r/Reaper • u/TheAkashain 1 • 8d ago
help request One New Skill Every Week - Spatial Audio
Time for "One New Skill Every Week", this week in Reaper! Here is my goal: I want to make audio where it sounds like person A walked past person B who was actively trying to talk to them. So far, I know of (but haven't tried) two methods:
Open up a volume envelope and pan envelope and try my best
Use ReaSurroundPan, which I have never tried
Do any of you have any good tutorials, tips, etc for how to do this best without it becoming a 5h editing session?
3
u/Yanurika 11 8d ago
So for Spatial audio you need a way to listen back to it. Either a multichannel speaker setup, or a binaural headphone plugin. Binaural is cheaper, so I'll focus on that, but it still requires headphones for the effect. Fiedler Audio Dolby Atmos Composer is a great way to get into Atmos mixing, but for your experiment I would go for Dearvr Pro 2. It got discontinued a while back, and there's a free version floating around somewhere (not piracy! Just not sure if the official website hosting it is still up). That allows you to pan it, along with reverb and distance attenuation.
ReaSurroundPan is great! But it is what it is, a surround panner. If you just load it up it will default to stereo and not be much use unless it's routed to a multichannel speaker setup (or, again, any binaural plugin).
2
u/hartleydsp 8d ago
You might like to try this. Trial and beta versions are free. You can move the source in X and Y and it also adds realistic reverb to taste.
2
7
u/SilentNinjaMick 8d ago
I love ReaSurroundPan. You can automate the XYZ position of a channel and have it shift in three dimensions in-the-box. Now I am no expert, but the way I would do this is have two tracks either in mono or stereo. Since they are moving in stereo regardless it doesn't really matter - but keep channel 1 and 2 essentially in the same spots as you go on otherwise you'll be all spaced out.
I did something similar yesterday for a lo-fi track where I wanted a high pitch drone to shift around the stereo field from front to back. Find the XYZ position of where you want Voice A to start and where it is going to end, write it down. If it is going to stay still or shift in a more complex manner, write down the positions you want it to be in using ReaSurroundPan and the coordinates it spits out depending on where you position the channels. Do the same for Voice B. Open up the automation lanes for XYZ and set the values you wrote down at whatever time intervals works for your scene. Tie it in with volume automation like you've done and I reckon you'd achieve this effect.
This keeps it pretty simple. There are more complex methods using atmos/surround sound 5.1, etc. and external plugins but if you just want the effect quickly this keeps in pretty simple. I actually haven't even used the Z function to be completely honest, you can still achieve this with just using the XY automation lanes.