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4.0 / 5.1 Surround Demos .. do they exist? Care to point me to some if there are any? :)

Woah, that's a pretty cool track actually, I like the strange and dark atmosphere, it totally works as surround material, I think. The demo doesn't run here tho, so I lack the visuals :/

Thanks for the link, nosfe!

YEAH! Exactly what I am looking for, this is awesome! :D

sunspire, yeah that demo is a bit problematic to run, i actually haven't seen it since the compo where it was shown :D

didnt 2nd reality have it too?
miggt be a bitch to get working in dosbox, tho

The technique Second Reality and many other demos with tracker music used is called Pro Logic Surround and encodes one (not two) rear (center) channel in the audio by inverting the right channel. A dolby decoder can extract this information from the stereo sound to recreate the rear channel. On a stereo setup, you just hear a very spacey sound instead.

To clarify: DOSBox doesn't play any role in this equation, you need a dolby pro logic decoder, or a tracker/player that can output real surround sound.

Aaaand triple-post - the latter part of my previous post is nonsense because Second Reality uses inverted samples instead of dedicated surround panning commands. Those weren't available in ScreamTracker 3, but other people hacked them into the format later on. Many other soundtracks make use of those commands, but most people probably never tried them on a real surround system and just used them for the cheap for-free basic stereo effect you get.

To pick up on this again, I think there is a lot of potential for surround content in demos, or even standalone music. It seems it hasn't been heavily utilized in the scene just yet. Might be because it is a lot of effort to produce surround content or because it can only be enjoyed with the correct audio setup. But it's still is a nice feature that I'd like to see more. I might try a few things in the near future! :)

I know DPL II was used in a lot of gamecube games, I remember having trouble getting it to work since my setup is made up of two stereo systems (4.0 surround) as opposed to a DPL II decoder. So while content played back on the pc is distributed to the individual channels, external sources like my real gamecube are not. Then again I haven't tried this in years, it might just work fine with my Xonar D1 soundcard.

Thanks for all the useful info :)

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