Photograph by Luke Heiber on Unsplash
As one of many earliest adopters of immersive music mixes, Alex Solano is the blending engineer behind Dolby Atmos tasks for labels like Atlantic Information, Photograph End, NinjaTune, EMPIRE, Place Music, and plenty of others. Solano’s firm, AlexProMix, assists labels and distributors in leveraging income era alternatives offered by Dolby Atmos codecs.
The next recaps an interview of Alex Solano — Immersive Audio Specialist — with Music Enterprise Insider. Solano’s AlexProMix is an organization DMN is proud to be partnering with.
When Solano entered the Dolby Atmos world in 2021, the tech was costly and complex. Now, though the tech has shifted and immersive audio is accessible to anybody with headphones, Solano factors out that there’s nonetheless a monetary value and funding to ‘doing Dolby proper.’
Talking about the way forward for audio mixing, Alex Solano revealed the educational curve that led him to turn out to be an authorized Dolby Atmos engineer. Solano additionally highlighted the unimaginable alternatives in retailer for striving immersive mixes’ engineers.
As a result of Solano was one of many early adopters of immersive audio in 2021, he confronted challenges discovering studying assets for Dolby Atmos. By creating instructional movies on YouTube, Solano believes he’s paving a better path for aspiring Dolby mixing engineers.
In accordance with Solano, to do Atmos ‘proper’ and expertise it accurately requires a room with specialised gear. “That’s what differentiates a bed room producer engaged on headphones, making beats, and publishing their music from someone skilled within the area and mixing in an immersive room of 12 audio system.”
It was Dolby Atmos that linked Solano to main labels to be licensed. “I’m on the authorised Dolby Atmos mixer checklist, which implies that any producer, artist, or engineer who needs to transform their music into Atmos can achieve this. I’m already licensed with Common Music and Warner Music.”
Solano insists that artists and producers want to pay attention to the fast-paced segue into Dolby Atmos. “While you have a look at the historical past of recorded know-how and the swap from mono to stereo, engineers who may solely work in mono grew to become irrelevant.”
With a clientele that features labels, publishers, and distributors, Solano says he’s experiencing a drive towards spatial audio. “My purchasers pitch their tune to Apple, and Apple says, the place’s the spatial audio? They’re like, what spatial audio? Apple says go discover an engineer.”
“Primarily based on suggestions from professionals, music trade occasions, and the majors, all music codecs supported in Dolby Atmos will quickly be the usual for changing new music and again catalog music. In any other case, music streaming providers won’t help it.”
“To get editorial playlisting, you have to have that Dolby Atmos Grasp,” says Solano.
However what about AI-converted Dolby Atmos mixes? Solano reveals Apple is barely accepting immersive mixes if they’ve the unique stamps from a mixing engineer. “From a artistic standpoint, no artist that invested in making their music sound nice in stereo needs to run it via an AI algorithm. They need it to be remastered accurately.”
Now that Dolby Atmos know-how is on the market to music mixers, creators, and producers through Apple, Tidal, and Amazon, Solano believes it unlocks a world of alternatives to reimagine music preparations and blend music in a approach that immerses the viewers and the listener.
With widespread adaptation of gaming, immersive audio has ended up turning into a standard, everyday-experience for this era. Solano believes artists can ‘future-proof ‘their music by adopting immersive codecs.
Solano believes that when the music trade catches up and adapts to immersive audio, the tech will likely be ‘quite common.’ “The truth that you’ll be able to expertise spatial audio on earbuds makes it accessible to anybody.”
