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Can we have spatial audio support ?


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🙄

 

... find music actually available for purchase in such formats and then request this.

 

Otherwise you're just chasing a buzzword because "OMG-NEW-WIZZ-BANG-ZOOM".

 

If you have (legitimate) multichannel flac sources, these are mixed down appropriately to stereo for processing in Poweramp.

  • 2 weeks later...
On 2/3/2023 at 11:06 PM, Fitzian said:

🙄

 

... find music actually available for purchase in such formats and then request this.

 

Otherwise you're just chasing a buzzword because "OMG-NEW-WIZZ-BANG-ZOOM".

 

If you have (legitimate) multichannel flac sources, these are mixed down appropriately to stereo for processing in Poweramp.

Hey! Music is available in such format. Give it a Bing search 👍

I suspect there are rather too many restrictions on phone models, devices, ROM version, etc to make it practical (or even desirable) to put much work into this sort of niche area. For starters it would require Android 13+, suitable surround-encoded source material, and compatible phone and headphones.

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/spatial-audio

https://wccftech.com/spatial-audio-on-android-will-be-limited-to-a-few-apps/

Andre

  • Solution

Android 14 beta has outputs marked as spatial audio so support is there. And this is for video/audio chats/etc. But I don't believe this has any usage for hi quality music content, as it changes your stereo perspective and audio is reprocessed a lot (delays/reverbrations added, etc.) just to make audio "go" from your device?

12 hours ago, Tuhin Dogra said:

Hey! Music is available in such format. Give it a Bing search 👍

I would be happily disproven, to find that there is some way of legally obtaining albums with spatial audio encoding (not counting existing AC3, DD+, DTS, or full bitrate multichannel PCM sources). However anything Dolby Atmos*, Sony 360 Reality, etc., are to my knowledge all tied to some subscription-based streaming service (Tidal, Amazon, Apple, and so on). You do not own these spatial audio versions, and thus supporting their local playback in Poweramp is on iffy ground.

Rather than suggest I use Bing... (odd choice, that) how about you point me in the direction of a reputable digital music retailer selling spatial audio formats.

 

[*full bitrate Atmos mixes (read as Dolby TrueHD 7.1 when Atmos decoding is absent on your hifi receiver) are supported on blu-ray media.]

@andrewilley Thank you for giving it a thought. Makes sense that most of the users too would not have shifted to Android 14 to make it worth the efforts. Love your work and support 😊

On 2/15/2023 at 5:53 PM, andrewilley said:

I suspect there are rather too many restrictions on phone models, devices, ROM version, etc to make it practical (or even desirable) to put much work into this sort of niche area. For starters it would require Android 13+, suitable surround-encoded source material, and compatible phone and headphones.

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/media/spatial-audio

https://wccftech.com/spatial-audio-on-android-will-be-limited-to-a-few-apps/

Andre

 

  • 4 months later...
On 2/15/2023 at 9:14 PM, Fitzian said:

Rather than suggest I use Bing... (odd choice, that) how about you point me in the direction of a reputable digital music retailer selling spatial audio formats.

iTrax.com is such a digital musical retailer:

https://www.itrax.com/

Being the digital retail arm of the AIX Media Group (AIX Records), it is certainly reputable:

https://www.itrax.com/about/

This is an example of album (great music, btw!) that may be purchased either in stereo or in 5.1:

https://www.itrax.com/product/cheryl-bentyne-among-friends/

9 minutes ago, reverbel said:

This is an example of album (great music, btw!) that may be purchased either in stereo or in 5.1:

5.1 multichannel is not the same as the new spatial audio that Apple And a few select sources are now using.

36 minutes ago, reverbel said:

iTrax.com is such a digital musical retailer:

https://www.itrax.com/

Being the digital retail arm of the AIX Media Group (AIX Records), it is certainly reputable:

https://www.itrax.com/about/

This is an example of album (great music, btw!) that may be purchased either in stereo or in 5.1:

https://www.itrax.com/product/cheryl-bentyne-among-friends/

As I said: I would be happily disproven, to find that there is some way of legally obtaining albums with spatial audio encoding (not counting existing AC3, DD+, DTS, or full bitrate multichannel PCM sources).

In some way, are there apps or baked-in software features that can process multichannel formats and output some pseudo-binaural-spatialized 1s and 0s on the other end? I mean kinda, yeah. But they can do the same thing to your existing stereo formats and it's not been something to write home about, there. In those cases, it's certainly letting Android (or other OS where this applies) have its way with the audio stream, with absolutely no transparency or way to peek behind the curtain.

In the case of iTrax and what it offers, Poweramp can already play these back just fine. The exact details of the mixdown to stereo are a little murky still, but I trust Max to have implemented it appropriately.

@MotleyG @Fitzian

Apologies for the confusion! I took "traditional multichannel audio" for the new "Spatial Audio", which I didn't even know existed. 

It would be a nice thing, however, to be able to stream 5.1 audio from a phone to an AVR and listen to the music "spatially" in all the speakers. Without downmixing the audio to 2.0, of course. Not the highest thing on my list of priorities, but a nice thing anyway.

5 hours ago, reverbel said:

It would be a nice thing, however, to be able to stream 5.1 audio from a phone to an AVR 

Poweramp's fundamental audio processing engine is stereo, and any multi-channel audio has to be downmixed to 2 channels before it can be handled. PA does not have any "direct stream" features to simply push the bytes from an audio file directly to another device.

Andre

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