Nuendo 15 and Dolby Atmos

Nuendo
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I have Nuendo 13 and the upgrade pricing right now to 14 and getting 15 for free is very enticing.

But I still don’t understand how is it that ten years after Dolby Atmos has become widespread, and almost every DAW comes with support for it, we still (I think) don’t have a DAW that can render a simple MP4 with an Atmos track that you can playback in your home theater, not an ADF BWF or whatever master file that works very nicely if you’re a professional sound engineer and send it to Netflix or whatever, but if you want to simply render your Dolby Atmos project and render it to a file that will be playable as such, you need to either spend 300 bucks in the Dolby Atmos Renderer, or upload the master to AWS and go through a very un-intuitive workflow to get an Atmos file that your receiver will interpret as such.

So how’s the Nuendo 15 situation regarding this? Are you able to finally output a file that you can play on any device connected to the receiver and will be decoded as Dolby Atmos, or is it still the ADF WAV file?

And by the way, if that’s still the case, Steinberg really needs to change the wording, because one is called Dolby Atmos Renderer (I think that’s the one from Dolby that allows you to render an MP4 and costs $300), and the Renderer for Dolby Atmos (I think that’s the one that comes with Cubase and Nuendo, with no MP4 support). Both names are practically the same.

But what really gets to me is that there was a way to author that master file to a WAV that was playable and interpreted as Dolby Atmos. I did it myself about four years ago before I even knew Cubase, when I was playing around in Logic Pro X and the first “Spatial” demo projects started coming with it. Logic also doesn’t have an MP4 renderer, but the WAV master file you created back then, was properly read by the receiver as Dolby Atmos with all the objects and channels in place.

Then about a month later, I think Dolby caught wind of it, and forced Apple to release an update, so after that, the same exact project, when rendering the master WAV, only played garbage when played through an Atmos receiver. What a surprise.

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Part of this frustration should be directed at Dolby, not just Steinberg. :grinning_face:

What you’re describing isn’t a missing feature in Nuendo. It’s a controlled pipeline.

There was a brief period, even in Logic, where WAV exports could still be interpreted correctly by consumer Atmos receivers. That didn’t break by accident. It was shut down. That tells you this isn’t a technical limitation, it’s a licensing decision.

Dolby controls how Atmos gets encoded for consumer playback. If you want something like MP4 with Dolby Digital Plus JOC that your home theater will recognize properly, that path is intentionally locked behind Dolby’s own tools and ecosystem.

Nuendo, like other DAWs, gives you ADM BWF because that’s the open, professional master format. It’s meant for delivery, not direct consumer playback.

So the gap you’re hitting is real, but it’s not because DAWs are “behind.” It’s because the last step, consumer encoding, sits behind Dolby’s paywall and restrictions.

That said, the workflow is still a mess from us user perspective.

We can mix Atmos natively. We can monitor it. But to simply use it outside a professional pipeline, we’re pushed into extra tools, extra cost, or cloud workflows that feel completely disconnected from the DAW.

And the naming doesn’t help. “Dolby Atmos Renderer” vs “Renderer for Dolby Atmos” is confusing to the point of being misleading. One encodes for playback. The other doesn’t.

So the short answer to your question:
No, Nuendo 15 still won’t give you a simple one-click export that plays as Atmos on a home theater system. You’re still dealing with ADM BWF unless you go through Dolby’s ecosystem.

The real issue isn’t capability. It’s access.

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I’m pretty sure it is a Dolby thing. Dolby was real cagey with me when I asked them about it, and Steinberg is clearly under an NDA so I’m pretty sure Dolby dictates what the features can be, and what stuff is called. They want people to license their encoder. You can’t even buy it, you license it yearly.

It’s annoying, I really wish that Atmos hadn’t caught on and something more open became the standard, but we are where we are and I doubt it will change. Once something gets entrenched as a standard, generally it doesn’t get displaced.

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Indeed, it’s a Dolby thing. No other DAW gets a license from them to export MP4.
The only third party company who did get such a license is Immersive Master Pro (a very expensive app for batch processing of ADM files).

I just wrote a book on immersive music production (the title is ‘Stereo was a nice try - Creating and Producing Immersive Music), in which Nuendo plays the leading role. It’s my DAW of choice for decades and in this book I discuss the workflow for creating immersive music with Nuendo. Always open to help answering questions.

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If this poughkeepsie keeps up, there are bound to be alternatives that will break this barrier. Eventually, even the biggest studios will need to cater to alternative formats that can be converted to Dolby, or something of that order….

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As far as the consumer landscape is concerned, do you feel there are more immersive consumers than stereo consumers? I’m talking lowest common denominator here.

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Immersive is still niche in comparison to stereo, both on production and consumer site. Some people (on Apple Music/Tidal/Amazon) will listening to binaural, even without noticing, but it is still not mainstream. Maybe in the US the market is bigger, but not in Europe.

That why I’m convinced: it has to start with a new generation of music producers making music in immersive. DAW’s are important in that perspective.

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Cool. I’ve thought about it many times but from my neck of the woods, jobs that come in for immersive stuff like audio post for film are virtually non-existent. So from a business standpoint, it’s just simply not feasible to invest in. Already my 5.1 setup is covered in dust, haha.

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Binaural is impressively good. Most recent Hindi songs released on Apple Music are Atmos-ready. It is aesthetically pleasing, and once you get used to it, you do not want to go back to stereo.

Your 5.1 setup is a solid reference point, provided no one is sitting off-axis. In music, you can use binaural alongside visualization tools to better understand and place the height channels.

For film, 5.1.4 is the bare minimum, and it is what I use.

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+1!

5.1.4 is the sweet spot between technical effort and sonic benefit, especially when mixing music.

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Well, I think Steinberg isn’t exactly helping when they don’t make it abundantly clear that the support for Dolby Atmos is not complete and therefore you cannot export an MP4 of your Atmos mix. Even worse, they swap words in the name of the renderer so it’s rather misleading.

I know that, but at the same, it makes me wonder if DAW developers are pushing Dolby enough on this. Why are you able to create an MP4 in AWS after following one of the many YouTube tutorials on the topic? Even better, while that tool still can’t create a proper Dolby Atmos on TrueHD file, it can create the DD+ JOC version at 1 Mbps, while the $300 Dolby Atmos Renderer has only the choices of 512 or 768 Kbps.

But yes, my frustration should be directed at Dolby, and it’s been for a long time, for many reasons. Their guidelines for streaming Dolby Digital or Dolby Atmos are absurd, to the point where lately I have to set my receiver’s volume to +80 to listen to dialog at a normal level. If I leave it at that volume and play a CD, it will blow up my speakers mercilessly. If I play a Blu-ray movie with an Atmos track, it won’t blow up my speakers but it will be pretty loud.

Granted, I have a Dirac Live EQ curve that tames down the mid-highs, mids, and low-mids, because I want my home theater to sound like the Sansuis of the '70s and '80s, not like the ear piercing garbage sound quality you get these days from even the most expensive receivers.

But my point is, those Dolby guidelines for streaming shouldn’t be allowed. In fact, Amazon Prime Video seems to disregard them, because the other day I was watching “Roofman” there, and at one point I was really surprised that I had the volume at +65 and dialog was at a good level, and there wasn’t a lot of hiss like when I watch anything on Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, etc, because when the volume is at +80, the hiss is audible.

But going back to Atmos not having an MP4 exporter in DAWs, I think it’s just absurd. It’s not that Dolby controls it so tight that you can only get it from a studio that pays a fortune each year for the license. Dolby themselves sell the program for $300 and there’s the AWS option that once you used it once, it’s very easy to use it again, and costs almost nothing per song.

But also, back in 2024 when I spent months on my MIDI mockup of Bear McCreary’s “Prelude to War” in 5.1, I did a version in Atmos after watching dozens of tutorials, learning about the whole thing from both Steinberg and Dolby documentation, and at that point I had the three month trial of the Dolby Atmos Renderer, so I exported the MP4. It was correctly interpreted by my receiver, back then a Pioneer VSX-935, and it sounded fine. However, when I played the 5.1 WAV file on the same receiver, same EQ and everything, it sounded far far better. It was powerful and crystal clear. The Atmos version, which was practically the same but with some tracks converted to objects to use the two extra height speakers, was rather flat and boring. Now, this is probably because of the 768 Kbps compression. I have a lot of audio Blu-rays with a Dolby TrueHD Atmos track, and they sound amazing.

But as much as I would like to have the ability to export to an Atmos MP4 from Cubase or Nuendo, the truth is that an uncompressed 5.1 file sounds better than the Atmos DD+ version of it.

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I have hundreds of movies on Blu-ray, both HD and 4K, with 5.1 tracks that sound excellent. Dolby has done a great job with that Dolby Surround mode in receivers that upmixes from 2.0 to 5.1 into a pseudo Dolby Atmos, and it’s remarkable.

That said, those movies in 5.1 can still sound great without that upmixing.

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I am with you. And…Even if we threw our pianos out the window, we would not be able to get Dolby to change its mind.

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This is done using the Dolby Renderer:

file:///Applications/Dolby/Dolby%20Atmos%20Renderer/Documentation/Dolby_Atmos_Renderer_User’s_Guide_HTML/help_files/topics/t_export_mp4.html

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Look, I don’t blame you for not reading my full post, nobody has any obligation to do so. But at the same time, if you’re not going to read the full post, then don’t post something that doesn’t help at all and was also mentioned by me more than once in this thread.

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I use the Fiedler Audio Mastering Console on Win 11 for Dolby Atmos. It can output most configurations but not MP4’s. Maybe ask Thomas what the hurdles are for that.

I use the Dolby Atmos Renderer to output MP4’s but I bought it while I had a Pro Tools subscription, it was $99. Yes Dolby like Avid like to put unscaleable walls around their products.

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I don’t know that they are allowed to change the name. Dolby is very controlling of their technology. Steinberg has a contract with them that dictates what they can and can’t do. We don’t know what that contract is because part of the contract is almost certainly an NDA. Unless there’s something they are doing that others with the DAR are not doing, I’d presume that Dolby is forcing it.

Amazon licenses the Dolby Encoding Engine that lets them encode media. I haven’t checked recently but last I looked it was about $500/year, which is why Steinberg does NOT license it and bundle it with Nuendo (not sure if it could be bundled even if they did want to charge that much).

Well ya, it is not only the amount of compression, but how Dolby does the AC-3 compression for Atmos. They don’t go and encode the objects as separate tracks or anything. It is actually just a 5.1 audio track, but then there’s information in it to recover object data from that. This works… but it is not near as clear as the output you get from a DAW where each object is separate. It isn’t just compressing audio as we did in the past, it is effectively folding down spatial information. You can think of it kinda like Dolby Prologic.

Neat idea, but it will never give the object separation and 3D field you get when mixing.

Right or wrong (and I fall on the side of wrong) Dolby has the movie industry in their thrall, and basically always has. They invent a technology, and films get on board and it is the standard. The only time I can think that briefly broke was early days in the digital cinema industry and some Blu-Rays.

Digital Cinema decided to just go with lossless compressed 5.1/7.1 since the size of that audio was still peanuts compared to the video and then you got great quality with no licensing fee. Likewise DTS-MA seemed real popular on Blu-Rays since a single stream could support both lossless and lossy audio.

But then Atmos happened, and now everyone is back in the Dolby boat.

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This. ^^^^^^^^

It’s actually almost funny how much the audio deteriorates when using lots of Atmos Objects.

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Sorry.

(I had written something, but I deleted it: I think everything has already been said above, as you mentioned.)

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Sorry, I don’t think I understand. Are you saying that the Dolby Encoding Engine costs only $500 a year (I say only in the sense that it’s small change for any company, not for end users), and that Amazon pays them $500 a year to have at least part of it (the Dolby Digital JOC Atmos version) available for anyone to convert as many Dolby Atmos projects as they want?

If that is the case, then I find it hard to believe that Steinberg wouldn’t pay 500 bucks a year to offer Atmos MP4 rendering from Nuendo and Cubase Pro, unless it’s $500 per user, but then Amazon wouldn’t pay $500 per AWS account because while uncle Jeff may be able to afford it, they would lose millions.

I know it doesn’t have all the separate tracks, but one thing I forgot to mention is that I also did a render to Dolby Digital 5.1 from the WAV file, and that sounded much better than the Atmos version, using something like 640 kbps.

What sucks is that MPEG-H is not more widespread and probably will never be, because they give you everything you need for free. But it’s pointless to spend time learning all that, when other than some Denon receivers and a few other brands, most receivers don’t come with it.