So what am I doing at the moment in StudioLock? Well I have been experimenting with 5.1 surround sound mixing. I know it sounds like something only a proper studio could do, but it is surprisingly easy to achieve surround sound mixes. Firstly, you’ll need to have a sound card in your PC that has multiple outputs. I purchased a USB external soundcard for my laptop for £10 to achieve this. Of course, you will need a surround sound speaker system to connect the soundcard to. I’ve had a such a speaker setup in the living room for nearly a decade now, so it was just a matter of connecting thiings up.
I use Cakewalk Sonar 7 to do my recording. I’ve been using Sonar since 2000 and the latest version give you surround sound mixing out of the box. The tricky thing is configuring your speakers. To do this, open an audio project you are working on and go to Projects > Surround and then assign an audio channel to each speaker channel on the list. When you are happy with this, save the configuration for future use. Now you’ll need to right click and create a new Surround Bus and then click on each audio channel in your project and change the audio output from the stereo bus to the new surround bus. Following me?
Now a surround panner panel will appear in each channel that’s been designated to the surround bus. You can use your mouse to position the audio channel in the surround sound field. You can even automate panning to make the sounds whizz around, etc.
Once your mix is complete, export the audio as a multichannel RIFF audio WAV file. This can be encoded to a DVD disc for playback on a home entertainment system through a multichannel audio system. Alternatively, you can encode the audio as a multichannel Windows Media Audio file, which means you an easily distribute it via the net, but it is aimed at those who have surround speakers connected to their PC or an Xbox 360 connected to multichannel audio system.
This has been your lesson for the day…

« »