Voice piece: 4 speakers, voice jumping to and from.

I'd like your assistance on setting up the following setup.

4-5 voices have been recorded reading a monologue. A setup of 4-5 speakers spread out, the voices will move around the speakers individually, moving around inbetween sentences.

What would be the best way to achieve this? I would prefer a single audio file being played from a system, but I would not have the opportunity to work with a surround setup to do this beforehand. I'm not well-versed in surround sound mixing, but I assume I could do a 'ghost-mix' and just send the tracks off to different channels linked to a specific speaker?

Thank you.

fucking hell are you a mind reaader i was thinkig about almost the exact same concept a few days ago.

reaper comes with a plugin that would be good 4 this, its called reasurround it can rout multiple inputs to multiple outputs and controll where thay are in the stereo space using the UI or fx envelopes or CC.

http://wiki.cockos.com/wiki/index.php/ReaSurround

There are a few different ways you could do it depending on what you have at hand.

You could have 4 or 5 different files that are all the same length and only feature one voice each. If you have a mixer with 5 outputs, you could send each track through one of those simultaneously with each output routed to a separate speaker.

If you have an audio interface with surround sound capability, you could just take your outputs into your speakers that way and route in 5.1 in Logic/Cubase/etc.

Thank you for your help.

Aaaah: I assume the panner is only usable with a surround sound external soundcard.

Braintree: I've considered that option.

The setup is as follows now: 4 speakers, one voice per speaker, inbetween and at the end music will play from all speakers together. It will most likely be two pairs of KRK Rokit 5 monitors. I only have a stereo output USB interface myself.

So, as far as I can see, either I

a) Get a 4 channel output interface, perhaps run each track through a send channel in Ableton (preferred environment) out to each channel.

b) Get a hold of a mixer with 4 outputs, as you said, Briantree.

c) Go idiotically simple and have two laptops playing two tracks each simultaneously.

I ought to tie the knot on this thread.

I ended up borrowing an external firewire interface with 6 outputs, and re-routed each channel to a different speaker within Live.

I appreciate your helpful thoughts. Cheers.