Spatial music has become a lot more accessible since Logic Pro made the decision to make the Dolby Atmos plugin native to its digital audio workstation. Logic Pro users can now test drive immersive, surround mixes without needing to buy expensive hardware or software.

If you're a bedroom producer or a professional engineer looking to get started, here's how to set up your first spatial audio session in Logic Pro.

If you want to test drive spatial audio, you will need to update Logic Pro to While the Dolby Atmos plugin for spatial audio was first included in the If you're unsure about what the renderer does, you can read about the difference between the Dolby Renderer and Apple Renderer to see which one you should use. Keep in mind, to use the Apple Renderer Head Tracking option logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free head tracking enabled devices, you will also require a Mac with Apple Silicon.

As you will soon discover, converting a stereo session to a spatial audio session in Logic Pro requires a larger sample rate and buffer size. This increase in processing power has an effect on what you can and can't do while working in this format. It's recommended not to record live instruments or include virtual instruments while in a spatial logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free session. You should instead convert your session once you have completed all recordings.

This shouldn't be a problem as most microphones record in mono or stereo outputs anyway, rather than in a multi-surround format. You can use the Dolby Atmos plugin and the 3D Object Panner in post-production to change the spatial logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free of your recordings later on. Let's go over the process of setting up your spatial audio session in Logic Pro.

We've laid out all the steps below. The reason for changing the sample rate of your session is that when spatial audio is turned on in Logic Logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free, tracks are automatically converted in real-time to one of the above sample rates.

For example, if your session is set to The same is true for a session in This conversion affects the performance speed of Logic and is not recommended as a result. If you know that you want to work with spatial audio at some point, it's best to create a recording session in either 48 kHz or 96 kHz from the outset. For more information on how Apple is introducing spatial audio to its hardware and digital platforms, you can read our article about Dolby Atmos and spatial audio for Apple Music.

Finally, to start panning objects in 3-dimensional space, you will need to open the 3D Object Panner plugin. Now that you know how to set up a spatial audio session in Logic Pro, you can start creating new immersive audio tracks.

Try converting your old stereo tracks into surround sound, or write new music just for spatial audio. If this is your first time working with 3D surround sound, it could easily change the way you think about sound forever. Requirements: Logic Pro to

Its surround features are ligic not documented fully in its manual. This page attempts to outline how to use Logic for surround sound work. Much of the same applies if you are using Logic with por ambisonic work set up the surround system as a Quad 4 channel in Project Settings.

Most screenshots and bugs are from Logic version Much of the following applies to 7. Logic is now capable of producing Dolby Atmos format surround sound as of v Dolby Atmos also works significantly differently, in that rather than exporting a 7.

This enables better decoding on playback - a Dolby Atmos decoder can scale up and down logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free bigger or smaller auditoriums, or to systems with more or less speakers, and to be reformatted into binaural sound with head tracking for logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free use. Logic makes it very easy to import mono and stereo files. Surround files are considerably harder. There are two options:. Drag and Drop - this will typically import a surround file as multiple mono files, i.

You can create a track stack to better manage these. There are instances where you might want to do this, for example if you want to rebalance the surround file pajner more detail, or logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free just want to use the centre channel of the file. When you have mono or stereo files routed to a Surround Sound bus, Logic will automatically insert a Surround Panner to replace the normal pan control.

The Surround Panner is about routing one or two inputs to your 5. This is a lot neater. When you have a surround file routed to a Surround Sound bus, Logic will automatically insert a Surround Balancer to replace the normal pan kogic. The Surround Balancer is about routing your 5. These icons indicate how many channels the source file has. These icons represent which inputs from the file Logic will utilise.

You can long-click on the input icons to force Logic to use certain inputs on certain input types. For example, fres on the stereo icon allows you to choose to use a mono version of the stereo file, or just the left or just the right channel. Logic will replace the pan control with a Surround Panner or a Surround Balancer depending rree the input type. Typically mon o or stereo files will have a Surround Panner, whilst a surround file will have a Surround Balancer.

If you long click on the surround file input icon in the mixer as in the image above and tell Logic to use just the left channel of a surround sound file, it will replace the Surround Balancer with a Panner. Consequently when you are dealing with surround sound recordings, you are typically importing 5. As another example, if you purchase sound effects from one of the largest sound effects eurround, Boom Library, they are often provided in 5.

When you mix all these 5. So generally speaking, when you use Logic you are importing mono, stereo and 5. Currently, when I import a 5. Surronud audio on Channels 2, 3, and 4 is completely ignored, which obviously is quite problematic!

So the logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free problems here are: 1 Audio from channels is ignored. Currently the only way to import a 5.

Very boring. Sometimes I will open a 5. Each track has then been panned to the correct outputs for each channel of the audio file.

A Track Logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free can be a useful way of organising tracks when you have to import files like this. The Surround Panner in Logic is not its greatest feature. Below, you can see what the different pan settings actually produce in terms of levels to the different speakers.

The following is measured using a dBFS 1kHz mono freee wave. The default pan for a mono sound file is a bit interesting. Increasing the diversity from 0 to 0. So mix with your ears not with your eyes! Increasing the diversity up to 0. With the diversity up to 0. With the diversity logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free 1, the signal is going to all outputs, but at a reduced level. The dB sine wave is hitting all outputs at dB. Logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free makes sense when you pan a sound C with a stereo panner, it is -6dB to L and R channels, compared to when it is panned hard Surrounnd when it goes L at 0dB - see pan laws.

Different people have preferences about what they put in, or leave out of the FC channel. This is just a convention and there are countless logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free to this. But generally it helps the intelligibility of the speech to have them coming out of separate speakers. Whilst this can encourage you to ix the music and FX at a louder volume, its important to listen to a stereo down mix at some point as most people will listen to that version, which may be less intelligible.

This is where using the panner intuitively goes very wrong…. But even a minor deviation from 0 starts adding the signal into the surround channels too.

The diversity control at 1 sends it to all outputs, we then turn off the Ls and Rs channels using the speaker icons, and finally we boost the centre channel logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free 3dB so it is predominantly in the centre, and down 3dB in FL and FR. The angle needs to be at or for the signal to route only to the Ls channel. The further away from you get, the more the sound leaks into the Front or opposite Surround speaker.

The following is measured using a dBFS 1kHz 2-channel sine wave. And again with a stereo file with the right channel completely silent, and the left channel has our dBFS sine wave. The dB stereo file hits the outputs at these levels: FC at The dB stereo file with silence on ,ogic R channel gives us FC at The stereo dB sine wave, but with silence on the Fgee channel gets us this:.

This pan position gives us dB to Front Left only from the Left channel only, and vice versa. Even though the dot is right in front of the C channel, no sound will get there. There is no way to route a stereo input to front, surround AND centre using the panner - you can increase the diversity, but this will start to mono up the signal so the right channel will also appear in the left channels. The only way to do this would be to also pannwr a Bus Send that routes direct to the Centre channel - see the Even More Control section below.

This one is nice and simple - just turn off all the speaker icons, and use the LFE slider control at the bottom. Even with the surround channels turned on, no signal goes to the surround channels.

Whilst this is clever, it is slightly unexpected, and confuses how we expect the panner to work. If we take a stereo input and route it to the C channel, it goes to the Centre channel. Doing this can also cause Logic to crash…. Option-click the centre dot to reset angle and diversity to the default settings.

These effectively mono-ish the input to specific sets of outputs. One example is if you have an atmos track that is very stereo, it might be good to have it stereo in the FL and FR channels, but it might be too distracting to have it that stereo in the surround channels, so you could reduce surroud XR setting to reduce the stereo-ness in the Surround channels. It does this to the Front channels too, but less so. You can use the XF setting to make panner more mono, but not less.

You need to manually change a setting within the panner to get the icon to update. It can still be difficult to get the precise balance you want in your speakers using the panner. Some additional control can be added using a Multi-channel Gain module, fres then gives you individual level control over each channel.

As plug-ins are inserted before the panner, you need to send your channel to a bus and add the Multi-channel Gain plug-in to that for it to work properly. The easiest way to do this is to create a Track Stack of the Summing type that contains just that track. There are plenty of times when you want really precise control over channel assignments. A good example of when logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free might do this is if you are using a 5. Or if you are routing 4 channel ambisonic files.

Bus 33 is taking a mono input and using the Surround panner to send to to FL only, and then routing to Bus logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free which is my SFX sub-mix bus. Logic pro x surround panner 7.1 free is really important, that your Stereo output is not mapped to the same outputs as Front Left and Right.

Even when you are only. You can map which of your surround sound speakers are mapped to which soundcard outputs. Otherwise, if your Stereo output and your Surround L and R outputs are both mapped to outputs 1 and 2, it can all get a bit confusing inside Logic.

On the relatively unlikely occasion that you have a device that is playing 5. One of the most common standards panndr ITU - for channel order is:. There are of course several other standards with different channel orders, used by different stations and industries. And this is important when you start using Audio Unit plug-ins to process surround sound files.

If you patch in a 5. This is really important as otherwise you just get random stuff coming out of random speakers.

Logic This is designed more for creating Spatial Audio for a music track to be listen to on AirPods, that for post production work. The new 3D Object Panner plug-in is essentially identical to the Surround Panner plug-in, with a slightly different and less channel oriented approach.