Following up on our recent round-up of primo Dolby Atmos-enabled effects for music and media production, let’s take a look at some of the less overtly ‘exciting’ software utilities that are essential for getting the immersive job done.

Dolby Atmos Music Panner

If you’re not crafting your immersive mixes in Pro Tools, Logic Pro or Nuendo, our first entrant is a literal no-brainer. While the aforementioned DAWs feature onboard panners with which to move your Atmos objects around in 3D space, for others without built in atmos facilities, Dolby’s own Dolby Atmos Music Panner adds said functionality in the form of a free VST3/AU/AAX plugin.

The interface is largely as self-explanatory as it looks, and as well as a variety of Elevation modes for determining the behaviour of objects in the height channels as they traverse the planar soundstage (Manual, Wedge, Dome and Ceiling), stereo Object Pairs can be set up and connected in various mirroring modes for simultaneous panning. There’s even a built-in sequencer for automating panning, with a palette of drawing tools giving you total control over the movement of your objects, and tempo sync keeping everything in time with the music. Powerful, creative and a joy to use.

Nugen Audio Halo Upmix

Originally designed for the upmixing of stereo signals to 5.1 and 7.1 surround, Nugen’s uniquely handy plugin now offers an optional 3D extension that beefs that spec up to 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos bed tracks and Ambisonic. Essentially, Halo Upmix lets you take a stereo source and expand it out to the surround field, while maintaining downmix compatibility for playback on stereo systems. Key to the whole thing, of course, is the quality and coherence of the upmixing, and Nugen’s algorithms certainly don’t disappoint on that front, with no reverb or delay involved at any point, and the ‘Exact’ mode ensuring a 1:1 match between source, upmix and downmix for those mission-critical track elements. There’s also centre channel management and neural network-driven dialogue extraction, and an immediately informative spatial analyser; and the 3D extension adds height channels, and vertical energy analysis, exclusion and filtering controls to the interface. An indispensable tool for anyone looking to integrate stereo stems and archive material into their Atmos mixes.

Sonarworks SoundID Reference for Multichannel

With immersive audio becoming so ubiquitous in professional and project studios around the world, it was only a matter of time before Sonarworks upgraded their acclaimed speaker calibration system for multichannel setups. What we have here, then, is quite simply the same SoundID Reference that you may well already know and love in its stereo guise, multiplied to handle multichannel configurations up to Dolby Atmos 9.1.6. So, the fundamental concept and process remain unchanged – a reference microphone is used to generate ‘room-correcting’ calibration EQ curves, which are applied via a plugin on the monitor bus – but with the addition of time alignment to keep all those speakers in phase, support for sample rates up to 192kHz, zero-latency operation on AVID and DAD DSP hardware, and compatibility with Dolby Atmos Mastering Suite. Crucially, years of development have culminated in a supremely refined workflow and a degree of flexibility that sets SoundID Reference apart.

Addressing one of the biggest issues facing any immersive producer – the room in which they mix – SoundID Reference for Multichannel is the de facto industry standard in software-powered speaker calibration, and for good reason.

PerfectSurround Penteo 16 Pro

PerfectSurround’s Penteo range has long been the go-to solution for upmixing to 5.1 and 7.1. Penteo 16 Pro opens up the Penteo upmixing technology to the full range of immersive formats up to 16 channels. This includes 5.1, 7.1, Dolby Atmos up to 9.1.6, Auro 3D up to 13.1, DTSX and up to 3rd order Ambisonics, phaseless downmixer and Binaural output from any supported audio format are included. What is more, it is both an upmix and a downmix plug-in in one interface and enables you to go from different channel counts and formats in the one plug-in.

Penteo’s phaseless process has been designed to generate the perfect upmix without any unwanted sonic artifacts which result in downmixes that always match the source. Upmixing is complicated under the hood, but with tools like this it doesn’t have to hard to do!

Audiomovers Binaural Renderer for Apple Music

Apple Music is a platform no producer working in Dolby Atmos can afford to ignore, but with Logic Pro being the only DAW that natively supports the Spatial Audio rendering required to audition its specific binaural implementation in headphones, workarounds have previously been required to get the same precise output from other applications. Enter Binaural Renderer for Apple Music, developed by Audiomovers in collaboration with Apple themselves, and available as both a plugin and a standalone application – the latter for placing between Dolby Atmos Renderer and your audio interface output using a virtual driver.

This keenly priced utility manifests as a straightforward control panel in which a number of variables can be selected and adjusted, ultimately providing a “100%” accurate representation of what your listeners will hear when they stream your music or soundtrack into their headphones or speakers from Apple Music or Apple TV+, right there in your DAW. It provides three rendering modes (Headphones or Speakers for Music; Headphones for Movies), supports personalised HRTF and head tracking for headphones that can handle such sorcery, and should clearly be considered a definite buy for anyone uploading their work to the second biggest streaming platform on the planet.

Fiedler Audio Dolby Atmos Composer

The eventual addition of Dolby Atmos support to all major DAWs feels all but inevitable at this point, but until your mixing platform of choice joins the party, Fiedler Audio have you covered with their misleadingly named Dolby Atmos Composer. The package comprises a pair of plugins – Dolby Atmos Composer and Dolby Atmos Beam – the first going on your master bus and taking care of Atmos encoding and rendering, the latter being a 3D panner and signal router. The workflow couldn’t be easier: stick a Beam plugin on every channel in the mix to control their individual panning and route them all to the Composer plugin, where each one is assigned to the Atmos bed or as an object. The Dolby Atmos Composer plugin also enables binaural headphone monitoring with personalised HRTF, and exports in ADM/BWF format, and if all that isn’t enough to convince you, there’s a free version, Dolby Atmos Composer Essential, which gives you more than a taste of the full enchilada.

What are your go-to utilities for mixing in Dolby Atmos? Let us know in the comments.