Hi,
Currently REW 5.20 lets you send the two outputs to any of 8 output channels (i.e. 1-8). This used to be the limit on ASIO, but I believe Windows is up to 32 at least. Macs are a lot more. With Dante Virtual Soundcard for example, you can get up to 64 outputs and 64 inputs.
An ATMOS home entertainment studio for music production per Dolby should be either 7.1.4, 9.1.4, or 9.1.6 with the 9xx being recommended. There are also lots of home theater AV receivers that support up to 16 channels (e.g. 9.1.6). With the 8 channels REW supports now for the speaker output, one has to get creative with routing outside REW to drive all the speakers on anything above 7.1 or 5.1.2. It is also important that you allow the user to set the channel number of the outputs. Not everyone has their speakers on channels 1-8, or 1-16.
On the reference output, you are forcing the output to be on one of the speaker outputs (L/R). It's kind of in the way for measuring whatever speaker you send it to.
So on both the speaker and the reference output, I would suggest you change it to work like the mic and referenece input where the user speicifies the channel he wants to use. I'm not exactly sure why you want to know the role the speaker out is playing (and maybe even less so for the reference output), but if there is a reason (like you would know you could average a set of measurements for one speaker when there are measurements for other speakers in the same mdat), I would suggest you support 16 speaker output channels where you allow the user to indicate the number of channels, select the channel number for each channel, and select the role for each channel. This gets around issues like 7.1 vs 5.1.2 or 7.1.6 vs 9.1.4 where the roles are not proper subsets in all configurations. If the reference output needs an associated role (again not sure why), then it would good if the channel of the reference doesn't have to be one of the speaker channels.
I'll also mention that in attempting to work around these limitations, I came up with a rather interesting solution. I use Pro Tools and it supports Aux I/O (which are busses that show up in the macOS sound output list (as if they were an audio interface). I was able to use the Pro Tools Audio Bridge 2 A/B (two inputs/two outputs) in REW for the four I/O and have the I/O available in Pro Tools, I could then route the speaker output to any channel of my 9.1.4 monitoring (via 14 aux input tracks). This works great provided I don't trip over some REW function that needs to know the speaker role. However, it is not a general solution for other DAWs, or for someone wanting to run REW standalone. So 'll say I don't think I need the feature I'm requesting, but I think there are others that would find it handy.
Thanks for considering.
Currently REW 5.20 lets you send the two outputs to any of 8 output channels (i.e. 1-8). This used to be the limit on ASIO, but I believe Windows is up to 32 at least. Macs are a lot more. With Dante Virtual Soundcard for example, you can get up to 64 outputs and 64 inputs.
An ATMOS home entertainment studio for music production per Dolby should be either 7.1.4, 9.1.4, or 9.1.6 with the 9xx being recommended. There are also lots of home theater AV receivers that support up to 16 channels (e.g. 9.1.6). With the 8 channels REW supports now for the speaker output, one has to get creative with routing outside REW to drive all the speakers on anything above 7.1 or 5.1.2. It is also important that you allow the user to set the channel number of the outputs. Not everyone has their speakers on channels 1-8, or 1-16.
On the reference output, you are forcing the output to be on one of the speaker outputs (L/R). It's kind of in the way for measuring whatever speaker you send it to.
So on both the speaker and the reference output, I would suggest you change it to work like the mic and referenece input where the user speicifies the channel he wants to use. I'm not exactly sure why you want to know the role the speaker out is playing (and maybe even less so for the reference output), but if there is a reason (like you would know you could average a set of measurements for one speaker when there are measurements for other speakers in the same mdat), I would suggest you support 16 speaker output channels where you allow the user to indicate the number of channels, select the channel number for each channel, and select the role for each channel. This gets around issues like 7.1 vs 5.1.2 or 7.1.6 vs 9.1.4 where the roles are not proper subsets in all configurations. If the reference output needs an associated role (again not sure why), then it would good if the channel of the reference doesn't have to be one of the speaker channels.
I'll also mention that in attempting to work around these limitations, I came up with a rather interesting solution. I use Pro Tools and it supports Aux I/O (which are busses that show up in the macOS sound output list (as if they were an audio interface). I was able to use the Pro Tools Audio Bridge 2 A/B (two inputs/two outputs) in REW for the four I/O and have the I/O available in Pro Tools, I could then route the speaker output to any channel of my 9.1.4 monitoring (via 14 aux input tracks). This works great provided I don't trip over some REW function that needs to know the speaker role. However, it is not a general solution for other DAWs, or for someone wanting to run REW standalone. So 'll say I don't think I need the feature I'm requesting, but I think there are others that would find it handy.
Thanks for considering.
