Creating 7.1 Audio
Microsoft® Windows Media® Encoder 9 Series and the Microsoft Windows Media Audio 9 Professional codec enable you to create audio or video files formatted for eight-channel 7.1 audio. After creating the files, users can enjoy a true surround-sound experience by playing the files using Microsoft Windows Media Player 9 Series or later, through a sound card that supports 7.1 audio, and a speaker system that includes up to seven speakers and one sub-woofer.
You can also create multichannel Windows Media audio files with fewer than eight channels, such as 4.0 and 5.1 audio files. Often, the easiest way to do this is to set up the encoder to source directly from multiple discrete WAV files. For example, to create a 5.1 audio file, you can source from six mono audio files. The encoder can also source from a single WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE or multichannel AVI file. WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE formatting enables you to create a WAV file with more than two channels.
You can use any of these methods to create multichannel Windows Media audio files with six channels or less. However, because an encoder source is limited to a maximum of six files, to create a 7.1 audio file you must source from a WAVEFORMATEXTENSIBLE or multichannel AVI file.
This article describes two methods for creating eight-channel AVI and WAV files, and then shows how to encode the files into Windows Media-based audio or video files. The first method uses Windows Media Mono to Multichannel Wave Combiner 9 Series, a command-line tool that you can download from the Microsoft Download Center page (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=72F6F2FA-0ABE-4A92-9DD0-FD35B966825C&displaylang=en). The second method uses the Nuendo professional audio production program from Steinberg.
