User16867864900796362161 (Customer) asked a question.
Atmos assembly channel usage guidelines unclear
The Dolby article "How do I assemble an album of ADM BWFs for Dolby Atmos Music?" says:
There are some considerations that will make the process of assembling much easier.
* Channel usage should be similar for all songs in an album
* Plan Object and Bed usage
* Plan Binaural Settings for the project
I've not tried assembling an album yet but I'd like to bear these tips in mind to get a good workflow in place early on. I was wondering if someone can help me concretely understand what "channel usage should be similar" means, and how similar they need to be to get a good result.
From my understanding the mix stage determines all of these settings, and it doesn't matter to the playback device whether the channel, object and binaural settings of the current track are completely different to the previous track. So why should it matter to the album assembly stage?
It also seems like an unnecessary pain and a creative limitation to have to always route every similar stem to the same object or bed channel throughout an album. Some tracks may require a different approach from others and I don't know how you'd always be able to have the foresight to say that you always want a certain instrument mixed to a certain object or binaural distance.
That said I understand why you might want to follow best practices, and want to understand how people have worked with these guidelines to get good results.
There are some considerations that will make the process of assembling much easier.
* Channel usage should be similar for all songs in an album
* Plan Object and Bed usage
* Plan Binaural Settings for the project
I've not tried assembling an album yet but I'd like to bear these tips in mind to get a good workflow in place early on. I was wondering if someone can help me concretely understand what "channel usage should be similar" means, and how similar they need to be to get a good result.
From my understanding the mix stage determines all of these settings, and it doesn't matter to the playback device whether the channel, object and binaural settings of the current track are completely different to the previous track. So why should it matter to the album assembly stage?
It also seems like an unnecessary pain and a creative limitation to have to always route every similar stem to the same object or bed channel throughout an album. Some tracks may require a different approach from others and I don't know how you'd always be able to have the foresight to say that you always want a certain instrument mixed to a certain object or binaural distance.
That said I understand why you might want to follow best practices, and want to understand how people have worked with these guidelines to get good results.
These guidelines are written with the goal of gapless playback in mind, where each song transitions into another. In that case, you would want to maintain similar channel mapping, object and bed usage, and binaural settings so that it is easier to transition between songs and to import all songs into a single DAW session without running into object limits and IO setup issues. These suggestions have nothing to do with downstream deliverables but are intended to help keep gapless workflows organized and consistent.
If you are not planning to have gapless playback, these suggestions are not as important, and you can feel free to construct each song however it best fits the specific instrumentation and source material. Obviously the content of the album should always determine the mixing methodology, but it is helpful to plan ahead of time so that you can spend less time on session/project organization and more time actually mixing.
If you are just looking to organize and master an album without focusing on gapless playback, you can also use the Dolby Atmos Album Assembler, which makes it much easier to assemble multiple tracks with different object counts, settings, etc.
-B