Ableton Forum

Hi,

getting to grips with Sound Panner & have a couple of questions. Basing this on the 8 speaker option.

1) as Ableton uses stereo tracks, do I assume that to have a track in speakers 1 & 2 the only way to do this is to place the icon in between those of speakers 1 & 2 in the panner window?

2) is there a way to assign the left & right of a stereo track in speakers that are not consecutive? ie. left in speaker 1 & right in speaker 3?

thanks

jshire wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 11, 2024 2:46 pm

1) as Ableton uses stereo tracks, do I assume that to have a track in speakers 1 & 2 the only way to do this is to place the icon in between those of speakers 1 & 2 in the panner window?

Yes.

jshire wrote: ↑

Thu Jan 11, 2024 2:46 pm

2) is there a way to assign the left & right of a stereo track in speakers that are not consecutive? ie. left in speaker 1 & right in speaker 3?

Not right away. You have to do some routings: it could be inside Surround Panner by editing the device, or by doing routings in your soundcard/mixer or outside of Live, or probably a mix of cables on your soundcard and weird re-routing in Live. (Or splitting your stereo files as dual-mono, and placing them in different tracks, and route them accordingly)
Easiest solution (but I didn't think about this thoroughly so I might be wrong) is probably to edit the device.

thanks.

In terms of the 2nd question, I can't see a way to edit the Sound Panner instrument to do that &, unless I'm missing something, uploading a mono track to Ableton doesn't result in a mono output as its structure is for stereo tracks. This, I think, means there would be an empty side of each track.

If it can be done the ideal way would be to have the Surround Panner allow users to assign l/r on each track to individual speakers.

getting to grips with this, but another question has come up;

If I understand it correctly each track needs to be set to 'sends only' but that option is only there on midi-tracks not audio tracks. What should audio tracks be set to (sound seem present on more than one of the options).

thanks

Hi. Sends only is available on all tracks that output audio. You must be doing something wrong. And you can use the panner also without using sends only. You can keep the master output volume down in performance, but see it as a stereo backup in case the surround system fails.

Ableton tracks are totally fine with mono audio and this works much better with surround panner, especially if you are diffusing a lot of sounds at the same time. But there is nothing stopping you from sending stereo audio all iver the place yet, i think splitting that stereo audio into two mono tracks and panning them separately would sound awesome.