Hey Zeerround,
I'm a professional dialogue sound editor for episodic television and feature films in Hollywood. I have a pretty decent home theatre system in my home with Definitive Technology loudspeakers in a 5.1 setup. For my editing, I only use Macs and since I only cut dialogue and ADR, my edit system is used exclusively in mono and occasionally 2-channel mono mode. I only have "stereo" monitoring capability in my home edit bay, I don't need more than that.
I have always been a fan of 5.1 music mixes and In my personal HT viewing/listening space, I have a top end OPPO Blu-ray/DVD player as much for its capabilities to play DVD-A and SACD multi-channel discs as well as video. I have a small fortune invested in 5.1 albums in both formats and have acquired the majority of good titles (some very rare) that were released over the past 10 years, most in the early 2000s. Unfortunately, as you know, those formats are essentially dead and never became commercially successful. Almost nothing is being commercially released in surround any more. There are many many titles I have wished for to be re-mixed and re-released in surround, but had pretty much given up on. My story could end here.
Then I heard about a DTS 5.1 Surround version of one of my favorite albums which I was pretty damn sure had never been released in surround. After much searching, I finally acquired the live, 2-CD album "Waiting For Columbus" by the southern rock/blues band Little Feat and was blown away! The separation and quality yet faithfulness to the original mix was breath-taking. If you haven't got this 5.1 DTS version, get it. Not only is it one of the finest quality live albums every released, the 5.1 up-mix is astounding! In my opinion it is "demo quality". Included in the archive was a little note stating that this 5.1 was created using something called "SPEC"...I'd never heard of it, Googled it and found this forum. To me, this is like finding an oasis in the middle of a desert. I never had any idea that a 5.1 surround mix from only a 2-Channel stereo source could sound this good! In the professional audio world, there isn't crap available that does 1/4 of what your software will do. There are a couple of plug-ins for ProTools and one or two "stand-alone" very expensive rack-mount boxes that claim to create stereo from mono or surround from stereo, but they don't do much more than the useless DSP settings on most home receivers these days and create some fuzzy time-delayed ambiance in the surround channels. Basically useless. I know that some effectively up-mixed music would go over incredibly well on some dub stages when an old, stereo only music cue is needed in 5.1. I can't believe that you are giving this incredibly sophisticated and effective software away! In the commercial world, it would be the type of specialized software that would command thousands of dollars. This truly must be a labor of love and I (and I'm sure every other hobbyist that reads this forum) really appreciate what you're doing. THANK YOU!
Now, a couple of tech questions if you don't mind.
As I mentioned earlier, I use Macs for my sound editing and also for my personal computing at home. I do have a rarely used 4 or 5 year old PC with an Intel Core 2 Duo and (I believe) 1 gig of ram running Windows XP Professional. I also have a fire-wire card for the PC. I am thinking of moving the PC to my home theatre and using an M-Audio 410 firewire digital audio interface from the computer to my 5.1 amplifier for monitoring. Its not a terribly powerful PC, I just use it occasionally for a PC only game or for surfing the Internet when I'm too lazy to go into the other room and boot up my Mac. I've actually downloaded Plogue and SPEC Mac versions and they run fine on my laptop, but haven't actually tried any conversions because I don't have any way of monitoring 5.1 on the Macs. I will download the PC versions of the software and from the brief description that I gave, do you think I'll be able to use my existing PC for serious experimentation and ultimately conversion? I don't plan to upgrade past WinXP Pro because it has worked just fine for me so far for what I use the PC for and besides, I hate giving MicroSoft a dime.
Thanks for listening to my rant, hope you have time to read the whole thing and can take a moment to answer.
Best Regards,
JAY