I'm recording several things with my Canon Legria HF S200, both with and without an external mic plugged in.
Th mic goes to a jack(3,5 I think) and the camera switches automatically to the mic.

Later on I use Kdenlive to edit my footages and for me, on my computer there is no problem with audio.
But for others, when e.g. watching my videos on youtube, there are problems.
Some have no audio, some have some strange audio... Very irritating.

The camera records in AVCHD, and I then transcode to DNxHD 1080 25fps 120 Mb/s.
(Have not yet tried the proxy-stuff)

I think the problem is the way the camera records with the microphone, but I would very much be able to solve this (easily) during my editing.

I render my videos to the MPEG-4 (8000) format, or a customized version of the Youtube 1280*720.
Customized in the sense that I've had to change audio-codec to: libmp3lame.
I've tried rendering to other formats but without luck.

Is there no way to just get Kdenlive to 'normalize' all audio in one video to stick to the same format?
I've tried the audio-effects with no result so far.
I've also tried different stuff in Audacity, e.g. splitting audio-tracks and then re-importing them to Kdenlive with no result so far.
(And having to export, change, re-import, and synchronizing sound is not on my wish-list...)

I not an expert on either Linux or on audio, be gentle with me ;-)

I run the Ubuntu 10.04 and Kdenlive 0.8, but I've had the issue since at least some versions of both Ubuntu and Kdenlive.

What to do?

PS. I cannot change the way the camera records audio, and some tips around the www on changing audio-recording from 12mb to 16mb stereo is probably not an option for me.

The external mic is plugged in via an -minijack stereo to xlr-adaptor cable.

> Is there no way to just get Kdenlive to 'normalize' all audio in one video to stick to the same format?

Well, when you render out, it does exactly that (although the term normalize usually refers to making all the audio volume in the same range so no parts are much louder or quieter - I assume in this case you mean - 'to use the same codec / bitrate etc). When rendering, all the audio is exported at your chosen format, no matter what format the original was in.

Try doing something like adding an WAV audio file into the project then rendering out. If they can head the WAV file, but not the audio from the camera, then something very odd is going on in Kdenlive.. but if they can't hear anything, the problem is related to your rendering of the project, in which case your best bet is to try rending out with different settings.

Note: I've found with a lot of footage from Canon DSLRs that the audio is only one one channel, in Kdenlive you can easily fix that using the "Mono to Stereo" effect.

Ok thanks a lot for your help.
I think I've tried the mono to stereo before without succes, but I've just tried it again after your tip, and it seems to work.

And it doesn't matter whether I use 'left to right' or 'right to left' which confuses me ;-)
But confused or not I seem to be able to make everybody listen to my videos in a proper way, and I don't have to do anything but to remember to add the effect to the clips in which I use the mic.

What is also confusing to me is that on some computers the sound was okay and others it wasn't.
My computer is connected to my stereo(music-device) and i had sound in both speakers when others only got it one speaker, or in case of for example Iphones, didn't get any sound at all.
I'm guessing the Iphone-problem is because Iphone only uses one channel and that just happened to be the one without sound...

Anyway thank you very much, a pleasure using Kdenlive and feeling the community around it is working.