5.1 Music to Receiver

Hi all,

I am currently experimenting with creating music in 5.1

I have recently created a 5.1 mix on my pc, and I'm trying to play it on an Onkyo receiver. I have created both an AC3 file and DD wav file. I am trying to figure out the best way to play this file on the receiver WITHOUT connected the PC directly to the receiver (big, bulky server case + receiver setup = makes this impractical).

I can play the AC3 file on my pc, the wav file, as expected, is just static. I have tried both files being moved to a USB, but the receiver will not play either. I have tested the USB on a bluray player, same issue. I have tried burning the 5.1 wav file to CD and playing through the bluray player, but it only plays static, the same as if I were to play the wav file on my PC. I have considered burning a DVD, but it seems most software would require video, and I'm not convinced wasting a DVD on a 5 min. audio track is the best option.

TL/DR: What is the best way to play my 5.1 audio file through the receiver?

Thanks for you Help!

/bt

**I'm sure there are multiple forums out there, discussing the pros and cons of surround sound music production, so its redundant and unhelpful to discuss that here**

I have been considering this as an option as well. I had this setup at one point in time, but due to high IP traffic, it was better just to go through usb. Time to reconsider! This might be the best solution, as it's just too much to burn any disc every time, to test a song. Test, Fail, Fix, Repeat! < Just want to speed up this process

As far as software, i was using ableton live to create the music. The conversion to 5.1, I can't remember the program later. I'm at work. I've literally had the software for less than 1 hour, when I tested it : ) so I can't remember what it's called. Extremely simple interface. Drag and drop 2 channel wav files, and literally select which channels go to which speakers.

Although I have many DAW's, Ableton was just too easy to throw something together just to test with. I had to use Sony Sound Forge to merge two 'effects' tracks into a single "Surround L/R" wav file, and to convert a 2 channel "LFE" to mono. But this discussion is probably best left for another thread. TNX Javi!

The (crappy) software I (got for free) am using is Sonic Foundry: Soft Encode. Extremely simple interface, which is always good, but it will only allow you to import 6 channels. So when I tried to pull in my 'LFE' track, that was 2 channel, there were more than 6 total channels. I am about to test out some software by a company called Cirlinca that is relatively inexpensive.

So this seems to resolve my issue. Almost all DVD/Bluray burning software does not support SACD/DVD-Audio/Bluray Audio formats. You have to special software, like the above mentioned Cirlinca for 'Authoring' Mixes and creating a DVD\Bluray Audio Disc.

Javi, you said, "you want to stay below the 80Hz range since you can start to detect where bass is coming from..." Not sure exactly what you mean. Do you mean that it starts to become obvious which speaker the lower freqs. are coming from?

Thanks again Javi