Hi,

I did investigate how surround works in Logic 8 a while back.

You have only one multi-channel output, and no sub-busses. You have to decide the output format, the choices being apparently standard quad, LCRS, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1 (as I recall). The good news is that you can centre the built-in surround panner, which effectively bypasses it. Thus it seems at first that you could use this to produce any sort of surround, ambisonics in my case, with the right sort of panners. The limit is obviously 8-channels wide.

However it didn't seem to work properly beyond four channel quad.

I made a number of multi-channel Pluggo plug-ins, that had a pink noise generator, and a switch to route the output to just one channel at a time. Quad was fine: route to output one and it came out of channel one on the quad master. Fine with outputs 3 to 4. Things started to go wrong with 5.1. I don't recall the exact details, but some channels came up on different outputs, and some on more than one output. Similarly with 7.1, though the pattern was different, and not obviously related. Some of this could be explained by the the different output channel orders used within 5.1, and 7.1, but it seemed there was more going on under the hood that was not explained anywhere.

I concluded that this was typical Apple: trying to make it simple for the user, but not really explaining it. Four channel B-Format ambisonics will work in the simplest possible way. 5.1 and 7.1 also presumably work, though it would seem that there are a few curious things happening, and I never tried it. Although I have Logic 9, there seems no indication that anything much has changed in this respect. The upgrade seems to have concentrated on other things: those that musicians working within stereo could do in rival products.

Cubase, Nuendo, ProTools and Reaper seem to behave well in this respect.

Probably the safest option if you only want to use Logic is to do what Jascha suggests. Could get fiddly, as there seems no easy method to precisely time align mono files on different tracks, apart from snapping them to a grid. Then you'd need to group the tracks so that editing one edits all.

I admit to not being a Logic expert user, but quickly went back to using something else for this sort of work.

Ciao,,
Dave Hunt

Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2011 18:34:59 -0400
From: Jascha Narveson <jnarve...@wesleyan.edu>
Subject: Re: [Sursound] mixing multichannel in Logic
To: Surround Sound discussion group <sursound@music.vt.edu>
Message-ID: <f99bd2c7-abdd-4739-bc1d-529fbb761...@wesleyan.edu>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii


If you're just doing simple cut-and-paste editing (ie: not generating new multichannel data using multichannel panning etc), you could just work in multiple mono tracks and then use something like Scott Wilson's free little De-Interleaver app to pull apart and put together multichannel files.

(link on this page:  http://www.beast.bham.ac.uk/research/mulch.shtml)

If you don't mind learning a new DAW and have $40 lying around, you could get a copy of Reaper, which works with multichannel audio pretty nicely.

cheers,

j


On Jun 12, 2011, at 5:13 PM, Navid Navab wrote:

Does anyone know a straightforward way to mix multichannel files (8 or 10 channels files) inside logic pro 9. I have a few already decoded and already panned multichannel files that I like to edite and then mix together into one file. So logic needs to be setup to read a few 8 channel files and
and mix them into one 8 or 10 channel file.
thanks,
-Navid


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