It is still better to associate verbs such as "allow" with the player,
rather than with the file. Software allows you do do stuff, files just
are what they are.
The specialists here may argue about "any number of speakers". Classical
Ambisonic decoding requires specific kinds of regular layouts (square,
hex, octagon, cube, e.g. as listed on my web page and elsewhere), with
stereo probably as a default on first launch. There are recipes for
other standard layouts such as 5.1. With HOA, I could not even begin to
enumerate the options. Chances are in most situations that the user will
have some particular layout set up, and will hope to decode most files
to it, most of the time. The very high-end decoders (Fons?) do offer the
means to specify the positions of each speaker and then compute the
decoding magic accordingly (and always awaiting the day predicted by
James Moorer when "speakers will know where they are").
The challenge Ambisonics presents to a DAW is that in most cases the
number of B-Format channels and the number of speakers decoded to are
not the same; this is a somewhat exotic paradigm for a conventional DAW
that has been carefully built around just speaker feeds. But once such a
facility has been implemented in the host, in principle a high-end
decoder plugin could be installed to do it more suavely.
Apart from the basics of loading an AMB file into Nuendo, playing it
(hopefully through some installed modest decoder) and writing it, the
other obvious task is mixing - possibly with the stipulation that all
the files are of the same order (number of channels). So one wxyz file
can be mixed in the usual way with another wxyz file. The data remains
in amb format and would not need to be "re-encoded" for export.
Perchance a built-in decoder can decode for real-time playback in some
nominal way (maybe even for headphones) for simple monitoring purposes.
I would not expect Steinberg to add anything more sophisticated than
that (nice as that would be).
In fact, I suspect I would be happy just to know that Nuendo could read
an amb file into generic channels, and export likewise, leaving it to
users to do what they will, good bad or otherwise, with the data.
Richard Dobson
On 02/10/2013 19:03, Augustine Leudar wrote:
So basically "the .amb file will allow you to decode b-format to any number
of speakers up to 16" .
In that case I dont think you could export directly to .amb in nuendo even
with wigware , and it would probably at best just let you import the
x,y,z/w. as four seperate tracks or one interleaved quad. You could edit
their length etc then export them as seperate tracks and re-encode to amb
with another piece of software though.
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