More often than not audio material that does the same thing and could be treated as a stereo file doesn't get delivered in that shape. A typical example is the left and right channel of a stereo recording such as drum overheads or a stereo room mic. It can also be overdubs of guitars or vocals.
It usually make sense to treat these files as stereo files though for a couple of reasons. For the most part you'd probably want to treat these audio in the same fashion anyway. You probably want the same kind of equing and compression to be applied to both tracks. Also it's a lot easier to keep track of one track than two tracks right?
So if you have a project full of mono tracks that could be put together as stereo tracks there's a handy action in the sws-extension. If you haven't installed it go to www.sws-extension.org and follow instructions. The action that will, once you've installed the extension, pop up in the actions menu is an action called "xenakios/sws: implode items to takes and pan symetrically". I personally like to combine this in a custom action followed by "Item: Glue items, expanding to time selection if any" which is a standard reaper actions. I have CTRL+ALT+I set to this action.
To run it select the two items you want to combine and the items will jump to the top track of the two and be glued together. Now you have a perfectly fine and panned out stereo track instead of a mono track. If you need any stereo balancing or phase issues taken care of you can use the "JS: Stereo Channel Volume/Pan/Polarity Control". This plugin will help with balancing the left and right channel or make width adjustments!
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