The Hamburg-based company, which develops software tools for creating and authoring multichannel and immersive audio, launched the SAD Version 2 upgrade at the beginning of January. SAD V2 is a plug-in for any digital audio workstation (DAW) and offers a complete MPEG-H real-time workflow. Thanks to its intuitive user interface, audio and music producers can keep working with MPEG-H Audio without changing their established work processes. Tom Ammermann, general manager of New Audio Technology and Grammy nominee for Best Surround Sound Album 2018, said: “We wanted to make sure that as little as possible has to be re-learned, because the focus should be on the intuitive creation of MPEG-H productions. We have achieved this with the active support of the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits IIS, whose real-time processing engine we have integrated into the SAD.”
MPEG-H Audio is a Next Generation Audio standard and supports many types of object-based, interactive audio content (such as presets) that TV viewers can switch between. The MPEG-H metadata contains all relevant information for playback in various situations, such as audio components in the bitstream and their hierarchical structure, as well as restrictive metadata, which enables the producer to release or limit interactive options for the user. This metadata is encoded together with video and audio and later decoded on the receiving end.
Header image © New Audio Technology/Fraunhofer IIS