spatial audio in Bitwig

[Midibitch]

Thanks, very interestig workflow / workaround @thomashelzle

[ThomasHelzle]

You're welcome @Midibitch

Not so off-topic as you may think @IIze...

Basically what I'd like to use is a kind of realtime game-engine view on space and place/animate my sources there.
But what's out there is either super expensive and made for cinema mainly (like JMJ says in that article) and/or very limited.

A DAW like AudioGL - abandoned for quite a while now - could have been cool for that, it had a very intriguing spatial form of dealing with sound.

I could imagine this either as a plugin or a full blown DAW for surround mixing where you feed in stems and individual sources and do your full surround mix in there.
If it's a plugin, it could be a simpler plug on every track for basic positioning and on the master one more elaborate one where you do everything in full 3D-space.

I find it rather funny that we don't see much in that regard.
That is one reason why I investigate those realtime engines...

Cheers,

Tom

[trevormeier]

I do think there is a space opening up for a company to bring full spatial processing to a “mere mortal” creative level. The tools for Ambisonic and other spatial formats have existed for awhile but they require a level of commitment similar to building your own eurorack modules. It’s not very accessible and requires significant time investment outside of making music.

That’s why I’m a bit hopeful for Bitwig. As DSP nerds, they have the skills to do spatial properly while exposing it in a musically useful way. They’ve shown that with the Grid (despite its lack of multiple outs… grrr ). Unreal Engine is a good example of this done in another context. The tool does the work behind the scenes: the creatives build the objects and their properties, and the engine presents it in a useful way (for gamers). Now we need something similar, but for musicians and performers.

I do think that a convergence of audio and visual tools would be a beautiful thing to see here though I think the complexity makes it less likely in the near term. That will probably stay in the code-it-yourself realm for awhile.

[ThomasHelzle]

That's why I got pointy ears when epic was listed as an early adopter/interested party for CLAP
They did some other industry specific things before, like the architectural visualisation tools, they bought Bandcamp and games need surround audio, so it could in theory become a thing with them, to have a surround audio authoring tool, based on Unreal and it's existing audio environment.

But yeah, right now it's a bit of a hodgepodge area with every tool being a bit of it's own island, although interchange becomes more and more of a thing in the higher end realm of the realtime graphics market.

I agree that Bitwig could do some beautiful stuff in this realm, they seem to have the basic ideas and approach right, but I do not know if they see it as something in their target area.
Fingers crossed...

Cheers,

Tom

[Cyoon]

This L-ISA Studio is actually a great solution it seems. You choose L-ISA bridge as the driver, then define some outputs and route your tracks directly out of Bitwig in to L-ISA Studio. There you can setup everything with regard to outputs, placement and whatnot and it has a great GUI. Best part then it has vst plugins that you can load on the Bitwig tracks to remote control the movement of single tracks or groups. Fully OSC compatible I/O also.

[ThomasHelzle]

Yeah, L-ISA Studio sounds good from the description but subscription- and Mac only...
Pass
But yes, close to what I would imagine.

Cheers,

Tom

[hockinsk3]

It's really too bad that the FX grid isn't able to add chains or otherwise send more than stereo out without resorting to software loopback. For such an elegant piece of software, it's a pretty glaring omission IMO. Even before adding true multi-channel support, just allowing additional chain outputs from the grid would enable so many workflows.

I did request Bitwig to create a feature to include a multi-audio receiver device, that would really allow you to keep within multichannels until the very end where you export out the individual audio tracks. More and more the issue though are plugins depend on the DAW telling them the channel count of the track/bus they are hosted on and so when that happens, there are really only multichannel tracks that will resolve that. I think it's workable though.

[hockinsk3]

This L-ISA Studio is actually a great solution it seems. You choose L-ISA bridge as the driver, then define some outputs and route your tracks directly out of Bitwig in to L-ISA Studio. There you can setup everything with regard to outputs, placement and whatnot and it has a great GUI. Best part then it has vst plugins that you can load on the Bitwig tracks to remote control the movement of single tracks or groups. Fully OSC compatible I/O also.

Fiedler Spacelab is a good solution too if you have a good strong GPU. It's multichannel spatial audio, but works in Stereo DAWs by using a Beam Plugin that sends to the main Fielder Spacelab VST Receiver (I assume over ethernet) for panning and then there's an MPEG-H ADM Exporter. Unfortunately, it cripples my computer's GPU for some reason and the export depends on the song position to set the in/out markers for the ADM export which seems buggy from Bitwig, but I don't think Bitwig is officially supported.
https://fiedler-audio.com/spacelab-interstellar/

[Cyoon]

This L-ISA Studio is actually a great solution it seems. You choose L-ISA bridge as the driver, then define some outputs and route your tracks directly out of Bitwig in to L-ISA Studio. There you can setup everything with regard to outputs, placement and whatnot and it has a great GUI. Best part then it has vst plugins that you can load on the Bitwig tracks to remote control the movement of single tracks or groups. Fully OSC compatible I/O also.

Fiedler Spacelab is a good solution too if you have a good strong GPU. It's multichannel spatial audio, but works in Stereo DAWs by using a Beam Plugin that sends to the main Fielder Spacelab VST Receiver (I assume over ethernet) for panning and then there's an MPEG-H ADM Exporter. Unfortunately, it cripples my computer's GPU for some reason and the export depends on the song position to set the in/out markers for the ADM export which seems buggy from Bitwig, but I don't think Bitwig is officially supported.
https://fiedler-audio.com/spacelab-interstellar/

Yea, also quite steep in price. We are going to make our audio backend in super collider once the time allows, but that won't solve my Bitwig situation. Spacelab and L-ISA would solve it I think, however I can not see how to insert a multichannel plugin somewhere. At least in L-ISA it's not possible. I would love to use some of these plugins. Maybe one just cannot have it all, yet

https://soundparticles.com/

[Cyoon]

It's really too bad that the FX grid isn't able to add chains or otherwise send more than stereo out without resorting to software loopback. For such an elegant piece of software, it's a pretty glaring omission IMO. Even before adding true multi-channel support, just allowing additional chain outputs from the grid would enable so many workflows.

I did request Bitwig to create a feature to include a multi-audio receiver device, that would really allow you to keep within multichannels until the very end where you export out the individual audio tracks. More and more the issue though are plugins depend on the DAW telling them the channel count of the track/bus they are hosted on and so when that happens, there are really only multichannel tracks that will resolve that. I think it's workable though.

Recently? And did they say something more than, yea it's on the list?

[hockinsk3]

They didn't say multichannel is on the development list as such, just that they are aware users want it to be included and it's being considered for a future update.
For direct sound designs and making music, mach1 is the best I've used and I've used most apart from L-ISA which his not Windows-compatible for some reason. Even gone down the path of syncing Bitwig outputs into ProTools & DaVinci Resolve to use the Dolby Atmos Production Suite for Atmos work but I always return to Mach1 as it's the most flexible system for spatial audio music making in Bitwig and ProTools imo because it's completely identical to the stereo source, allows monitoring from within Bitwig and includes a Transcoder to get to all formats I would need to. The only limit is all your multichannel VST processing in Bitwig has to be done within a vst host plugin like Plogue Bidule, Krushview Element or DDMF Metaplugin. That's basically where I run stuff like Cinematic Rooms in 7.1.4 or Binauralizers taking the 8 channel Mach1 through HRTF if working on headphones.
You can get a free 6 months trial to Mach1 here:
https://www.mach1.tech/trial

[trevormeier]

I’m currently working up a new template that keeps everything within Bitwig, using Blackhole 64ch essentially as the missing multichannel busses in Bitwig. For quad it seems doable, since everything can be routed with a pair of stereo pairs. But beyond that it would be too much. Let’s see how it comes together.

[hockinsk3]

Yep, that method works well. I did similar with JACK Audio. Generally, it's a buffer and sync challenge I found when you start routing outside and back in, but if you're always within the buffer of your I/O with no underruns, it's all pretty stable in my experience, at worst you're just adding double buffer size to things not going out and in with Bitwig Timeshift devices.

Remember, you can also do all your multichannel psuedo routing within Bitwig using Bluecat Connector Senders of the VST multi-chain outs and then Bluecat Connector Receivers in Plogue Bidule. e.g. with Mach1 I am now running the 8 multi-chain outs of each Mach1 Panner VST via a BlueCat Connector on each multichain out. Then that all busses down to my main Mach1 8 Channel Spatial & Binaural Monitor VSTs & Reverb sends to each corner of a 7.1.4 Cinematic Rooms Instance. All this syncs with latency compensation because BlueCat & Plogue Bidule are just VST instances reporting it to Bitwig. This really gives you all the freedom of mutlichannels inside bitwig because Bluecat allows you to just send direct from the multichain outs of a VST and you use another instance inside Plogue Bidule to collect them into the VSTs needing multi-input chains/channels.
This is still work in progress for 'yet another' setup idea, but so far so good. Depends how it scales up to 20-30 panners really but if feels solid so far and supports offline export which is important for me.

scrn.png

[Cyoon]

I did not get into Mach1 yet, but the blue cat method sounds like you worked out how to use true Multichannel plugins within Bitwig? That is the only drawback I currently have with this L-ISA studio, as it cannot load 3rd party plugins and there are quite a few I’d really like to use. Will check out the blue at connector.

[trevormeier]

I've been working on a quad panner using the Grid and got to something that I'm happy with. Working in quad (instead of larger surround formats) made it more doable. The preset takes a stereo input, with the piping in place for quad inputs using a sidechain receiver. It has controls for width, random XY and swirl, as well as a vector panner or direct XY placement.

Screen Shot 2022-10-25 at 16.58.02.png

I use stereo panners and some merge/splits to get consistent panning front/back as well as left/right. Modulators control DC Offsets on a "Quad Sender" FX Layer device, which go to a "Quad Receiver" device using some stereo splits and audio rate modulators to get a pair of stereo outputs for front and rear. These outputs appear as chains in the mixer that you can then route to a pair of FX Tracks assigned to front & rear speakers, or to a spatialization plugin if you're using headphones.

I've attached a preset for you to play with.

Quad Panner (Swirl).bwpreset.zip