Spacial Audio for 360 degree video

Yes, I saw that when I first read the post... Being it has been 9 months since the thread was started and Charles reply was in Aug of 2016... I was hoping there would be some updated news

Adobe... Dragging their feet as usual... ugh

efassbender wrote: So what i would like to see is a way to comfortably ingest A-Format and/or B-Format files, edit them in Audition with a visual SurroundScope option that shows us where each sound is on the vertical plane and then export to ONE format that is supported by all major playback platforms. My wish list for Christmas 2017

By using the Harpex decoder, you can more or less do this now, certainly as far as the editing is concerned (although the integration isn't brilliant - yet...) but as far as the output format is concerned, I don't think you'll ever satisfy everybody. The best you could hope for is a satisfactory domestic format, but we know full well that just about everybody doing multi-speaker presentations, etc will laugh derisively. I've been lurking Sursound for a heck of a long time, and watching the arguments and reading the discussions, often on a daily basis over the years, reveals very clearly that we are no further forward with this than we were in the 1970s!

Bob Howes wrote: I got interested and have been Googling. It appears that, so far, there's no one accepted method.

Okay, I'll come clean and admit that I already knew that!

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that the devs will a) keep an eye on it, and b) do nothing about it until there's an agreed 'normal' production process. There are a few problems with just saying 'well, you can encode a SoundField mic to do it'. Not the least of them being that this mic is essentially a first-order device, which means that the image resolution will be based on a cosine directional response, and for many of the uses intended, it may be preferable to use a second-order response at least, and possibly more. If you want that in simple terms, it's about directional response, and which bit of physics determines image positioning. I realise that the google spec does go on about first-order uploads at some length, and that it will certainly work to a degree, but this isn't really the be-all and end-all of it by any means; it's a developing field.

The thing about all of this is that it's really about encoding standards. Audition can already handle 4-channel files with no trouble whatsoever, but you have to deal with 4-channel mp4 encoding and especially the metadata handling. And that's the real issue here, not Audition. There are plenty of tools around available for next to nothing to achieve the standards necessary, but at the moment, of necessity, they won't all run in Audition as plugins. That's the bad news. The good news is that Audition already supports an extension system that would definitely support some of them, but it's going to require some third-party coding from somebody who's dedicated to the idea, and I dare say that they wouldn't be free to the end-user.

It's a developing field. It needs to settle down and be easy to create, or it will disappear like a flash in the pan. At present, the issues surrounding it (pun intended) are complex, and there are definitely many ways of achieving the end result required. Some simple productions could be achieved as audio within Audition as it stands - probably not the metadata though.