Seems like the new MT9 format, or Music 2.0 as the company Audizen calls it, is all over the news these days. The idea is simple, and has been explored for years in the research community: distribute multichannel audio, so that the end user can have control over the single tracks. The problem of course is to make this into a standard, and I see many challenges in how this could be implemented:
- How should the division of sounds be?
- Should every track be totally independent of the others, or would there be room for leakage between tracks (e.g. reverberation).
- Is it intended for 2 channel tracks only. How would they handle panning/spatialisation and multichannel tracks?
- …
It would be interesting to read the specification of the format to see how they are going to approach this. Anyway, it is great to see these things approach the mass market! I am quite sure we will see lots of such “active music” approaches in the years to come.
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