A collaboration for which I will provide the visuals has been accepted into the Sound/Image24 festival, a week long celebration of audio-visual art. Here is a photo of our piece being tested on a fully circular 360 screen together with 16.2 speakers outputting an ambisonic soundscape. The resolution for the 360 screen is 9600x1080 (5x FHD) and so I can't run Magic at that resolution (at least not in my machine) but I am rendering it out from Magic to a video for synchronised playback on the venue's system.
I tried loading the 16 channel audio into Magic and it recognised all the channels but audio was apparent on only two of them - possibly because they are in ambisonic format. Outside the scope of Magic perhaps, but it would be great if Magic could go someway to make this process simpler (currently using several pieces of mac software: qlab, blackhole, reaper and a couple of others). Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to try Magic on the venue system.
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Do you use Reaper for encoding/decoding? I agree this could be an improvement if Magic could handle multichannel audio and make 3D sound placement available in modules.
I'm not doing the audio but, yes, Reaper is driving the piece and feeds its multiple tracks into a VST that (I think) handles the the ambisonics (O3A) decoding and spatialisation. I can't remember the name of the VST but it seems there are several out there.
Talking about audio and Magic - one thing that irks me is that Magic doesn't handle changing audio devices very well. For example, when connecting to BT headphones I have to restart Magic to listen through them. No other app requires this. If one tries, the play head speeds through the loaded file without any audio output. So Magic's audio would have to be more robust and flexible to handle ambisonics or multi-channel output.
All went well last night - no technical glitches. I would perhaps make different choices given more opportunity to review it live beforehand but on the whole I am pleased with how it came out. The recording is 360 so navigate around.
An unwrapped still from the video.
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