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Message: [QUOTE="Queen, post: 90521, member: 27"] Reaper hands every track up to 128 individually routable channels, while Logic Pro's Dolby Atmos bed tops out at 7.1.2, and Ableton Live routes only in stereo pairs. Same plugin, same spec sheet, three completely different sessions. Spatial plugins have quietly outrun the hosts they run in. Manufacturers advertise the widest layout their code can render, which is a fair description of the software, and a poor description of what happens on Tuesday morning in your own project. So [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/audiocube-introduced-space-for-3d-mixing-in-daws.75920/']a spatial plugin that handles layouts up to 9.1.6[/URL][/B] describes a capability rather than an outcome. The width your host is willing to build is the number that decides your session, and for a lot of people that number is still two. [HEADING=2]A plugin only gets the bus its host hands over[/HEADING] VST3, AU, and AAX all carry multichannel audio perfectly well. That part was solved years ago. What was never solved is the host deciding how wide a track, a bus, or an output is allowed to be, and no plugin gets a vote in that decision. Logic Pro is the clearest case, partly because it is one of the most widely used immersive rooms in the world. Its bed track offers 5.1, 7.1, or 7.1.2, and the Dolby Atmos plugin outputs 7.1.4 regardless of the monitoring format you choose. Anything beyond that is handled as objects through Logic's own panner, not by a third-party plugin sitting on a wider bus. Pro Tools splits along price. Artist does no surround mixing at all, so an immersive plugin has nowhere to live. Studio and Ultimate both include surround mixing and the internal Dolby Atmos renderer, with the real tier difference showing up in ambisonics, where Studio stops at third order, and Ultimate reaches seventh. Nuendo sits at the top of the range. Steinberg documents 7.1.6, 9.1.6, 22.2, several Auro-3D layouts, and first through third order ambisonics as selectable configurations, so a plugin claiming 9.1.6 can actually receive it. Reaper arrives at the same place from the opposite direction. It holds no fixed notion of a surround format. Set a track to whatever channel count the job needs, route it by hand, and let the two included multichannel panners handle position. Complete freedom, and not a single guardrail. [HEADING=2]The gap hits electronic producers hardest[/HEADING] Live is where this stings, because it is the workstation of choice for many of the people most drawn to spatial sound design. Its routing has to be set as stereo pairs, since the underlying API will not send a single channel on its own. Ableton's Surround Panner is a free Max for Live device with presets for four-, six-, and eight-channel setups, and it needs Live 12 Standard plus Max for Live, or Suite. It works, and it is still a device bolted onto a stereo architecture rather than a native multichannel mixer. The practical result is that you can run a 3D plugin in Live, hear a convincing binaural render on headphones, and then discover that you cannot feed a speaker array without hand-building a routing structure from paired outputs. That is tolerable on a solo project. It is miserable the moment somebody asks you for stems. [HEADING=2]Check the ceiling before you check the price[/HEADING] Find the widest bus your host will genuinely build, then hold it against what you have to deliver. If your DAW stops at 7.1.2 and the target is Atmos, you are fine, because the renderer takes objects. If the target is a room with twelve physical speakers, you are not. Then work out whether you need width or only placement. A binaural or stereo output needs no wide bus at all, so the layout ceiling stops mattering the second your deliverable is two channels, and most released music still is. If you do need width, budget for the host rather than the plugin. [B]Workstations built to carry wide channel layouts[/B] are a very different purchase from the fifty-dollar tool that made the idea appealing, and the honest upgrade path for most people is a second DAW reserved for immersive work. At the same time, the writing stays where it already lives. [/QUOTE]

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