I’m a Dolby Atmos Mastering Engineer by trade. So, just about anything I work on has to scalable up to 9.1.6 or at least 7.1.2, for it to be useful to me. I ran into an issue several months ago when I tried to add a sidechain bus because, as many here know, Reaper is a dick about when it comes to anything involving channel configuration. Adding the sidechain bus froze my channel count at mono. After a couple days of stressing, we removed the sidechain from the plugin. Now, we’re near the end of development and we’ve decided the aux bus serves a significant enough importance to this unique plugin that we have to add it back in. I’m really not liking the idea of having to create an alternate version just for Reaper. So, I was thinking:
Why don’t we just make the aux bus scalable along with the I/O and sum the signal? That way Reaper would, theoretically, allow the plugin to change to whatever channel size it needs to be and we have the aux bus we need in a single build.
It seems like it might work, but I haven’t seen any mention of solving this issue in the couple of posts about the same issue I came across; which makes me think there’s another issue I’m unaware of in some other DAW if the aux channelwidth goes over 2.0/stereo, or something like that.
I considered the possibility that, if this solution works for Reaper, I might avoid any consequences in other DAWs by trying to make it to where the plugin makes the additional channels unavailable if the DAW isn’t Reaper, but again, I can’t help but think "If it were that easy, that’s what people would be talking about when members post about the underlying issue.
I suppose I could give myself a little bit of credit, considering my main role in all this is the “ideas guy” because I’m very good at solutions, design, concepts, etc… but a mediocre coder at best. However, these particular solutions seem so obvious to me that I have a strong suspicion nobody’s suggesting it because its been tried and failed too many times already.
If my plan is doomed to fail, I’d really love for someone to inform me now, before I waste precious time on something that’s not going to work. I know there are some incredible software engineers in here that know just about everything there is to know. So, I’m hoping someone can tell me why my idea sucks lol.