So I have complained, in several other threads, that you couldn’t get the Dolby Atmos Production Suite for Windows. If you wanted to create MP4s, you had to have a Mac or go pay Amazon to rent conversion from AWS. I also yelled at Dolby about this.
Looks like finally they are doign something as there is a new Dolby Atmos Renderer 5.0 which looks to more or less replace the DAPS and it DOES run on Windows, as well as Mac.
There’s still a number of features that are Mac only, you can’t get their “bridge” for Windows and thus can’t run it on the same computer as your DAW, you have to feed the audio to another computer. However I wonder if that might be overcome with an RME interface doing loopback, or with one of the virtual ASIO tools out there.
Either way, it is a thing you can have now. Looks like you have to buy it from Avid, and they say it is for Protoosl only, but Dolby themselves says it works with Nuendo, though they say it does not yet work with the M1/Arm version if you are on a Mac.
Really happy Dolby have listened and made this development, I bought it right away after reading the docs.
RME loopback is great for simple usage but with high channel counts it’s not very efficient if you have other I/O going on, because you give up both a Madi in & out port for each loopback input or output. Still, for some configurations it is definitely do-able especially with an external monitoring controller. And great that people can at least experiment on Windows and things like ASIO Link Pro are worth looking into.
For me I will Madi-up with my last studio PC running the DAR, as I’d like to dedicate resources to running that at the lowest buffer possible whilst generating multiple re-renders so I can switch between them on the fly. As I have successfully Hackintoshed it but still have a Windows system drive, it will be interesting to see which is the most efficient OS for the DAR!
I welcome the fact that Dolby, unlike DTS, is now thinking of us Windows users.
We have authoring software that only runs on Windows. As a result, a Mac was not an option for us. So we weren’t thrilled when Dolby and DTS came up with the idea of making all (or in Dolby’s case, most) of their de-/encoders and applications Mac-only. So we were delighted when we were able to retire our only Mac computer after Dolby answered our prayers.
The only annoyance is that Dolby still have one or two programs that are “Mac only”. I really hope that will change.
Great news!, any chance this can work for commercial Film decoding through audio interface outputs instead of needing an AVR receiver ? We definitely need a solution like this to maintain software based room corrections etc and monitor atmos mixes from other films etc. would be great
No that is, of course, a different program. For that you need the [Dolby Reference Player]( Dolby Reference Player - Dolby Professional) because of course, why would the renderer be a player too? That does run on Windows… but is only for people who own the Media Encoder or Encoding Engine. Those are subscription services, at least they were when I last checked.
Also… looking at the documentation further I’m not sure the renderer will let you export MP4s anymore. The DAPS did, but it looks like that feature may be missing from this version. I think maybe Dolby has decided you HAVE to subscribe to one of their encoders if you want to do any of that, which is a huge pain since they are quite expensive (like $500/year).
If you want to do QC on your Atmos mix in TrueHD or AC-4, you will need to use the DEE or DME anyway. The MP4 file of the render contains only an E-AC-3 JOC track at 768 kbps.
You don’t, because Dolby are jerks. You can’t do that with the Dolby Atmos Renderer. You need another, more expensive, program to do that. You need either the Dolby Media Encoder (GUI) or Dolby Encoding Engine (command line) to do it. They are $400 and $500 per YEAR respectively.
Hopefully someone will at some point make a 3rd party tool that can do it. There is a 3rd party alternative to the renderer now, and TrueHD is mathematically the same as Meridian Lossless Packing, the format used in DVD-Audio so it would be possible, in theory, for someone to build a TrueHD encoder.
At this time though, the only option to do it yourself is to pay Dolby far too much money. Otherwise you have to find someone that owns the encoding engine and offers a front end to let you process things for you. I checked Amazon, and they are still only doing MP4, they don’t offer on-demand TrueHD service.
