Ambisonics is unarguably the best surround technology, yet ardour does not support this? I find this astonishing…
Don’t even try to give me the “it’s not commercial” BS, it IS commercial, Waves plugins use 2nd order ambisonic processing internally and only render to 5.1 etc at the output.
If Ardour took a similar route it would be unarguably THE BEST editor for surround, from 5.1 to 7.1 to 10.2 to zillion.zillion, with complete localisation and panning of sounds and FUTURE PROOF underlying structure.
I’m disappointed that this does not exist and I can find no plans for it on the site. The technology exists, but people struggle daily with Digi nonsense because they don’t support it properly.
I hope the development team sees the sense in making Ardour the most surround advanced editor in the world.
Thanks for the feedback. Sorry you didn’t find anything on the site, but this may be of interest: http://ardour.org/node/855
I’m the one working on the N.M panning and by the end of the summer there will be a panner API in place that will allow an ambisonic panner to be written and plugged in for arbitrary panning. If I have time to spare, that may get done before September too.
Many thanks hazure - that’s good to know, and if it happens this year, and Ardour does it correctly, it will make Ardour much much better - but some of the commercial programs are onto it and it won’t be long until they also offer good plugin support for ambisonics, Nuendo is practically there NOW…
I was hoping for something more fundamental, so that the underlying busing and panning structure of Ardour was more favourable for Ambisonics. That is what will separate it from the crowd and make its multichannel support future proof, regardless of what the final “render” is. The industry as a whole must get away from the stereo paradigm, and also the simplistic volume/phase and 2D paradigm of panning. If Ardour is first to embrace this, and soon, it will set the standard for others.
pxd - the internal structure of Ardour’s data handling is already very favorable to more abstract models like ambisonics. there is no concept of “stereo” anywhere in ardour’s internals.
our tracks/mixer strips represent a signal data processing pathway object that can handle any number of of data streams, and whose i/o configuration can be changed at any time.
We already have a design where panners are pseudo-plugins - that is, they are not hard-coded into signal pathways, and part of Hazure’s efforts this summer will convert them into true dynamically loaded objects. Once that is done, both he and other people will be able to write new panners very easily, not as part of Ardour but simply conforming to a very simple API.
One of the reasons I’ve been trying to push ardour past 160 channels is due to a truly intense experience at The Audium in San Francisco.
I have no idea how (or even if) they model how they are creating their compositions for that space, but it would be interesting to drive that one day with ardour.
