Exported quadrophonic sound not working as supposed to [SOLVED]

Using Win10 64x, Audacity 2.3.3

When i try to export a 4 channel project to .wav it wont give me a Quadrophonic, 5.1 or 7.1 surround option even tho .wav can fully support that

however when i try for a custom ac3 it does give me channel out options but when the exported file plays,
it only plays trough my Front L and Front R speakers (using vlc, winamp and wmp to play it)

when i play a movie with surround sound in vlc or winamp, the suround works fine. so theres no problem there or with my soundcard
and when playing a 5.1 channel wav song it also plays fine as supposed to.

Can anyone help me with this?
My sound setup.PNG
AC3 Output.PNG
Project.PNG

What happens? Do you get the “Advanced Mixing Options” window?


Perhaps your system is only setup to surround sound with video. Are you able to play ‘any’ multi-channel audio files in surround sound?

Perhaps your system is only setup to surround sound with video. Are you able to play '> any> ’ multi-channel audio files in surround sound?

Well i can play 7.1 and 5.1 sound files but offcourse if you play a 5.1 sound file on a quadrophonic setup you wont hear what would come trough the center speaker/sub as a quadrophonic setup is just fl fr rr and rl, and as they are all fullrange there is really no need for a sub, but the parts that should come trough the rear speakers and front ones always play like they should yes

“What happens? Do you get the “Advanced Mixing Options” window?”

i get the advanced mixing options only on ac3, while im not even sure what that file is only vlc recognizes ac3, but even then the ac3 file plays as stereo in vlc, and vlc is set to use surround output
AC3 Output.PNG

So what happens when you export as WAV? Does it export at all? Does it throw an error? Does it silently fail and do nothing?

Are you certain that you are using Audacity 2.3.3? (Look in “Help menu > About Audacity”). I ask, because for me it is working as expected, though I can’t play the 4 channel sound as I don’t have a multi-channel sound card.

I’ve uploaded a 30 sec, 6 channel WAV file, with distinctly different sounds in each channel. Does this play on you computer?
https://www.sendspace.com/file/vdk4pv
(Caution: This site may have a lot of adverts. Be careful what you click on)

So what happens when you export as WAV? Does it export at all? Does it throw an error? Does it silently fail and do nothing?

Are you certain that you are using Audacity 2.3.3?

I’ve uploaded a 30 sec, 6 channel WAV file, with distinctly different sounds in each channel. Does this play on you computer?

yeah the file you uploaded plays trough all speakers , ofccourse there are 2 channels tot im not hearing as i have 4 channels less ^^
i gues the 2 channels im supposed to also hear are Sub/Center Speaker.
the audacity is indeed 2.3.3 wich is i think is the latest one at the moment.
the white noise in the sound file scared me a bit tho xD

when exporting to .wav it gives me no options at all, just the selection between a 16bit int 24float and 32float. but no channel selections
i just found out however (weird way around this al to make it work :/) if i make something in lets say FL studio for a quadrophonic setup, and i export in fls the front l/r as a wav file and then seperatly export the rear left and rear right as a .wav, then drag those two to audacity , then export that to ac3 (wich still plays as stereo even tho 4channel is selected) then open a new audacity instance, paste the exported ac3 file in there and export that ac3 file to a regular .wav 32bit float (without channel selection) that exported .wav plays as quadrophonic, both in vlc , winamp and even windows media player. this is probably not the normal way to do it , but that works for the moment :confused:

When you re-import the file do you see all 4 channels?



…I’ve never played or made a surround file that wasn’t part of a DVD. DVD & Blu-Ray are the only truly-standardized way of playing surround files. Anybody with a DVD/Blu-Ray player (including software players like WinDVD) and a home-theater system can play them.

It’s been awhile, but I used [u]wavtoac3encoder[/u] to convert 6 mono WAV files to 5.1 channel AAC. Then I imported the AAC file into my DVD authoring program. You can select the number of channels and there is a “Mux Wizard” which is something like Audacity’s “Advanced Mixing” to you can tell it which file goes to which channel. I believe you can also import a multi-channel WAV but never used it that way.

when i import the created ac3 file from audacity back into audacity i see 3 tracks, 1 is a stereo channel (for front L and front R) and 2 mono channels whereas 1 is for Rear l and the other for Rear R, so when it was exported to ac3 audacity automatically splitsed the stereo rear channel into 2 seperate mono channels , then when that ac3 was exported to .wav and i open that .wav in audacity its still the same, 1 track 2 channels and 2 tracks both 1 channel. :confused:

btw, this is your file that plays fine , viewed in audacity
Your File.PNG.jpg

As you can see, exporting multi-channel WAV files works fine for me, but I’m on Linux. Perhaps someone on Windows can have a go (DVDdoug ?)

this thread can be marked as solved, i did a clean install of win10 (again), audacity and of the ffmpeg custom library along with it and al works fine now when exporting to quadrophonic. seems that windows 10 is still able to fuck up basic things as expected xD

Thanks for the updated, and pleased to hear that it is now working.
Topic closed.