Many Waves plugins have become essentials in my mixes. Everything from compressors to limiters, reverb, metering and up/downmixing plugins are built into this bundle.ġ2 plugins in total make up the 360° Surround Tools bundle including the C360 Surround Compressor, IDR360 Bit Re-Quantizer, 元60 Surround Limiter LFE360 Low-Pass Filter, LoAir and more. This plugin bundle provides the basics for mixing in surround. If I had to live with just one suite of plugins to begin mixing in surround sound, it would have to be the Waves 360° Surround Tools bundle.
Waves’ suite of a dozen useful surround mixing tools just get the job done. Modules like Mouth De-Click, Leveler, Ambience Match, EQ Match, De-Plosive, and Dialogue Isolate are just some of the essential tools I use to clean and enhance audio in my projects. RX6 gets real a workout on every project I mix. It sells for $199 by itself and also comes bundled with the RX Post Production Suite. Insight provides crucial loudness and true peak metering ensuring that each project I mix is complies with the technical specifications it requires. This plugin works beautifully in both stereo and 5.1, displaying up to six channels (L, C, R, Ls, Rs, LFE). The suite is comprised of Levels, Loudness History, Sound Field, Spectrum Analyzer, and Spectrogram. Insight is a complete suite of metering tools for analyzing your mix visually.
I covered Insight in detail a few years back, and since then it has become one of my most trusted tools for mixing both in stereo and surround. The customization available in Insight’s metering tools make them extremely adaptable to surround sound applications. I use Insight and RX6 every day, and on every project that passes through my studio. IZotope’s products are as crucial to my workflow as my DAW itself. There are now a number of tools made specifically for multichannel use that have become invaluable to my workflow in 5.1, and today, I’m going to run down some of the most crucial surround-ready tools I’ve found. From metering to reverb to surround panning, from encoding to multichannel sound libraries, these are now some of my most trusted tools for nearly every surround sound mix: While there are certainly many uses for stereo and mono plugins in surround sound mixing, quite often, working in surround means using plugins that are purpose-built for multichannel mixing duties. It also goes without saying that mixing in 5.1 is a lot of fun! It can be incredibly satisfying to create a soundscape for a scene that puts the audience right in the middle of the action. For example, dialogue lives much more naturally in a mix with a dedicated center channel than it does squished into a stereo mix when working in film, and music and FX have so much more room to breathe in five speakers than in two. In some ways, mixing in 5.1 is actually easier than stereo. One of the most interesting challenges I faced when transitioning from working primarily in music production to audio post-production was making the switch from mixing in stereo to mixing in surround sound. Read on for some of our top picks in the world of surround sound processing.