It's been a while, folks.
Studio One 6.5 offers the new feature, surround mixing. It can be useful for filmmakers, but as a musician, I doubt if it is necessary/useful. It may make the process complicated as you have to handle more channels than stereo.
What do you think?

 

Dolby Atmos is not sourround, is "Dolby Atmos".

In surround, you actually mix for a dedicated speaker - so if you mix 5.1, you really need to manually account for those channels. Your mixing decisions are "I want this sound to go to from the front-left speaker to the back-left speaker" and so on...

In Atmos you work with objects and space: "I want this sound (object) to go over the top of the listener from the front-left of the room to the back-left of the room" and this decision will scale automatically over all the speakers in the system (7.1.2 to 7.1.20). You don't care about how many speakers you have, anymore. It is simply not the same approach for dolby atmos and general surround. And some other details, I won't go over - read the specs

Now with this aspect clear, you will make an atmos mix from the stereo mix. So you make the stereo mix, export the relevant stems, import them into an atmos template and start spreading the objects: vocal front left+right, bass front left&right + sub, the reverbs over all speakers. Maybe add some more movement to pads and vocal throws.

Assuming you have the speaker setup, you can start with a stereo atmos mix - just have the same stereo mix but over the atmos matrix (just front left&right, no sub - the atmos standard is full-range speakers, so there's no need to hipass the signal). Then, as you wrap your head around working with objects, you can spread some elements of the mix

If you have a clean workflow, doing music with atmos is not that overwhelming.

I have no idea what the future holds, but I think at least a general understanding of atmos worth knowing

 

How many consumer Surround systems have you seen?
No, for real, how many people would need these 8 channels of audio to listen to the music you're producing?

 

Nopes, Dolby Atmos is a surround-sound technology, and it distinguishes itself from others with additional height channels, which are reproduced via roof-mounted speakers.
What you're describing is a usual "immersive pan" akin to DearVR or these IRCAM solutions. Those been around for a while now, and a real new feature SOne 6.5 brings are surround-capable plugins and mixer channels being there by default.

 

it's useless even for filmmakers, they only have one more excuse for unintelligible dialogs

 

I'd invest, but my closet studio just isn't big enough! I use voxengo msed.

 

ill eat my hat if this freaking surround joke being forced on our feeds becomes even slightly relevant for regular music production in a near future.

its just pathetic

 

That's what I felt exactly.

 

if the saxophone in my footloose soundtrack isn't placed perfectly in the upper left hand back corner I'm so pissed and I can't even enjoy the music.