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Updated 14 Oct 2026 · 11 min read

What's New in v1.5 ​

Orbit 1.5 is the biggest release since launch — a full timeline, a built-in video editor, a completely rebuilt IAMF / Eclipsa export, a rebuilt QC PDF report, and, in 1.5.2, OSLS — a customisable speaker output system that drives any layout up to 64 channels.

This page covers the 1.5 line: 1.5.0, 1.5.1, 1.5.2, 1.5.3, 1.5.5, 1.5.6 and 1.5.7.

How to read this page

Sections labelled (Pro) are part of Orbit Pro. Everything else is included in the free Orbit edition. See the overview for a full Standard / Pro breakdown.

Highlights ​

  • A full timeline (Pro) — your entire master on one timeline: beds, objects and stems as colour-coded waveforms, with per-track soloing, looping and markers.
  • A built-in video editor (Pro) — fast scrubbing, proxy generation and up to 4K, with text and graphic tools, for material bound for IAMF / Eclipsa.
  • A rebuilt IAMF / Eclipsa export (Pro) — a full audio-routing graph, auto-route presets, and Mix Presentations for alternate mixes.
  • OSLS — the Orbit Speaker Layout System — output to any custom speaker layout up to 64 channels, from one open-source .osls file. Read more.
  • Per-speaker solo, mute & groups (Pro) — a new Monitor view with top-down, side and 3D layouts.
  • A rebuilt QC PDF report — proper A4 pagination, a live preview, and (Pro) a full album workflow. Read more.
  • Loudness, powered by Cota — the footer loudness section rebuilt on Cota's engine, with a reworked 5.1 re-render pathway. Read more.
  • New privacy controls — optional, first-party usage data via Downlink, opt in or out any time. Read more.
  • Speaker rooms (1.5.7) — calibrate a speaker once and keep that calibration on every layout, save it as a Room, test your wiring with pink noise, and keep a library of your own SOFA HRTF profiles. Read more.
  • Performance across the board — lower CPU and memory use throughout.

1.5.0 — the biggest release yet ​

Released 2026-06-22.

A full timeline (Pro) ​

Orbit Pro 1.5 puts your entire master on one timeline — beds, objects and stems as colour-coded waveforms, with per-track soloing, looping and markers. Spot a silent object, read automation, scrub anywhere. The 3D scene and activity grid dock to the right, live as the file plays. See Timeline & Transport.

A built-in video editor (Pro) ​

Cutting a music video or podcast bound for IAMF / Eclipsa? Orbit Pro 1.5 includes a genuinely capable editor — fast scrubbing, proxy generation and up to 4K, with text and graphic tools. Don't need to edit? Drag your video in and go. See Video.

Quite possibly the world's most advanced IAMF export (Pro) ​

Take an ADM master to IAMF / Eclipsa through a full audio-routing graph. Go fast with auto-route presets — YouTube, the upcoming Esfera platform, Full Master — or take complete control. Hear exactly how the file will sound as objects fold into First-Order Ambisonics elements, and craft Mix Presentations for alternate mixes: no-vocals, different languages, and more. See ADM to IAMF Exporting.

Read any master at a glance ​

The Overview has been refined — session waveforms across the top, the activity grid and 3D scene side by side, full metering below — plus a brand-new real-time analyser: fluid, clear and detailed.

Object Grid (Pro) ​

Not new to 1.5 — it's been in Orbit Pro since 1.4 — but it deserves a mention. The Object Grid (View ▸ Show Object Grid…) is a dedicated Pro window that lays out every object in your master and traces its movement in real time. View trajectories as Polar (az/el) or Top-Down (room), alongside each object's waveform and live position. It's the fastest way to understand what a complex mix is actually doing.

1.5.1 — a rebuilt QC PDF report ​

Released 2026-06-24.

A brand-new QC PDF report ​

The PDF report has been rebuilt from the ground up: cleaner, more readable pages with proper A4 pagination, polished loudness and waveform graphics, and a live preview as you set it up.

  • Orbit (Standard) gets the full rebuilt report for per-track export.
  • Orbit Pro adds the complete album workflow — an album cover and contents page, whole-album export, and batch exporting.

See QC PDF Report for the full walkthrough.

New privacy controls ​

Orbit can now share optional, privacy-first usage data — purely to help us see which features matter most. It's never tied to your account, name or projects, and it stays in-house: the data goes to Downlink, our own analytics platform built specifically for Orbit. No third parties, and we will never sell or share your data.

You'll see a one-time notice on first launch, and you can opt out (or back in) any time under Preferences ▸ Privacy. See Data & Privacy.

Smoother session handling ​

  • Double-clicking a session in Finder now opens it correctly.
  • Opening a file cleanly replaces what you had open — offering to save first if there are unsaved changes.
  • There's now a clear way back to the home screen.

1.5.2 — "Anything Is Possible" ​

Released 2026-07-03.

OSLS — the Orbit Speaker Layout System ​

OSLS is a fully customisable speaker output system. Any layout you can describe, Orbit will output to it — up to 64 channels. 10.1.4, 22.2, Auro, a 30-speaker dome: if you can describe it, Orbit can drive it. Format mapping from ADM and IAMF is automatic.

OSLS replaces hardcoded, duplicated speaker tables with one human-readable .osls file per layout plus a small SDK — a single source of truth across native, browser, Windows and mobile. Build your own in the browser 3D designer at osls.io.

OSLS is fully open source under the Apache 2.0 license. The spec, JSON Schema, blessed layouts and reference SDKs (TypeScript, C ABI, Swift, WASM) are on GitHub. See OSLS.

Solo, mute and group — right on the speakers (Pro) ​

The new Monitor view in Orbit Pro lets you solo, mute, and build custom groups across the new multichannel output system. Top-down, side and 3D views; click any speaker to solo it, or use the sidebar. The footer carries your custom solo groups across every view. See Monitor View.

Loudness, powered by Cota ​

The loudness section in the footer has been restyled and rebuilt to display Powered by Cota. Cota is our dedicated loudness plugin and framework — we've brought its look, feel and clarity into Orbit, and reworked the 5.1 re-render pathway for more accurate metering. See Loudness.

On immersive loudness

Orbit uses its own renderer — exactly what lets it play back any immersive format independently (ADM masters, EBU ADM, IAMF, and more). Loudness won't line up perfectly with another renderer such as the Dolby Atmos Renderer; that's the nature of immersive, so test on every renderer you can. Orbit's loudness is verified against the standard tests in ITU-R BS.1770, EBU R128 and more.

Also in 1.5.2 ​

  • The PDF viewer has been refined — bed- and object-only loudness selection has been removed, and everything from the 1.5.1 beta has been pulled across.
  • You can now delete cable connections between ADM sources and IAMF elements in the IAMF / Eclipsa export window — hold Option and click a connection to delete it.
  • Performance updates across the board — CPU and memory usage kept as low as possible.

1.5.3 — Export Audio ​

One window for every audio export ​

File ▸ Export Audio… (⇧⌘B) replaces the old binaural-only WAV export with a single export window, for ADM and IAMF masters alike. Render to binaural — or, with Pro, to a speaker layout — in WAV, MOV or MP4, normalise to a loudness target with a true-peak limiter, and override the fold-down trims for just that export. Binaural export is available in every edition; speaker-layout targets, video muxing and ranged export are Pro. See Exporting.

IAMF files that play everywhere (Pro) ​

Exporting IAMF as MP4? A Compatibility stereo track switch (on by default) adds a standard AAC stereo track alongside the immersive stream, so ordinary players get stereo while IAMF-aware players still pick up the full immersive mix. It's hidden for .iamf files, and isn't supported for YouTube upload.

An Immersive loudness target ​

The loudness targets gain Immersive — −18 LUFS, ±1 LU. Pick it in Preferences ▸ Loudness or from the footer's target pill. See Loudness.

1.5.5 — sign in to Orbit ​

Sign in, and start a trial in the app ​

Sign in with Apple, Google, or your email and password to find your licence — no licence key needed (though you can still enter one). Signing in lists the licences on your account with their device-seat usage, and activating this Mac is always an explicit Activate This Mac click. New to Orbit? Sign in and choose Start 14-Day Free Trial for 14 days of Orbit Pro, no card required. See Licensing.

IAMF Export graph (Pro) ​

  • Restore Silent Source — right-click a source that was auto-discarded as silent to bring it back, unrouted.
  • Reset Graph — a permanent toolbar button (with a confirmation, and undoable) that returns routing, groups and removed sources to the recommendation.
  • A new light background for the graph canvas, remembered between sessions.
  • Adding Mix Presentations, renames, language changes and element edits are now undoable.

1.5.6 — a roomier Overview ​

A flatter, roomier Overview ​

The Overview page and footer lose their panel boxes: the session waveform runs edge to edge, the 3D scene more than doubles in height, and the footer is one flat strip. See Overview.

Activity: Hex or Grid ​

Switch the Activity panel between Hex (the honeycomb) and Grid (a numbered dot matrix in rows of ten) from the Activity header, on the Overview and in the Timeline inspector.

Quiet objects no longer disappear ​

The level at which an object counts as active was fixed at roughly −30 dBFS. It's now −62 dBFS by default and adjustable in Preferences ▸ Appearance ▸ Object Activity, and objects fade around that level instead of flickering. See Appearance Preferences.

Also in 1.5.6 ​

  • SILENT tags — once a file is scanned, a track below −85 dBFS for the whole file carries a dashed SILENT tag (or "4/12 ch silent" when only some channels are dead) on bed banks and object rows.
  • A Diagnostics panel — Preferences ▸ Diagnostics shows render load, underruns, buffer and sample rate, the output device and layout, and your Mac's CPU, memory and thermal state, with Copy and Email to Support.
  • Fixed: looping couldn't be switched on after drawing a region; drawing a region is now undoable; the output device picker in Preferences showed the previous interface.

1.5.7 — speaker rooms ​

A release for the room you listen in. Change layout without leaving the main window, calibrate your speakers once and keep that calibration on every layout, save it as a Room, test your wiring — and keep a library of your own HRTF profiles.

Change speaker layout from the sidebar ​

With Multichannel selected, the sidebar's Monitoring tab shows your speaker layout as a menu — custom .osls layouts included — with a Configure Layout & Routing button underneath. If your interface can't carry the layout, Orbit now says so instead of quietly monitoring a narrower one: "…has 6 output channels. 7.1.4 needs 12 — select an output device with at least 12 outputs to monitor this layout."

Speaker test, for Standard and Pro ​

Preferences ▸ Speaker Layout & Routing gains a Speaker Test: click a speaker, hear pink noise from that speaker alone at the −20 dBFS calibration reference. The tone follows your routing, so a speaker that stays silent or answers from the wrong place is a patch or a cable, not a guess. Routing in use lists what every output carries, and any speaker routed nowhere is called out. See Output Routing.

Calibrate a speaker once — every layout uses it ​

Calibration now belongs to the room, not the layout: set your heights on 5.1.4 and they're the same heights on 7.1.4 and 9.1.6. Existing calibrations are merged in automatically.

Time alignment now aligns. The furthest speaker is the reference at 0 ms and nearer speakers are held back to match it — Orbit used to delay each speaker by its own distance, which delayed the far speaker most. The new Delay Table does the whole layout when you press Auto-Calculate Delays, and nothing changes your delays unless you press it.

Rooms ​

Save the whole calibration as a named Room — Save, Save As…, Load, Delete. Loading one applies it straight away, whatever layout you're on. See Speaker Configuration.

Your own HRTF profiles ​

Preferences ▸ Audio & Monitoring ▸ HRTF Library — import .sofa profiles and Orbit keeps its own copy. They appear in the HRTF menu by name, in their own Imported section, and your choice is restored at launch; previously a custom HRTF was forgotten on quit. The HRTF quality selector is gone — binaural always renders on the interpolated grid. See Audio Preferences.

Standard and Pro ​

Speaker calibration and the speaker test are no longer Pro-only. Both tabs of Speaker Configuration — Virtual Studio and Physical — open in every edition. The room you monitor in isn't an upsell.

Also in 1.5.7 ​

  • Speaker Configuration is roomier, with a Side View on the Physical tab, steadier panels, and matching Save / Save As / Load / Delete controls on both tabs.
  • Apply lights up only when there's something to apply, and no longer closes the window.
  • Fixed: Virtual Studio's Ls and Rs speaker tests were silent, and that test followed your interface's channel count although its speakers are virtual.
  • Fixed: picking a layout in the Speaker Configuration window didn't change it anywhere else.
  • Show Object Details is now ⇧⌘D (⌥⌘D is macOS's own "hide the Dock"), and Show Object Grid… is ⇧⌘G. See Menus & Shortcuts.

Orbit, or Orbit Pro? ​

The marquee additions in 1.5 — the full timeline, the built-in video editor and the rebuilt ADM → IAMF export — are part of Orbit Pro. Orbit (Standard) lands the 1.5 foundation too, including OSLS output layouts, the rebuilt QC report for per-track export, and performance refinements across the board — and remains the most flexible way to play back, inspect and QC ADM and IAMF masters in 7.1.4, binaural and stereo.

See the overview for the full breakdown.

Upgrading ​

Orbit 1.5 is a free update for existing users. The minimum macOS version is unchanged (macOS 14 Sonoma); Orbit runs natively on Apple Silicon. Existing Pro licence keys continue to work; Standard licences remain Standard and can upgrade to Pro at any time.

Looking for the previous release notes? See What's New in v1.4.0.

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