A friend has a daughter who's almost deaf in one ear.
Her music collection is, of course, mostly stereo so when she's listening on her iPod Shuffle, she's missing half the tune.
As the Shuffle doesn't have a mono output option that I can find (unlike the iPhone/iPod Touch) he's going to need to convert her stuff into mono.

Any recommendations for a free bit of software to accomplish this?

Audacity.

It might be a bit of overkill, but it would certainly do the job.

I'd completely forgotten about Audacity!
Cheers H.

There's a mono option in most software you use to rip or convert, usually where you set the bit rate. I'd set her default to 128K mono on her whatever she uses?

Oh my, the children of today know nothing of ripping tracks, you know.
I'm sure her Dad's going to have a ball going through her collection of youthful pop music in Audacity churning it into mono.

I think there's a batch convert. I'm sure Audacity is probably not the easiest way, but it's a great program.

Can't she get a little adaptor for the headphone jack? I'm sure you used to be able to get mono ones. That way she could listen to any music on any device in mono.

Great suggestion!
I've pointed him at one of these too - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Cables-To-Go-Stereo-Adapter/dp/B002DWAXLE/ - a 3.5mm stereo in/mono out jack.
Cheers!

A 3.5mm stereo to mono adaptor would be my suggestion too. However on a shuffle it would be a significant size. On the plus side her music collection wouldn't be hobbled and any audiophile friends of hers won't be offended when it is being played through a speaker setup.

I'm sure there will also be headphones available with this as an option.

Those would be some very advanced 8 year olds.

Young kids can be especially mean.

in the sound settings for volume/speakers should be a slider to balance the speakers (stereo)
just use/move the slide balance to lift/right and set this to default

that way only one speaker will be playing instead of the 2 (or more) ...

Yeah, but you'd be masking out the other side of a mix. Try that on some of the Beatles' early stereo stuff and you'd lose significant stuff like the drums*. Better to mix both channels down to one where possible, I would have thought.

*There would be those who would argue losing Ringo Starr would be an improvement. I couldn't possibly comment.

I think you just did.

Another option would be dBPowerAmp which contains a batch converter, so you can select the entire music collection and set the computer churning away doing the conversion with minimal interaction required.