Activation Code Thx Spatial Audio

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Sherman Desrosiers

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Aug 3, 2024, 6:01:40 PM8/3/24
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Although the system can display the entire spatial audio list, but there is currently no API to achieve what you want. I also tried getting info from the registry, but didn't find anything about that either.

Creating such spatial audio experiences and playing them back at scale requires new technologies. While research on spatial audio is being conducted in academic arenas, until now there has been no reliable, end-to-end pipeline for bringing such technology at scale to an audience. We recently launched new user tools and rendering methods that for the first time make high-quality spatial audio possible for large-scale consumption. These rendering techniques were applied to a new, robust toolset, called Spatial Workstation, that gives creators the ability to place sound in a 360 video. The rendering was also applied to the Facebook apps, so people hear the same audio that creators upload.

Before people can hear the audio, a creator has to place the sound in the correct position. To put it another way, they have to design and then stream the spatial audio. There are a variety of methods that exist to do that. One approach is object-based spatial audio, a method in which the individual sounds for each object in the scene (e.g., a helicopter or an actor) are saved as discrete streams with positional metadata. Most games use an object-based system, as the positions of each audio stream might change depending on where the player moves.

Ambisonics is another method in spatial audio that describes a whole sound field. You can think of it as a 360 photograph for audio. A multichannel audio stream can be used to easily represent the whole sound field, which makes is easier to transcode and stream than object-based audio. An ambisonic stream can be represented through a variety of schemes. The biggest differentiator is the order of the ambisonic sound field. A first-order sound field results in four channels of audio data, while a third-order sound field results in 16 channels of audio data. Generally, a higher order results in better sound quality and more accurate positioning. You can think of a low-order ambisonic sound field as a blurry 360 photograph.

Spatial Workstation is a suite of tools we developed to help professional sound designers design spatial audio for 360 video and linear VR experiences. The Workstation extends the functionality of existing audio workstations to position sounds in 3D space with a 360 video and, simultaneously, to preview the output on a VR headset. This creates a high-quality end-to-end workflow, from content creation to publishing.

The renderer is part of the Audio360 audio engine, which can spatialize hybrid higher-order ambisonic and head-locked streams. The audio engine is written in C++ with optimized vector instructions for each platform. It is lightweight and manages queueing, spatialization, and mixing through a multithreaded and lock-free system. It also directly communicates with the audio systems on each platform (openSL on Android, CoreAudio on iOS/macOS, WASAPI on Windows) to minimize output latency and maximize performance. The lightweight design not only keeps things fast but also reduces app bloat by keeping binary size small. The audio engine binary is compiled to about 100 kilobytes.

For the web, the audio engine is compiled to asm.js using Emscripten. This helps us maintain, optimize, and use the same codebase across all platforms. The code required little modification to work well in the browser. The flexibility and speed of the renderer allows us to use the same technology in the browser and maintain quality. The audio engine in this case is used as a custom processor node within WebAudio, where the audio stream is queued into the audio engine from the Facebook video player and the spatialized audio from the audio engine is passed to WebAudio for playback through the browser. Compared with the native C++ implementation, the JS version runs only between 2x and 4x slower, which is still more than adequate for real-time processing.

The world of encoding and file formats for spatial audio is rapidly evolving and in a state of flux. We wanted to make it as easy as possible to encode and upload content made with the Spatial Workstation to Facebook, for viewing and listening on all devices that people use. The Spatial Workstation Encoder will prepare the eight-channel spatial audio and stereo head-locked audio, together with a 360 video, into one file ready to upload to Facebook.

We chose to use a channel configuration with three audio tracks in the MP4 file. The first two are four-channel tracks with no LFE, for a total of eight non-LFE channels together. The third track is the stereo head-locked audio. We encode at a high bit rate to minimize quality loss when converting from WAV to AAC, because it will be transcoded again on the server to prepare for client delivery.

The Spatial Workstation Encoder also takes the video as input. This video is muxed into the resulting file without transcoding, and the appropriate video spatial metadata is written to the file so that it is processed as a 360 video when uploaded to Facebook.

Once the video with 360 video and 360 audio is uploaded, it is prepared for delivery to the various client devices. The audio is similarly processed in several formats. We extract the audio metadata (whether YouTube ambiX or Facebook 360 format) to determine the track and channel mapping, and then we transcode it into the various formats. As with all our videos, sometimes we transcode with multiple encoder settings so we can do comparisons to arrive at the best possible overall listener experience. We also prepare a stereo binaural rendering that is compatible with all legacy clients and also serves as a fallback if anything goes wrong.

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