I am not a sound editor, (at least not a professional one) but check out Mac's Logic Pro6. It is retailed at $999.00 but you can get it cheaper. It supports suround sound. You can see all the specs at ?url? http://apple.com?/url?. Click on "software" then on "Logic Pro6".

Future Director,
Tyler Ives

I'm not sure what good my help will be, as Im not a Mixer. However, My advice is do a Google or Yahoo! on "Surround Sound Software". You will be surprised what you come up with!

P.s) To whoever hacked my password and got into my profile and changed it, It was not funny!
Landon D. Parks
www.landon-parks.8k.com

Nuendo might be a solution... Haven't tried it that much myself, but it is supposed to be quite okay for mixing anything, including surround sound.

/Rico

Thanks for the advice. I was pondering the choice between Adobe Premiere and Sonay Vegas, but both are very expensive. They seem to be the best from the specs. Even though demo software is available for them, the AC-3 encoding plugins are disabled in the demos, so I can not really get a good idea what the results are by creating a DVD and playing it on a home thetre system. Vegas seems to be the only one I could see that has propper surround automation and good surround reverb included.

PS. forgot to mention that my current system is PC based and the upgrade to a Mac with Pro Tools is way out of my budget.

Uhm, I thought You where asking for audio software, but both Premiere and Vegas are video editors first and foremost so I guess I got You wrong...

AFAIK the AC-3 plug-in in Premiere is a limited one, and You have to buy a separate licenese for it after You have used it for soem time. I was on an adobe product presentation a while ago, and I have a vague memory of this?

Regards,
Rico

No, you got me right first time. I am looking for audio software, but more specifically for use with creating DVD. The software I use now (Sonar) can create multi track output, but it can not create a AC-3 track (encode). Nuendo and Cubase are a bit better at that, but I am not really looking for a full sequencer package.

I know what you are saying that those I mentioned are more video editing software, but the only other option I found was Adobe audition, which does not include all the plug-ins and automation possibilities that adobe premiere has.

All the above is not from any in-depth experience, but only from trying to make sense out of online advertising.

I found lots of suggestions on DVD-help dot com, but those are encoders only, with no effects (maybe simple panning at best).

I'm glad you point out that the AC-3 encoder in premiere is not full.

Nuendo is not really a sequencer (though it has those capabilities), it was specially designed for mixing sound for movies.
I'm not sure about the encoder options included in Nuendo, but I know they at least can be bought as add-ons (both for DTS and AC-3)...

Adobe Audition supports surround sounds, but as with Premiere, the encoder(s) have to be bought as add-ons. I'm not sure what You think is missing from Audition that is in Premiere, the only thing I can come up with are VST effects which I think is supported by Premiere Pro (haven't upgraded to it yet - still running 6.0 🙂 )
I do have Audition 1.0 though, just haven't had the need to check these things out. If You have any specific questions I'd be happy to look up the answer for You.

Best regards,
Rico

pro tools is good for audio mixes it's compatible with both pc and mac but you need an mbox(far less than $900) or digi002(more than $900) to run it.

What? $1000!! That's crazy talk!!