Blog archive for August 2025

Application patching for Ambisonic and Dolby Atmos

I am remixing a previous work in order to spatialise in seventh rather than third order Ambisonic. For upcoming concerts. I have to be able to provide the resulting work in Ambisonic as well as Dolby Atmos theatrical format. Based on experience from our sessions at Lillehammer last winter, I will mix all scenes in seventh order Ambisonic. This can either be decoded directly, or I will use Blue Ripple to decode to a 64 channel dome, further mapped to 64 Dolby Atmos objects.

I now test out a rather complex system combining

• Multiple parallell Reaper projects:
  
  
  
  • Reaper projects for scene authoring – returning 64 channel O7A signals
  • Reaper decoding project – Receiving O7A signals, decoding and forwarding either to Dolby Atmos Renderer or as a 12 channel 7.1.4 decoded signal fir direct monitoring
  • Reaper speaker setup calibration project – receiving 7.1.4 over loopback, applying Sonarworks SoundID loudspeaker calibration



• Dolby Atmos renderer


• Mira Flux for monitoring


• Multiple audio drivers combined into an aggregate device:
  
  
  
  • Loopback 64 channel virtual audio driver – passing O7A encoded signals from Reaper scene authoring projects to a Reaper decoding project
  
  
  • Dolby Audio Bridge – passing audio signals for Dolby Atmos objects to Dolby Atmos Renderer
  
  
  • Loopback 16 channel virtual audio driver – passing 7.1.4 signals from multiple sources. This can include:
    
    
    
    • Rendered signals from Dolby Atmos Renderer
    
    
    • Decoded signals from Ambisonic
    
    
    • Output from Apple Music or Apple TV, for playback of content from streaming services that provides audio in Dolby Atmos

  
  
  • Driver for the physical sound card

Let’s see how and if this might work…

QLab adds Object Audio

QLab 5.5 introduces Object Audio as a new tool for sound design. With this, you can describe the speaker layout used in live performance or a sound installation, and then design audio cues with trajectories that move the sound sources within the space. It seems to be nicely designed, possibly taking a few ideas from the paper on DBAP by me, Pia Baltazar and Theo de la Hogue.

The spatialisation technique resembles DBAP, but with further refinements that substantially improves behaviour in edge cases where classic DBAP struggles, using shadows and filters. The heat map, as well as the ability to use the technique to move and crossfade between several paralell audio FXs, were both suggested in our paper.

It is nice to see such a well-made and thorough implementation of these ideas.