Just discovered the virtues of Foobar's "Upmix to 5.1" DSP (Mac)

[kap'n krunch]

I do not know if it's the same for Windoze users since Foobar for Mac is VERY basic but still quite good as a program...

The "upmix to 5.1" is quite a revelation! I have never seen anyone mentioning it on the forum (that I have seen)...Really enjoying it now...

 

[zeerround]

Looks like there was a brief thread here:

https://www.quadraphonicquad.com/forums/threads/foobar-and-upmix.15881/
I'm sure what DKA was referring to was a VST or foobar2000 plugin version of Spec. I never got to that and all energy when into SpecWeb, Although it is possible to run Plogue Bidule and Spec inside a foobar2000 VST host plugin. Never tried it on mac, however.

By the way, you should be able to run SpecWeb on a mac via parallels or virtualbox, etc.

Could you be more specific about exactly how you get to "upmix to 5.1". Is it a plugin/component or something that is part of foobar2000 itself?

When I google it I get a lot of old stuff about old plugins/components, except for a brand new "DSP Module".

 

[zeerround]

OK, I see the upmix to 5.1 and upmix to 7.1 options in the stock DSP manager. Yeah those have been there for a long time.

 

[zeerround]

With the foobar upmix I'm not hearing anything broken out from the stereo or really pushed to the rears. It sounds like maybe it's just doubling left and right in the rears?

e.g., given a stereo track:

If I upmix with foobar2000 and record the results, so as to display the waveforems, we get:

Everything looks pretty much the same, and there is also no visible LFE.

Now if we look at the same track, upmixed via SpecWeb default settings:

You can see there is clearly different content in each of the channels and there is an LFE as well.

In the case of this song, with SpecWeb, you get the two acoustic guitars separated out into the rears (one left, one right), and the vocal firmly in the center channel, etc.