Openmixer: a routing mixer for multichannel studios

The Listening Room at CCRMA, Stanford University is a 3D studio with 16 speakers (4 hang from the ceiling, 8 surround the listening area at ear level and 4 more are below an acoustically transparent grid floor). We found that a standard commercial digital mixer was not the best interface for using the studio. Digital mixers are complex, have an opaque interface and they are usually geared towards mix­down to stereo instead of efficiently routing many input and output channels. We have replaced the mixer with a dedicated computer running Openmixer, an open source custom program designed to mix and route many input channels into the multichannel speaker array available in the Listening Room. This paper will describe Openmixer, its motivations, current status and future planned development.