Multichannel panning using Max for Live

[NickDesigner]

Greetings,

I am trying to send audio out of Live, into Max5 (via Max for Live), in order to use multichannel panning.

I send audio through plugin~ into the max patch, where I then send it through a spatialization patch (VBAP (vector based amplitude panning)), then I don't know how to output the audio.

Normally when using vbap in Max, I send it to dac~ object and specify 4 channels (for example). But when using max for live, the dac~ object doesn't seem to work. And when I send it to plugout~ it sends the audio back to the Live track.. but Live tracks only deal with two channels. So if I send to plugout~ 1 2 3 4, how do I get the audio out of all 4 channels?

Many thanks for any help on this,
Nick D.

[broc]

Unfortunately, there is no proper solution.

As a workaround you could try using plugsend~/plugreceive~.
But it's not officially supported and induces unpredictable latency.

[amounra93]

Sooperlooper is a free audiounits plugin that supports multichannel output...you may be able to use it to pass through audio with the new ~au object. I haven't tried it, but I use Sooperlooper for looping, and I know that it is possible to route its up to 8 audio outputs to different channel inputs in Live, and it also has manual latency compensation.

There are probably other ways to go about this: in fact, I bet you could build something with SonicBirth that would do what you want, I've used that environment before for building similar objects in order to defeat Live's lack of routing capabilities. Timing isn't going to be dependable no matter what you do, I think: but it might get you by.

Cheers.

[broc]

On Mac you could also try AUNetSend/AUNetReceive using the new [audiounit~] object.
The object is still in beta but works well for me so far.

EDIT:
For some reason AUNetReceive is not available in Live.
So I have experimented with AUNetSend, and was able to send audio from an M4L device to the outside world (using 'AU Lab' as receiver).
But unfortunately, it seems to work only if the M4L patch is open in the editor. Also, latency is different on each run.

[789lwnm2]

oh bummer, I finally looked into m4l with the hope that I could use dac~ for multichannel spatialization, similar to what the original poster wrote.
of course dac~ does not work. that´s a real shame.

did you find anything to workaround this problem with predictable latency?