Understanding Mid/Side Processing

Good day all,

I'm a newbie to the music production world and I've got a question about Mid/Side processing. Well, to be honest, I have more than just 1 simple question about it, I'm having a difficult time wrapping my head around it exactly.

I use FL Studio 10. So any mid/side alterations occur through the FL Stereo Shaper plugin.

Let me tell you how I understand it (which I could and probably am very wrong in several ways).

From what I gather, music is recorded into both a Left and Right channel. So when the music is recorded in the studio, all of the identical information is recorded into the Mid/Mono signal, while the unique or different information is recorded into the Side/Stereo channel.

If I wanted to isolate either the Mid or Side channel in FL using the Stereo Shaper, could I just use the Mid or Side presets?

And, if I do happen to extract and isolate the side signal, how do I know if its the unique information from the Right or Left speaker/channel?

I guess what I would like to fully understand and accomplish with the Stereo Shaper plugin is to isolate the Mid and Side channels from audio samples I have or alter the Mono/Stereo portions of a synthesizer track I may have.

Am I getting the general gist of Mid/Side processing? I feel like there are certain pieces of information that I'm missing that will fully get my mind around how it works and how to actually apply it to my music.

Thanks and have a great day,

Speck

not all stereo tracks you come about are recorded using mid/side technique but are either recorded using another stereo miking technique, such as "spaced pair", "ortf" or "xy" and the results of those techniques differ and can not be decoded the same way a mid/side recording can be.

the mid/side recording consists of a mid microphone that records a mono recording pointed directly at the sound source and the side recording is made with a figure eight microphone that is 90 degree of axxis to the mid microphone with the front pointing to the right, but also only to a mono channel.
so what does that side microphone do to get a stereo soundfield of two mono recordings from the same place in the room? simple as that: the sound coming from the right puts positive pressure on the figure eight capsule and the sound coming from the left is putting negative pressure on that capsule.
to make a stereo track out of these two mono tracks again you need three tracks. track one is the mid signal alone that is the center of the track. then on track two you have the side track to form the right side of the stereo track and on the third track you have the side track again, but this time you flip the polarity 180 degrees. this is essentially m=m plus m+s=r plus m-s=r

more to read here: http://www.about-audio-mastering-software.com/mid-side-processing.html

i must admit that i do never decode stereo tracks to manipulate the way you described as this scenario never came up in my work, but i do a lot of mid/side recording, because to me this is the best stereo recording techique on most sources. the biggest advantage in mixing is the ability to turn the mid channel up or down to bring the middle out or to push it back or to widen the stereo field. also on many sources other stereo recording techniques leave some "gap" in the middle of the soundfield which may not matter in a bigger arrangement but does sound hollow on solo sounds.

peace, jo

He is talking about mid-side processing, not mid-side recording.

Same deal, but you take a normal stereo sound, encode it to mid-side, process the mid and side signals separately, then decode back from mid-side to stereo.

Lets you split out and process the centre sounds separately to the side sounds.