The surround sound feature lets you to create a surround sound project. It is better to use DirectSound Player with a device(headphones, etc) that supports surround sound to achieve the best effect. To use the surround sound feature, set up the "Project Channels" to 5.1 or 7.1 surround in the Project tab of the Options dialog. Then open the Surround Sound dialog by clicking the Surround Sound button on the Mixing tab.

The following are the main elements of the Surround Sound Editor:

• Static means the position of the sound source is fixed in 2D space
• Dynamic means the sound source position can change while playing

In MixPad, static surround is used for tracks, and you can configure the position of each track. Dynamic is used for clips and clip positions can change along with the progress of playing in percentage.

Choose Dynamic surround sound and use the envelope pan to adjust the position of clip source. The envelope pan provides two point lines which allow you to control the up/down and left/right position of clip source. The red line on the envelope pan indicates the time position (percentage) of the source. You can drag the red cursor and you will notice the source will move around on the radar display. Note that in dynamic surround sound mode, dragging the source on the radar display does not alter its settings.

The speakers and tracks are positioned graphically with the help of the Radar Display.

All the available tracks in the Sources List. This allows selecting/deselecting of tracks to include in the Radar Display.

A speaker represents a channel in the surround audio mix, which will be usually played back through a single speaker. A text is displayed along with a speaker icon.

An LFE speaker is a special type of speaker. It usually carries a Low Frequency Effects (LFE) sound track. Any track assigned to an LFE Speaker is played back exclusively through that speaker (channel).

The length of a blue line extending from the speaker icon towards the center of the Radar Display indicates the relative volume of a speaker. When a track is selected, the length of the line indicates the percentage of the total volume of the selected track played back through the speaker.

Spatial Blur is a parameter which controls the volume distribution of a track between multiple speakers. Its main use is to blur the localization of a track. Lower values mean higher localization.

By default all speakers carry equal weight in surround panning. This can be controlled by assigning a weight to each speaker. Low weight means low contribution in panning (Note: LFE speaker does not carry a weight). Setting the lowest weight results in the total exclusion of a speaker from panning.

Once satisfied with the project, you can export the project to a "multi-channel" surround sound in .wav file format. Just click the "Export Mix" in the Home tab and choose “Surround” on the popup dialog. Then MixPad will export the surround project to a single multi-channel wav file.

If your playback device is ASIO compatible, you can assign channels to your ASIO outputs. Click on Configure ASIO Channels on the Project tab of the Options dialog.