Transforming audio signals captured in different formats into a reduced number of formats for simplifying encoding and decoding operations

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing instructions that, when executed by one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations comprising:

• receiving, by a simplification stage from an acoustic pre-processing stage, audio signals in multiple formats and metadata of the audio signals, wherein the audio signals represent audio that has been captured by at least one microphone;
• receiving, by the simplification stage from a device, attributes of the device, the attributes including one or more audio formats supported by the device, the one or more audio formats including a spatial audio format;
• converting, by the simplification stage, the audio signals into a spatial mezzanine format that is compatible with the one or more audio formats;
• and
• providing, by the simplification stage, the converted audio signal to an encoding stage for downstream processing.

A system comprising:

• one or more processors;
• and
• a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing instructions that, when executed by the one or more processors, cause the one or more processors to perform operations comprising:
• receiving, by a simplification stage from an acoustic pre-processing stage, audio signals in multiple formats and metadata of the audio signals, wherein the audio signals represent audio that has been captured by at least one microphone;
• receiving, by the simplification stage from a device, attributes of the device, the attributes including one or more audio formats supported by the device, the one or more audio formats including a spatial audio format;
• converting, by the simplification stage, the audio signals into a spatial mezzanine format that is compatible with the one or more audio formats;
• and
• providing, by the simplification stage, the converted audio signal to an encoding stage for downstream processing.