I’m really impressed with the sound demos on the site.  Panorama should be just what I need, but I have a question…

I’m trying the demo in Nuendo and my initial intent was to use Panorama as a plug in so that I could pan mono tracks to various places in the stereo mix…including up, down panning etc. 

To start, I set Panorama up as an insert on a mono flute track, but it didn’t work at all. 

I got weird distortion and panning didn’t really do anything but change tonality of the flute or make it fade completely away. 

I experimented with other things like setting the width to zero so it would show as mono.  No luck (the manual is a little sparse with how to actually set the parameters to get a particular effect).

FINALLY as an experiment, I took the mono flute track and ran it through Sound Forge to create a “stereo” track.  Or dual mono I guess. 

I loaded that stereo track back into Nuendo and ....boom….Panorama suddenlty works as an insert to that track…and does a simply fantastic job panning the “stereo” flute all around the stereo mix.  Even though my flute is still basically mono…but now as a stereo source track.

SO..does this mean I have to take ALL the mono tracks I want to run through Panorama and first convert them to stereo tracks in order to utilize the plug-in?

Or am I just doing something wrong with the initial set-up?  Or do I not have the correct routing concept?

Thanks.

Panorama should work OK with mono sound sources, and I tested this with Cubase which is probably similar to Nuendo in how it’s set up.  If I had a mono sound file on a stereo track then Panorama would work correctly, is there a way you can set the Nuendo track to stereo even though the source file is mono?

I’m not up on Cubase but I know it’s mostly like Nuendo.  You mention “if I had a mono sound file on a stereo track Panora would work”.  That’s what I ended up having to “make”...some stereo blank tracks and then re-load the mono instrument into that blank stereo track.

The way I usually do things when transferring old tapes with multiple mono channels is to first create a bunch of mono tracks in Nuendo and then import the mono wav files I’ve transferred.  Then process and mix in Nuendo, routing the tracks to stereo/surround out etc for mixing.

It seems Panorama doesn’t like it if I’m starting with a mono instrument on a “mono” track…even though that track is routed to a stereo output bus.

Which means either I’m doing something wrong or I have to stop setting up templates with blank mono tracks for a starting point.

I can create any kind of track for starters, but once it’s there and loaded with a wav, I don’t see any feature for changing the track itself…for example from mono to stereo.

The process I use is to “Add Track” in the Cubase Project menu, then it asks if I want Stereo or Mono.  After the stereo track is created I can import a mono file, and any effect I insert on that track will be in mono->stereo mode.  I don’t think you can change a track to mono from stereo or vice versa once it’s created.

Yeah, that’s the way it is with Nuendo too.  I’ll just have to make sure to create stereo tracks instead of mono to start with from now on…
and then load mono files into those.

I spent a couple of days setting up a few Nuendo songs from scratch…setting up “stereo” tracks instead of my normal mono tracks and then importing wavs onto those tracks…which of course Panorama is then happy to process.  It’s really a hassle to do this with older songs when I want to integrate Panorama as an effect.  I have to scrap the mixes and start over if I want to use Panorama since it won’t work with the existing mono signals on mono tracks (fed to stereo output bus).

Well…I’m reading the pdf manual and the info on the “stereo width” control seems to imply that I should be able to feed Panorama from a mono source OR a stereo source…. 

...........“Stereo Width – If the width parameter is set to “Mono”, the stereo input is mixed to a single monophonic virtual source. >>>>When processing mono sources, the width parameter is fixed at “Mono”......”.

These new mono signals that I had to import onto stereo tracks (that make Panorama work) DON"T force the stereo width into mono like the pdf says…my guess being because Panorama sees the stereo tracks that the mono signal is on and figures it’s stereo..so..no width mono lock.

In playing around with this for the past couple of days,  I haven’t yet experienced any type of input that “forces” the stereo width into a “mono” mode like the manual says. 

When would that happen?  It sounds like whenever the stereo width is to lock into mono, it’s because Panorama is being fed a pure mono signal….which as I mentioned in my first post…I can’t make happen.

Sorry to keep asking about this, but I’m trying to find a way to not have to start the whole mix over again for older songs that consist of “mono” sources on “mono” Nuendo input tracks.  Thx.

Different hosts have their ways of dealing with numbers of inputs and outputs, in this case it seems to be a limitation of Cubase that you can’t switch a mono track to stereo output after the fact, since as far as I can tell any insert effect you try to put there is always going to be forced to mono output (please correct me if I’m wrong, but I tried putting several different plug-ins on a mono track and there was no way I could see to generate a stereo image, it always works in mono).  For example, Logic and Digital Performer will let you create a mono->mono or a mono->stereo instance of a plug-in, there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that in Cubase.

However there may be a workaround, you could set up your mono track to send to a group (pre-fader), then move the volume of that mono track to zero so you only hear it through the bus.  Now you can create a stereo Panorama instance on the bus.  Maybe that would be easier than copying the mono tracks to stereo tracks?