Signal flow of the Dolby Atmos plug-in in Logic Pro for Mac

The Dolby Atmos plug-in has two input paths, one for the surround bed and one for the signals of all object tracks.

The signals of all bed tracks are routed to the surround bus on their channel strip. That surround bus enters the surround master channel strip and is processed on any plug-in that is inserted on the Audio Effect slots before the Dolby Atmos plug-in.

The signals (audio and pan metadata) from the object tracks are also sent to the surround master channel strip but directly to the Dolby Atmos plug-in. Therefore, object tracks are not processed by the effect plug-ins that are inserted before the Dolby Atmos plug-in.

The Dolby Atmos plug-in has one output path, the renderer output. This is the channel-based output that is created by the renderer from the object-based input, determined by the selection in the Monitoring Format pop-up menu.

The rendered output of the Dolby Atmos plug-in is sent to any of the plug-ins (7.1.4) that are inserted on the following Audio Effect slots on the surround master channel strip. This is where you would place the Meter and Loudness plug-ins.

After the signal exits the last Effect slot and goes through the remaining components on the surround master channel strip (volume fader, level meters, Mute button, Dim button), it is sent to two destinations, the output device (for speaker and headphone monitoring) and the optional bounce to a file or disc.

You monitor the output signal through the audio device that you choose in the Logic Pro > Settings > Audio > Devices pane.

When monitoring with a multichannel surround speaker setup, you need to configure the I/O Assignments settings. See Set I/O Assignments and bounce extensions for surround projects.

The Bounce feature uses the same monitoring signal to create a conventional channel-based audio file.