Importing surround mixes

Sonar imports multi-channel (surround) files as a group of mono files. If the files contain information that labels the speaker location of each channel in the file, Sonar copies these labels to the clips in your audio tracks, but does not pan the tracks according to these labels. This is because you may not have your Sonar project set to the same multi-channel format as the imported project.

You can import the following types of multi-channel files:

Multi-channel PCM wave files (.wav)

Dolby AC3 encoded files. (.ac3)—these are encoded for Dolby surround. You will need to install an AC3 decoder filter such as this one: http://ac3filter.sourceforge.net in order to be able to decode these files in Sonar.

Important: After installing the above AC3 codec, go to Control Panel and launch the “AC3 Filter” control panel applet. From there you can set up the default speaker output for this filter to 5.1 channels. Until you do this it will only stream in stereo. Also check the sample rate of the imported file. It’s recommended that you set your project sample rate to whatever the file uses before importing. Otherwise the import process will go through a time consuming resampling pass for each channel.

Windows Media Pro

To import a surround multi-channel file

1.	Use the File > Import > Audio command to open the Import Audio dialog box.

2.	Select a file of a supported file type.

3.	Check Import As Mono Tracks.

4.	Click Open.

Sonar imports each channel to a separate mono track.

Tip: You can also rip the soundtrack from a video file by opening the video file directly from the Import Audio dialog box.

 

See:

Exporting surround mixes