7.1.2 Dolby Atmos bed tracks in Ableton Live made easy

today's videos and updates to a previous video where I showed you how to use Ableton Live for the production of Dolby Atmos and one of the issues that we ran into is that Ableton life is only stereo and Adobe Atmos essentially asks for a 7.1.2 bed track and you obviously can't do that directly within Ableton because once again it will miss only stereo so we had a couple of hacks a couple of workarounds that allowed us to sort of kind of do bad tracks for all the atmos but none of those things were really perfect now however over the last couple of days one of the developers of one of the solutions that we used made a couple of additions that now make it possible to really do a full 7.1.2 bad track in Ableton Live and this is what I'm going to show you today now the video today is probably going to be a little bit shorter but I felt that the development is significant enough to justify its own video so if you're enabled in life and you want to do Adobe Atmos now you can actually do that in almost exactly the same way like you would do in Pro Tools or any other digital direct station and that's actually really really cool so with that being said let's get right into how to actually do that foreign in case you're new here my name is Michael Wagner I teach at the Antoinette Westford College of media arts and design at Drexel University in Philadelphia and on this channel I talk about digital media game design and spatial audio and if any of those topics interest you I invite you to subscribe or join my Discord community in that link is in the description below and since you already did it also please don't forget to press the like button especially if you get any value out of my videos it really helps out the channel and makes my videos more accessible to other people thank you so let's get right into evil now a couple couple of things I need to mention before I get started um there are a couple of requirements that we have today the first thing is that what I'm going to show you today only works on a Mac and that is unfortunate but that is a consequence of the fact that Dolby Atmos or the Dolby Atmos production suit is only available for a mix so well everything that we're going to do with in Ableton is actually independent of the operating system if you want to work with Dolby Atmos view unfortunately have to have a Mac and the second thing that we need to be aware of is that if we are using one of the later or the newest mix that runs with a apple silicon chip we need to make sure that Ableton is uh set to work or set to be opened with Rosetta and the reason for that is for some of the things that we're going to do or use today are requiring an Intel chip so they can't really kind of work they are not Apple silicon native yet so we need to work with the emulation now fortunately this actually works relatively well so there aren't really any problems that you have from that so so just set Ableton to reset that and once again we need to be on a Mac now the way I'm going to do this today is with a very simple drum Loop and all I'm going to do is I'm going to essentially take the drum Loop and convert it into 7.1.2 and then feed that into the Dolby Atmos Ranger so let's just have a brief listen to the drum Loop it is a drum Loop that comes with the Leviathan Peg from black octopus sound which is actually really maybe a nice pack in case you don't have that yet highly recommend it so let's just have a brief listen on how that really sounds and that's really everything that I'm going to kind of use today now the first thing I need to do is I need to open up the Dolby Atmos render and once again this is uh because we're working with Ableton so we can't really use an internal renderer obviously so it has to be the external renderer which once again only exists for Mac uh so um let's open it up and let's connect Ableton to it so let's open up the render and that is on the Adobe Dolby renderer and here we have the Dolby Ranger now the first thing we need to do is we need to make sure is that the input and output settings are set correctly so let's go into the preferences and let's just make sure that everything is set correctly so the input is supposed to be the Dolby audio Bridge so that's the way we're going to connect Ableton with the Dolby rendra and then the output device let me just set that to my um user interface here for some reason it didn't it didn't remember that and let's let's accept it and then we need to prepare Ableton for communicating with the Dolby Atmos renderer so the first thing is that we need to select the output device and the output device is supposed to be the Adobe audio bridge that is a 130 in 130 out kind of configuration so let's just uh if you haven't done that yet you will need to go into the output settings and then essentially enable all the stereo outputs and once again the last two have to be mono outputs that is because 129 is going to serve as the time code channel so that the channel That essentially provides the timecode information um and then we need to do a couple of other things and if you want to know exactly how all the details I invite you to watch my previous video here I'm just going to go quickly over those things just to make sure that they have everything so it said correctly so the first thing that we need is we need a Time code so so the time code needs to be provided by Ableton so that the Adobe Atmos render nodes are what time code it's supposed to be using and for that purpose we need to select the time code plugin and that is under Dolby and here we have the LTC generator and we're going to put that on one of the audio tracks that really make any difference which one and uh we need to set the frame rate now the frame rate has to be the same frame rate that is used in the Dolby Atmos surrender in my particular case here this is 24 frames per second doesn't make any difference we're not going to wreck this video anyway so it doesn't really make any difference whatsoever but we need to set it uh to match to match the frame rate of the renderer and then we need to just make sure that this is also sent to the renderer the renderer now is essentially um expecting the time code on channel 129 so we need to kind of set the audio out to external out and then essentially set that to 129 that will essentially move the time code into the Dolby Atmos renderer so the last thing we need to do is we need to Simply send the uh the drum Loop that we have to the to the Dolby Atmos renderer so for the moment being let me just send that to the first two channels of the batch drag so I'm going to select the external out and I'm going to Simply send that to one and two and that should then pop up here under channels one and two of the Dolby atmosphere let me just see if everything is working correctly so let's just play that and indeed it does so we now have the audio signal and once again I'm not going to talk too much about how to set everything up if you have objects you would need to have to add the um Adobe Atmos Pena and then essentially send the pending information to the Adobe Atmos renderer and the other information separately all I'm going to do here is I'm really only going to essentially send stuff into the bed channels and for the purpose we just send it into the corresponding external outputs so um how going to how are we going to convert that stereo signal now into a 7.1.2 and the answer to that is actually relatively simple what we're going to do is we're going to convert it into ambisonics first and then we are going to kind of take that ambisonic signal and convert it into 7.1.2 the reason we're going to do it that way is because for Ableton there's a very very well produced mix for Life set of devices that allow us to work with ambisonics and we can actually utilize that now I did a couple of videos before and about about that particular approach and I'm going to leave some links in description below the system is called envelope for life so um there are really two things that we need to do is the first thing is we need to set a an ambisonic Source Pena on our drum Loop pass so it's essentially kind of the the track that holds the drum Loop and then we need a master bus device that converts that ambisonic signal back into something that we can send or forwards to the um to the Dolby Atmos renderer so let's just first take the the drum Loop drag and let's just add a device a source Panner so once again let's go into the where do we have that on the user Library I think pegs wherever you kind of put that envelope alive so what we're going to do is we're going to Simply take the source Panna the envelope Source planner and we're going to drop that onto our Loop or our track that essentially holds the loop and that essentially will convert the Australia signal into an ambisonic signal and then scented ambisonic signal into mix for life so there's obviously a second step that we need to take we need to take that signal out of Max for life and convert it back into something that we can forward to the Adobe Atmos renderer now for that purpose what we're going to do is we're going to use the master bus device and we are not going to use the master bus device that is coming with the envelope for life system directly what we're going to do is we're going to use the custom device that the developer created for head tracking and he essentially added a capability to decode into 7.1.2 I'm once again going to leave links in the description below it's actually fairly straight forward you just download that and essentially open it up that's all you really need to do and in my case I have that here under masterbus device for heads tracking and I'm going to drop that onto our audio on one of the audio buses um it could also be a kind of a return track but it's not allowed to be on the masterpass itself and this is the master bus device and the only thing that we now really need to do is we need to set that masterpass device to kind of take that ambisonics audio and convert it into 7.1.2 and then forward that into the Dolby Atmos renderer a couple of things first of all let's disable the monitoring option that monitoring button here means that the um stereo signal is also simultaneously forwarded to outputs one and two we don't want that because we essentially are just kind of using everything for a regular kind of monitoring the the ambisonic signal so let's just disable that and then we're going to select here uh this 7.1.2 now if you are using the regular masterpass device that comes with envelope you're not going to see that 7.1.2 this is sort of the addition that the developer of this particular custom device did in order to make what I'm going to kind of show you now are possible now there's also a 7.0.2 option and I'm going to talk about that in a second let's just for a moment select the 7.1.2 and then we need to make sure that everything is set to the ascent to the Adobe Atmos renderer and for that we just need to kind of send them into the corresponding external out so that everything here is already set to external out so so the first two I'm going to send to one and two the three three four is going to send to three and four um then five and six is going to be sent to five and six and seven eight and then the last two nine and ten so those are essentially the seven channels 7.1.2 those are 10 channels and that will then move the signal into the external output 1 to 10 and that should reach the Dolby Atmos renderer so let's just see if everything is working correctly so let's just play the loop we see the ambisonic signal here and if you go into the Adobe Atmos renderer we essentially see that all 10 channels are now active so that signal has been converted into ambisonics and this custom masterpass device has then converted that into 7.1.2 audio now the one thing that we are noticing is that it also sends stuff into the LFE Channel and what it's actually doing is it it's going to let me just turn it off for a second what it is actually going to do is it's going to send the mono signal into it into the LFE Channel because it assumes that there's some bus management going on this might not be optimal for you so if you're working with Dolby Atmos quite often you actually don't want to send anything into the LFE Channel or you actually only want to use the LFE Channel who has actual purpose which is low frequency effects uh if if sort of the way this works bothers you or if it's not really working for you what you can do is you can instead switch to the 7.0.2 and that essentially makes sure that there's nothing sent into the LFE channel so that you can for example use a separate track and just send stuff into that channel separately for example you have certain low frequency effects and you just want to send those into that that particular Channel you can you can then do that so if I'm not doing that I should I should see no action on the um LFE channel so let's just spread it again and then I'll see that the LFE channel is empty and let's once again switch that back to the 7.1.2 if I do that essentially I have I have a signal on the LFE channel so depending on your particular application environment or what you want to do with Dolby Atmos one or the other makes sense most likely you're going to work with 702 and then maybe send some additional signal into the LFE Channel because once again sending the something into the channel just means sending it to the corresponding external output that's really everything that you need to do now if you're interested uh in me showing you how to actually address that LFE Channel separately with LFE effects um let me know in the comment section I can certainly do a video about it it's very straightforward but you know kind of I think it would make a nice video so if you're interested in me showing you that let me know so if you now want to move things around all we will need to do is we need to go into the source panel and essentially kind of move the signal there so let's just do that now I kind of rearranged the windows a little so that we have both the renderer as well as Ableton open here at the same time I'm obviously kind of one thing that you'll probably do is you would work with the two monitor setup but you know kind of for this particular purpose that's perfectly fine so let's just uh let's just play a little Loop and we can then essentially move the signal so let's just move that maybe to the to the left go to the right or we can also move it down up and depending essentially on how we moved it so now it's for example it's completely on top um we will have the corresponding uh channels active so this is where everything I wanted to show you today now the nice thing about this particular solution is that with the exception of the Dolby Atmos render obviously all the software that we use the envelope for life system as well as this customer device are completely free so you can just download them so when you have or if you have the Adobe Atmos renderer if you have the Dolby Atmos production suit and you are used to working with Ableton Live there's absolutely nothing that prevents you from producing Dolby Atmos with a wooden for life you can do almost everything that you could do with any other digital audio workstation that is utmost capable and that I think is actually fairly cool and fairly nice and fairly neat um I'm personally a kind of a big fan of development it's the door that I started with so I'm really happy that I can now do everything in Dolby Atmos disabled as well so once again if you have any questions or comments please use the comment section below or join our Discord community and let's have a chat there and if you if there's anything that interests you that you want me to explain a little bit more in detail let me know and I can certainly do a video about that and with that being said see you at the next video

Channel: Michael G Wagner

Views: 2,317

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Id: aKARZJnc3xo

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 01 2023