From: Richard Lee
Post by Richard LeeI sympathise with Mr Elen though I'm one of the Soundfield / Dead
White Man's Music
brigade.
Don't get me wrong, so am I (amongst other things). I actually listen to
and enjoy a great many kinds of music, and I had a classical (choral
scholar) musical training. However, my surround background is primarily
concerned with mixing from multitrack, and I've always believed that
this was the area that needed to be addressed for Ambisonics to take off
- just as single-point microphone techniques are interesting, effective
but seldom appropriate for stereo recording, the same is true in
surround with Ambisonics. Most mass-selling content simply isn't made
that way.
Post by Richard LeeOne of the things unearthed by the Elen/Carbines DTS-WAV initiative
and also the
Benjamin AC3 effort is that it's incredibly difficult to do ANY
multi-channel stuff.
None of the inexpensive wave editing packages like Audition are well
set up to do
so. The free ones like Audacity don't even recognise multi WAVE_X
files. And it
was difficult to find info to write WAVE_X files too.
I don't entirely agree with you - it's not 'incredibly difficult', just
more long-winded than it should be. What we have found are the following:
1. Cheap semi-pro solutions don't do the job. If you want a professional
job, you need a pro application. A stereo-based pro solution won't do
the job either.
2. Few apps are equipped to handle multichannel files, such that there
is not currently a multichannel file-based workflow we can use. At
present, the ".amb" and multichannel files structures are actually a
/disadvantage/ because we need to disentangle them before we can use the
vast majority of tools. This will hopefully change in time, as a
multichannel workflow would be so much easier. Last night, for example,
I wanted to extract three minutes of a longer work and fade it at the
end to create a demo sample, and it took far longer than it should.
Post by Richard LeeThe likes of Nuendo may be out of the range of the people you might
want to enthuse
over surround. What we need to sell is not Ambisonics but simply
Surround. And
the tools for easy production.
This is conflating a number of issues, but I support the general thrust.
1. I am certainly interested in enthusing music buyers about surround in
general - and as it happens I think that showing them stuff that sounds
great is a good way to do it, and Ambisonics sounds great. However my
interest in enthusing the general public about surround (music) is as an
avenue to Ambisonics acceptance, not to the acceptance of surround for
its own sake (although I support that, I only have the energy to grind
one axe at a time at present). Note, however, that if what I consider to
be a better way (as defined by a bunch of criteria) of doing surround
turns up, I may support that instead - it just hasn't happened for the
last few decades.
2. The listening public don't, however, need production tools of any
kind. They need content that is targeted for their existing playback
capabilities, as those change with time - hence the DTS-CD G-Format
initiative - and, possibly, making available new, simple tools that
enable them to experience what we have to offer. However the latter
still needs promotion and wide availability as you are trying to get
people to be able to do something they currently can't, which is always
more difficult than getting them to do something they already can (such
as putting a disc in a DVD player).
3. I'm interested in targeting professional engineers and producers (and
popular artists inasmuch as they have any influence on the technology
used on their sessions). This means that Ambisonics has to work with
professional production tools, and the extent to which is works with
semi-pro tools is important only inasmuch as those tools are used by
people who sell a lot of copies. We should not confuse "tools for easy
production" with "tools for cheap production".
The obvious professional tool that would be valuable to target is Pro
Tools, as that is the predominant DAW platform. This we do not currently
have except in the most basic form. What we /do/ have is an extensive
collection of VST plugins which work with the #2 DAW, Nuendo, thanks to
the hard work of a lot of talented people.
Now as it happens I think Nuendo is a significantly superior product to
Pro Tools, but Digidesign is the recording industry equivalent of
Microsoft, with all that implies. However, the fact that we can now
actually build Nuendo-based Ambisonic mixing systems and simply process
the result to deliver immediately- or simply-playable content is a major
advance. In fact, we've never had it so good: in the old days we had the
Audio & Design system but few of us had B-Format recording capability,
and there was no way of releasing anything superior to 2-channel UHJ discs.
Post by Richard LeeThat the archive medium is B-format is irrelevant. But if this format
allows easy
decoding into 5.1, 7.1 .. Zillion.1 later, then it's a feature worth
mentioning.
I think the whole business of audio rendering is going to be important -
the idea that you can have a master that can be regenerated to suit any
current or future surround system. In this respect, as B-Format is a
replay-system-resolution-independent "PostScript equivalent" format, it
is worthy of note, and I think this is saleable to the professional
recording industry. Think of the money it would save when reissuing
recordings in new formats. Not as good as everyone being able to play
B-Format discs, but that's a fairly low-probability outcome.
Post by Richard LeeCos present solutions are so clunky, there's an opportunity to be
CoolEdit for the
multi-surround century. Any young Turks want to take this up?
I don't think the Nuendo/VST-plugins solution is particularly "clunky"
as much as it is in need of documentation. Once I am more au-fait with
Nuendo I might attempt this myself, but that won't be for a while, and I
hope that Dave & Co might have made a start on that themselves by then.
But despite my comments above, I do think a "surround CoolEdit", ie an
accessible multichannel DAW with Ambisonic mixing capability would be a
great idea. Probably best implemented by encouraging existing teams to
deliver an architecture that can support B-Format, multichannel files
and then produce the application elements to do it. However this is not
my field!
-_Richard E