Corrected 7.1 surround recordings
Happy New Year, everyone!
Long story short, for the impatient readers:
ALL of my 7.1 recordings have been revised and now conform to the standard speaker layout.
If you downloaded any of them before, you might want to consider replacing them with their corrected versions.
And now, for the full update:
As I moved to a new home about 1~2 months ago, there has been a bit of silence lately... In addition, moving my DIY Hauptwerk VPO console luckily was no problem since I had that in mind during the design process and used furniture eccentric screws -- these nuts and bolts pieces, picture here: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Furniture-Connectors-Eccentric-Connection-Improvement/dp/B0962NK2B9 -- for easier dis- and reassembling.
This move also caused a software and data redesign of **ALL** of my recorded surround sound material so far, because my audio setup had to change to match the new living room layout. Each of my 7.1 recordings had the "front half" (FL, FR, SL, SR speakers) rotated 90 degrees clockwise, which was necessary for correct playback in my particular room where my listening position was facing the right wall instead of the front wall (which was my projector watching position instead). The downside of this was that every standard surround audio setup with front, surround and back pairs as well as center+LFE speakers would play these recordings as
SL--C--FL
SR-LFE-FR
BL-----BR
instead of the standard
FL--C--FR
SL-LFE-SR
BL-----BR
and thus resulted in a wrong reproduction for everyone but me. However, I rendered a few corrected 7.1. versions (as depicted in the second figure) in the past upon particular requests, but since my new home utilizes the "standard" setup for listening to music as well as watching movies, I needed to convert all of my recordings to not have the "front half rotation" present on my own setup.
So, during the past couple of days, I took the time to pull off the tedious conversion task, which involved
- manually scanning the waveform to decide whether or not the speaker setup was already corrected before,
- converting the file (if it wasn't already) by rearranging the channels (FR->FL / FL->SL / SL->SR / SR->FR),
- reuploading it to cloud file storage,
- reexeporting a public link (mucho tedious context menu / dialog window clicks) to the cloud location and
- pasting that link into my URL relocator database (huge potential to mix up things and paste it into the wrong data cell).
This process was carried out for EACH of my more than 350 past recordings. Whew.
And here's my strenuous appeal for my readers:
According to the high potential of possible flaws in the manual copy/paste process, PLEASE let me know if you notice any "via.woody-mc.de/to/" link (often found in the description of my uploads) to not redirect you to the correct file. Your report will help to get these fixed.
Also, as I've already written in the abstract, you might want to consider replacing the recordings that you may have downloaded in the past with their room-corrected versions to fully enjoy the surround ambience as intended.
Greetings and have fun everyone,
Woody/mC
