Commments, suggestions and critisisms are welcome.
About
Panning is often fairly creative when mixing in 5.1 and up to 7.1.4. The panning plugins we have function well, but they do not offer what is requested here. It has also been said that the plugin approach to panning can make Reaper less efficient than it could be, but more on that later.
My mixing time in 5.1 is considerably less than the folks I talked to about the methods that this request is supposed to facilitate. I'll certainly be using those methods to see where they'll take me.
Mixers, that includes myself, would like to pan a one- to two-channel signal on a multichannel send.
This is comon in film mixing, and in music mixing as well, where it's more often stereo.
And we can already do this in stereo because we have stereo panning on every send.
Request- 1 to 64-channel panning on a send whose source is a 2/4/6/8...64-channel track.
- The outgoing channel count of the send is indendant of the channel count of the send source.
Why
Creative expression expanded in to multichannel setups as efficient as it is for stereo sends right now. One example is to keep a signal in the centre of a 5.1 setup and just send to the rear two channels of a reverb send. It simply makes sense to have that capability. Why else would you have placed pans on sends in the first place ?
Consequences
Sends have independant outgoing channel counts from the source track.
Some folks will claw for a post-fader pre-pan send, which will ignite the discussion about ... see below.
Mixers can be much more creative in a multichannel mix.
Plugin panning AND/OR integrated multichannel panners
They could still be plugins, and automatable as well of course, but they would not sit in the normal FX chain. They could be there of course, but now instead of a 2-channel to 2-channel panner on each send (and track?) the user gets a choice of using something akin to ReaSurround or ReaSurroundPan. Or something like that. You guys come up with the good solutions in the end. I'm just a user.
Another possible benefit may be that tracks with 2 channels cost less CPU than tracks with 6 or more channels, even just sitting there without any plugins. Mim tested this a while back with a film mixing setup. Routing a lot of stuff can be CPU intense. With 2-channel tracks before hitting the panner compared 6-channel tracks in a 200 track, 10 sends(5pre/5post)+5fx-send-tracks you'd get 7% less channels with 2-channel tracks compared to 6-channel tracks, which isn't anything to sneeze at. You'll know best how much CPU could be saved here.
Current Workarounds
You could send just to the surround channels, but that would be highly inflexible and cost time in management and cost CPU resources for the extra sends.