Audio Ease 360 Pan Software Suite
Description
360pan suite is a plug-in suite for Windows and macOS designed to deliver up to third order ambisonics mixes for immersive audio: audio from all directions, intended for headphone reproduction, that stays where it is even when you turn your head.
You can do all your panning, distancing and even mixing from within the video window of your DAW (Reaper or Pro Tools HD/Ultimate). There is no need to have any plug-in interfaces open while working.
360pan enables you to pan mono, stereo or four channel input files into ambisonics, using pucks that move on top of the (Pro Tools HD/Ultimate) video window.
Gain, distance and reverb width, along with the puck itself will show up in the (Pro Tools HD/Ultimate) video window when a panner is inserted and ‘show puck’ and ‘show overlay’ are switched on. The three sliders appear when you click the three slider icon that shows when you hover the mouse over a puck in the video window.
360monitor scoops video frames out of the video window and sends them into a browser style drag-n-pan screen while decoding the ambisonics mix to binaural for headphones, (or 5.0) for speaker playback, so you can look around and listen to your immersive mix while you are making it.
In the picture the mix format selected is 8 channel (8 ch). This 360monitor is therefore on an eight channel bus (7.1). It folds the audio down to 2 channels for headphone listening. It does that in the way described technically in Appendix 2 ‘Ambisonics to binaural conversion’ from the 360pan suite manual.
360reverb360reverb is the first truly omnidirectional convolution reverb. A single instance can can provide pan-following reverb with individually adjustable reverb width for an unlimited amount of sound sources.
The dry/wet balance and the spread controls only function on the main (traditional plug-in) input of the reverb. 360reverb accepts ambisonics input and delivers ambisonics output. There is a separate private input that is selectable in all 360pan plug-in instances.
The dry/wet balance and the spread controls do nothing on the private audio lines each 360pan has to the reverb. The distance and reverb-width parameters for the private inputs are set in the 360pan plug-in (or through the popup faders in the video overlay).
360limiter is a first order to third order ambisonics, look ahead, brick wall peak limiter with adaptive automatic release time determination, and added EBU R128 (LUFS) loudness metering.
Your spatial audio mix will sound great compared to other mixes from other professional sources like the Google Spotlight Stories on YouTube.
Live ambisonic recordings often have a large dynamics range, where occasional peaks can prevent the user from gaining without clipping the peaks. When uploaded online (or on any other delivery platform) your mix can sound quiet compared to the rest. This is where the limiter comes into play. The 360limiter can, transparently, attenuate these peaks, enabling the user to gain the program without clipping.
360radar shows you when there is audio in your ambisonics mix or recording, but more importantly it shows where it is, all right in the video window.
The 360turner together with 360radar allows you to rotate or tilt an ambisonics recording so that misalignment and calibration errors of the microphone can be easily corrected.