Sample rate and channel count are two settings buried in nearly every audio export dialog that most people never touch, largely because the defaults work fine most of the time. But understanding what each one actually does helps explain both why some audio files are needlessly large and why certain recordings, particularly voice recordings, benefit from deliberately choosing simpler settings rather than the highest numbers available.
Sample rate: how often sound is measured
Digital audio is a series of discrete measurements (samples) of a continuous sound wave taken many thousands of times per second; sample rate is simply how many of those measurements happen each second, measured in Hz. 44.1kHz became the standard for music because it's comfortably above the range of human hearing (roughly 20Hz-20kHz), per the mathematics of digital sampling. 48kHz is the standard in video and broadcast production largely for historical compatibility reasons with video frame timing, not because it captures meaningfully more of what humans can hear. For voice-only content, even 16kHz is often enough to be perfectly intelligible, since speech occupies a narrower frequency range than music, which is why voice-focused formats often use lower sample rates to save space without any real perceptible loss.
Mono vs. stereo: when the difference actually matters
Stereo audio uses two channels to create a sense of spatial width, instruments panned left or right, ambient reverb spread across the stereo field, which matters for music meant to be enjoyed as a produced, spatial listening experience. Mono uses a single channel, identical for left and right playback, and is almost always the better choice for a single-speaker voice recording, since there's no spatial information to preserve in the first place, mono files are roughly half the size of stereo for the same content, and mono avoids the risk of a voice sounding oddly off-center on inconsistent playback systems. The Stereo-Mono Converter handles this conversion directly, and pairing it with the Audio Channel Splitter is useful when you need to inspect or extract just one channel from an existing stereo file. Checking a file's current sample rate and channel configuration is easy with the Audio Metadata Viewer before deciding whether conversion is worth doing.