No, it’s not the same situation. You are talking about up-mixing which I believe is not a standard function in Roon. You might try to use the Procedural Equalizer to accomplish this.
I’m talking about the “Downmix as needed” function which is broken since Roon 1.7 Build 610.
@support any news on this?
Hi @Frank_Nickel ,
I’ve followed up via private message last week, have you had a chance to respond to the message? Thanks!
Hello Noris. I just saw your mails. I’ve uploaded a file and responded to your mail.
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I have the same issue, no surround channels audible in the downmix (?), it sounds like just the FL anf FR channels are audible. Any update?
No. But what’s the rush. The issue just lasts about one year now. (Irony off)
Maybe it could help if you contact support as well. Frankly speaking I am a little bit tired of continuing asking about the status…
I did make an extra support ticket as well, who knows…
Reading the definition of downmixing in support:
Downmixing
Roon’s downmixing engine supports the most common cases that come up during music playback. - 7.1 → 5.1 - 7.1 → 2.0 - 5.1 → 2.0 - 5.0 → 2.0 The primary objective is to ensure that as much content as possible can be played through stereo zones without ignoring non-subwoofer channels. Other cases will fall back on the Channel Mapping behavior described above.
It looks even not to be a bug, it is simply not supported. The 4.0 case is not mentioned here.
It is mentioned somewhere in the same knockledgebase. But it does not matter as the whole function is broken. In other word’s. It doesn’t do downmixing at all, regardless the amount of Channels. It is ridiculus really, as listeners with stereo only files will probably not notice anything at all.
I really appreciatie if you also make a call to Support.
Hi @Frank_Nickel / @Henk_Van_de_Schoot ,
We have a ticket regarding this behavior, but work on the ticket has not begun yet. We haven’t had many reports of this issue impacting users but I will try to make the case for you to our project management team.
Happy 2 year anniversary broken Downmix as needed.
and congratulations to @Support for completely ignoring this.
You may close this ticket now as this apparently will never happen. However I would like to remind you that your Information Site over Multichannel playback is not applicable and therefore misleading information.
As for me I will stop using Roon and go back to any other free Software as they can handle this standard way better.
I didn’t want to continue to derail the other thread but why this isn’t working did interest me. I looked at how ffmpeg handles quad or four channel and this may be where the issue is:
4.0 FL+FR+FC+BC
quad FL+FR+BL+BR
quad(side) FL+FR+SL+SR
In a “normal” multichannel PCM bitstream those other channels all land in different channel slots.
Since there is no standard for 4 channels, Roon may not be selecting the right channel to downmix with the settings its using. This would lead to it downmixing silence into the stereo mix.
After all this time… you could use ffmpeg and downmix the files yourself. I realize that is less convenient but at least you’d have access to your music. I also understand dbPoweramp can do this. The benefit here is you’ll always get it right no matter what format, or really what channel numbers, were used to create the “quad” file.
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Thank you for reaching out on this. In their KB over Surround files they mentioned that on Quad files the suroound channels could be routed to the Surround back files. And that was the case indeed. From the moment that I posted this thread this also did not happen any longer. They were routed to the Surround channels. So there was more to it, but in my case all Surround music, regardless the amount of channels (4.0, 5.0, 5.1, 7.1) were not downmixed to Stereo. That was the reason that I said that downmixing did not work at all.
In the other thread I was moderated, so maybe they have done something about it. So I will definitely try out.