Freesound Forums

What is a good cheap software that can be used to make 5.1 sounds. For instance, make a plane fly from rear speakers to the front/center speakers on a home theatre system. Any ideas, comment, advice?

Audacity can be used.

look for instructions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu37UaVlLJE

That guy produced one of the clearest audacity tuts I've ever watched on Youtube.

I could add that it's easy to add fades, pans, eq and reverb etc. to the individual tracks in audacity to enhance the surround experience, although I'm not sure how or if you can actually set up your computer soundcard for 5.1 monitoring direct from Audacity without exporting first. Out of interest, does anybody know if that is possible? I have no need for 5.1 myself, but I'm sure plenty of Freesounders would be interested in doing that, and as an Audacity user I would say it's biggest limitation is it's lack of real time monitoring while parameter adjusting during processing.

Wibby

strangely_gnarled wrote:
[...]
I could add that it's easy to add fades, pans, eq and reverb etc. to the individual tracks in audacity to enhance the surround experience, although I'm not sure how or if you can actually set up your computer soundcard for 5.1 monitoring direct from Audacity without exporting first. Out of interest, does anybody know if that is possible? [...]

Checking the Device preferences in Audacity 2.0.3 (2.0.4 is the current version for those interested) the list of choices for output shows me the hardware device (motherboard built-in soundcard), alsa devices like dmix, devices defined in the .asoundrc file, and devices named surround40 surround51 and surround71 which I haven't explicitly defined anywhere nor I have dedicated hardware for.
No definite proof, but it looks like a quite positive answer to your question.

And its FREE!!!! Lol