Anyone having trouble with Dolby Atmos mixes and importing to local Apple Music cloud?

Hi all,
It’s been a while since I’ve been on here, but I thought I’d stop by to see if I could give and receive assistance on Cubase 12! I watched some really good YouTube videos on how to setup and mix Dolby Atmos with Cubase 12 and once you get it there it seems straight forward. I’m trying to remix some of my older tracks as Atmos. The problem I’m having is trying to verify how it sounds with an atmos playback on say, Apple Music. Has anyone been able to import their exported ADM (wav) to Apple Music so they can listen on iPhone? It plays fine with Quicktime, etc but Apple Music doesn’t recognize it when I try to import. It acts like it does but the file is just not there. I’ve verified other normal stereo mixes will import fine.

Comments, thoughts, Suggestions?

Thanks Cubase users!!

EDIT: I realize this could be more of an APple Music issue but I’m more interested in knowing whether anyone else has had this problem. AFAIK there is only one way to export Dolby Atmos tracks, correct?

-MF

You have to realize that an ADM-BWF file exported with Cubase does not work like a normal WAV file. It cannot be played with consumer hardware or consumer software. You have to encode the file with e.g. the Dolby Media Encoder (DME) or the Dolby Encoding Engine (DEE) in E-AC-3 JOC, “TrueHD with Atmos” or AC-4. Only then you can play it back with e.g. an AV receiver or the smartphone.

Apple Music and Dolby Atmos are a very special topic anyway.
(Because Apple uses its own idea of 3-D audio.)

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Thank you. Why am I not surprised!

Welcome to the wonderful world of proprietary systems, where MPEG-H has unfortunately (so far) not prevailed. :wink:

Meanwhile, there are also online solutions (e.g. AWS Elemental MediaConvert) that offer encoding in Atmos without having to buy Dolby’s software. However, I have no experience with this and therefore do not know their prices.

If you mainly create music in Atmos, then there is another possibility:
Since music is often played back over headphones, you can set the Atmos renderer in Nuendo to “Binaural” and then play out your project via the normal export (not the ADM tool) as a stereo WAV. You can play this file normally with any software player and then enjoy it binaurally with headphones. But it really only works with headphones.

You’re right of course, it’s kind of like the missing piece of the puzzle.

However, if you do set the Renderer to binaural once in a while you’ll get an idea of the finished result. (In cans.)

Using Immerse Embody helps with this too.

Also using something like NX helps if you have head tracking. It’s a little tricky to setup… Templates for all these are on my Discord if any help to you.

But yes it would be good to get a simple solution for this.

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It would probably already help many users if the Atmos renderer integrated in Nuendo could export an MP4 file with E-AC-3 JOC. But Dolby will probably want to keep this feature for its own renderer.

Since we work in (UHD) BD authoring, we also own the DME and the DEE. But I can understand anyone who doesn’t want to spend the money for that.

Yup you’re right. Afaik some of this is due to licensing costs. But let’s see… :sunglasses:

Good news. I was able to use the Amazon Web Services as listed in the above post. This worked perfect for me to allow a client to experience the mix on his iPhone. I highly recommend. For instructions you can search in youtube for step-by-step

Yup the AWS is really our only option right now.

OK, so the question on this thread is still the same question. Anyone have success with uploading an ADM Atmos file from Cubase up into iTunes?