as in iTunes, even though 98% of podcasts are likely mono (some may include stereo music stingers).

If you have a mono podcast to distribute, it will be most compatible if you export that in dual mono, meaning two interleaved channels that, being identical, should provide a 'mono' experience for listeners using iTunes or nearly any other platform to listen to it.

There are a number of ways to do this in LPX. One of the simplest is to insert a gain plugin on the output track, then set that to forced mono (there is a setting on the interface). What this does is takes whatever is in the interleaved two channels of that track, whether it is mono on one of those channels or mono on both channels (or even stereo), and creates identical mono channels for both of the interleaved channels in the output track. IOW, dual mono.

That should solve the issue, and it should be compatible with podcast platforms.

And if the level is then too low, I'd suggest using normalization. It gets a bad rap, but using it for a completed track is common and has no down side, and it should make it similar in level to other podcasts (unless there is some loud sound in that file).

Thanks. I finally got a mono mp3. This is what I did in case anyone else needs help with this.

I ended up changing all of mixer track inputs back to stereo, with the outputs also set to stereo to sort of "reset" the mixer back to the default as it was before I started changing things. This meant I had to redo my noise plug-in. Then I changed the "Master Track" to dual mono and LPX automatically named the two mono tracks "Stereo Out" and "Output 2" This removed the FX from my original stereo Master Track so I had to redo them on "Stereo Out." I spent several minutes confused as to why I was only hearing my compressor/limiter adjustments on the left channel before I realized it was because the "Stereo Out" track was the left channel of the dual mono. So I copied my newly created FX from "Stereo Out" to "Output 2." I don't know if that was necessary for my final file but it made it sound balanced and allowed me to hit my target loudness of -19. Then I just hit "BNC" on the "Stereo Out" track to bounce out a mono mp3 and ended up with exactly what I wanted. When the bounce options menu came up it said it was going to take 1.44GB for my 64Kbps, mono, 1 hour 34 minute podcast, but my exported mp3 was only 45MB. Not sure what the 1.44GB estimation was based on.

Probably could have saved myself some time if I had immediately renamed the dual mono tracks. I don't quite understand why LPX would name one half of dual mono track pair "Stereo Out"?