Live 8 w/M4L is the best, but still no 5.1 is disappointing

[gchang]

Hello all, I am a film music composer with over 30 years of professional experience, and I love Live 8, but there is one issue with Live 8 that I have that I believe is a serious shortcoming.

My biggest issue is with the fact that Live 8 offers no support for 5.1 or other multichannel mixing. I am a film composer and have scored and mixed over 70 feature length projects since 1991 - they have ALL been in 5.1 format.

A typical concert in academia, where Max/MSP is a dominant application, is no longer in steeo - up to 8 channel music performance is very common.

Even if Live only offered a 5.1 master mix track, so that typical stereo tracks could be panned in a 5.1 space, it would at least allow for the use of multichannel audio plugins for multichannel panning and location; many applications exist already in Max, but it seems pointless to port them to Live when all that you can do is trick Live into playing 5.1.

So, at least make a 5.1 master track that one can lable and assign the outputs (L,R,Ls,Rs,C,LFE), and the master fader can turn all six tracks up and down!

At this point, I record whatever I am doing in Live 8 to Protools in order to locate and mix in 5.1. I would like to use Live in a "live performance" - without dragging my Protools around just to mix and playback in 5.1, but I want to perform in quad or 5.1 - not stereo!

ANY COMMENTS OR SUGGESTIONS?

Thanks ahead of time!

Gary Chang

[hoffman2k]

There are a few messy workarounds using M4L, but just like you, the whole M4L community is waiting for proper surround support in audio tracks. Maybe Live 9..

[gchang]

It is encouraging to know that I am not the only one who has voiced this issue - I have ambisonic recordings that I would love to use the M4L platform for the max decoder, but I guess that I will continue to use it in Max/MSP until the Ableton fellows get their multichannel act together!

Gary

[scientist]

welcome to the waiting list, brother. i've been waiting for years! at the announcement of max for live there seemed to be a lot of buzz about multi-channel support being possible, but that didn't come to be. i compose in live, but still have to jump over to logic for 5.1 mixes.

[oblique strategies]

I work in quad, & have been wanting multi-channel support in Live for years. I use Sends as busses to route audio to speakers, but would like some additional options.

Perhaps you'd like to add you name to this feature request:
http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php? ... 1&start=15

[gchang]

Nice to hear from you guys - I think, aside from the fact that EVERYTHING that is written for Film and Television in the US is 5.1 (and has been an industry standard since 1991), when Ableton went with M4L, they attracted all of those MAX/MSP users from academia who are creating huge amounts of multichannel media - from quad to 32 speaker arrays!

Oblique, aside from my 5.1 work in film and televison, I also like quad for live performance. I have a great system for playback and I use a TCelectronic Studio Konnekt48 (which has bass management) for playback, so I actually use a 4.1 configuration, which is 5.1 with a phantom center channel.

I will post a note on you link, too.

gary