Merging Technologies’ Pyramix 14 Optimised For Dolby Atmos Music

Merging Technologies’ Pyramix 14 recording, mixing and mastering suite has been optimised to deliver the next level of production for those mixing and mastering Dolby Atmos releases.

The new version addresses all the common scenarios encountered in the preparation of suitable material for the immersive audio format, allowing users to focus on the mix, whilst in the background, handling the most powerful Dolby Atmos renderer automatically.

In order to keep the full capabilities of a Dolby Atmos renderer (including binaural monitoring and large speaker sets) while preserving the CPU and giving the same user friendliness as a renderer integrated into the DAW, Pyramix 14 now configures the Dolby Atmos Renderer to fit a project with a single click of a button.

Pyramix now automatically discovers any Dolby Atmos Renderers on a network and lets users simply pick the one to connect to, decide how they’d like their Pyramix mixer to be, click on ‘Update Renderer’ and start working immediately – no matter the complexity of a project.

Pyramix completely configures the Renderer, maps all kinds of immersive bus layouts by automatically creating the required static objects, and updates all the complicated audio routing.

Key new features include Ingest, providing the ability to load any Dolby Atmos ADM file into Pyramix. Pyramix can immediately build a complete mixer to play the loaded ADM correctly, while Power is for mastering, or whenever users need to load multiple ADM files into a project.

Users can choose to either have Pyramix automatically mapping beds/ objects to existing mixer buses, or route it all manually to the mixer. Pyramix's separation between timeline tracks and mixer strips means users can also load as many ADM files as they want.

CD Import is also new to Pyramix 14. Dolby Atmos is becoming more popular thanks to the immense demand from streaming platforms, so now there has never been more pressure to repurpose existing CD catalogues into Dolby Atmos.

Pyramix not only imports CDs with what Merging states is “the best sampling rate and bit depth conversion in the world”, and it will also ingest each track exactly as it was printed with all the CD text and UPC/EAN codes.

This allows users to then export Dolby Atmos ADM files that exactly match the length of the CD version, and carry the same metadata (wherever this is relevant).

To help streamlining the workflow even further, Merging has worked with trusted mastering engineers to bring in Apple, Universal, Sony and Warner Brothers naming conventions when exporting the Dolby Atmos ADM from Pyramix.

Repackage is also new, making it easy to feed any bus with any sort of immersive audio. For example, routing an Auro 3D master bus or an ambisonic bus into a Dolby Atmos bed is very easy thanks to built-in encoders and decoders.

Merging’s Dolby Atmos hybrid buses allow users to send any format into a Dolby Atmos Renderer by having some channels mapped as objects (such as a 9.1.6, etc...), and when exporting an ADM, the same flexibility is available.

A native 9.1.6 mix can be exported to a Dolby Atmos ADM file by just mapping the top channels and wide speakers as objects, leaving the rest in a bed, for example.

The ability to import ADM files into Pyramix also benefits Merging’s Ovation 10 because one can import to Pyramix, then publish to Ovation provided there is an Ovation Premium key present.

Those ADM files can be used as audio cues for instant live playback, either through a Dolby Atmos Renderer or the built in Merging Renderer, capable of rendering up to 384 dedicated speakers with the MassCore Engine.

“Pyramix 14 is a logical development for Merging and was very much guided by our existing Dolby Atmos customer base,” says Merging’s head of software engineering, Dominique Brulhart.

“The aim is to provide not only the most powerful workflow creatively, but to also automate some of the more time-consuming administrative tasks. We feel happy that this has been achieved.”