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Message: [QUOTE="Queen, post: 90523, member: 27"] Apple Music will not accept a Dolby Atmos track built from a stereo mix, and it caps integrated loudness at -18 LKFS with true peak at -1 dBTP. What it does accept is a Broadcast Wave Format file carrying Audio Definition Model metadata, holding 24-bit audio at 48 kHz. That file describes where every object sits, frame by frame, so the playback device can rebuild the mix for whatever speakers or headphones it has. Your plugin's binaural bounce contains none of that information. The distance between placing a sound in three dimensions and handing over [B]an immersive master accepted by streaming platforms[/B] is wider than most people expect. None of it changes because [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/audiocube-introduced-space-for-3d-mixing-in-daws.75920/']a fifty-dollar path into 3D placement[/URL][/B] turned up on your desktop this year. [HEADING=2]Your session is not a deliverable, and never was[/HEADING] A spatial plugin renders. A renderer writes metadata. Those are different jobs, and only the second one produces a file a platform will take. The metadata is the whole point of the format. Object positions travel alongside the audio, so a phone with two drivers and a room with twelve speakers both receive the same master, and each works out its own version. Bounce a finished binaural stereo file instead, and every one of those positions is gone, baked into two channels forever. That leaves you needing a renderer that can write the format. Several hosts include one, and Dolby's own tools cover the rest. What no third-party positioning plugin does on its own is produce the deliverable, however convincing its output sounds on your headphones. Some of that metadata is a creative decision rather than a technical one. Every bed channel and every object carries its own binaural render mode, set to near, mid, far, or off, and that setting travels inside the file to shape how your mix behaves when somebody plays it back on headphones. The mechanical requirements are strict too. Timecode runs at 24 frames per second, your immersive file has to sit within 50 milliseconds of the stereo master's duration, and each track carries a maximum of two sources, one stereo and one immersive. [HEADING=2]The specification polices how you got there[/HEADING] You cannot start from a finished stereo mix. Upmixing is out, de-mixing is out, and taking a stereo master, dropping it into a spatial field, and adding reverb is explicitly out. The immersive version has to come from multitracks, or from stems that came from multitracks. Low frequency handling has its own rule. Full-frequency content is not supposed to live in the LFE channel, which catches people who treat it as an extra bass send rather than an effects channel. Album work tightens further. On gapless releases, track boundaries have to align within half a frame, which works out at 1,000 samples at 48 kHz. Get that wrong and the transitions audibly stumble. Then there is the paperwork nobody mentions in plugin reviews. Every Atmos submission needs its own secondary ISRC, separate from the one your stereo release already uses, and the two files have to be conformed and synced to each other before anything is sent. [HEADING=2]Distribution adds a bill and a deadline[/HEADING] Apple takes immersive audio through its own delivery software or through an approved distributor. For most independent artists, that means the distributor, and the distributor charges. DistroKid, as one example, wants $26.99 per track for an Atmos file, and will not let you add one after the release has gone up. Stereo and immersive have to be uploaded together. On a ten-track album, that is roughly $270 in delivery fees on top of whatever the mixing took. The reach is narrower than the effort suggests. That file plays in Atmos on Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music. Spotify still offers nothing of the kind, which for most catalogs is the majority of the listening. So the sequence matters more than the tools. Decide whether a release is immersive before you upload anything, because the cheapest moment to make that call is while the session is still open, and the most expensive one is after your stereo version has already shipped without a matching immersive file beside it. [/QUOTE]

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