Dr. Wagner has made a video about the Dolby Atmos Composer, which is a 3rd party tool that does what the Dolby Atoms Renderer does and works in more or less any DAW.
I haven’t tried it myself, but he appears to feel like it is quite useful. Might be worth a look, though since Nuendo has the renderer internally it isn’t quite as useful there.
Nice!!!
it supports 9.1.6, Nuendo is limited to 7.1.4
Very interesting! I’m playing with the demo now. Really cool it gives any DAW the ability to do Atmos now
can you address all your surround speakers with the Composer on the master of a a stereo DAW? works ok in Nuendo on multi-channel master, but not on the stereo Master of Live or Bitwig?
A Stereo Master buss is, and always will be, two channels. In order to do anything beyond that, you need to have a Master buss that is the appropriate number of playback channels.
oh that would mean that the composer will not work with Ableton Live or any other stereo DAW with loudspeakers… for stereo only DAWs that means headphones only?.. I understood this function to be part of the appeal of the Composer as a product, that I would be happy to buy and use
You’d have to read Composer’s manual, to see how they “go around” Stereo only DAWs.
I imagine you still need either a multi channel audio device, or some way to fold the Atmos into headphones. Cheers.
Interesting. Steinberg and Apple (Logic Pro) can’t be too happy about losing a unique selling point. Also because the internal Atmos renderers always had fewer features than Dolby’s external renderer. This was tolerable as long as there was no alternative. But now I would no longer base my choice of DAW on this feature. (Good thing we prefer Nuendo for other reasons too. 
)
But is this really the case? Doesn’t the “add-on” concept mean that there will be no other bus processing (let alone true multi-channel FX) than the included reverb in a stereo DAW like (say) Studio One?
I was thinking more of Sequoia or REAPER, for example. I would not consider a stereo DAW when comparing Nuendo/Logic Pro/Pro Tools and “DAW X” + “Dolby Atmos Composer”. 
But I haven’t really looked at the plug-in yet. I have seen that there is an additional plug-in called “Atmos BEAM”. I could imagine that with a little creativity you could do a lot with stereo DAWs too.
The REAPER folks will be all over this one.