Wednesday 7 September 2011

some interesting free downloads for those wishing to experiment with ambisonic recording & editing techniques:

firstly, it's worth visiting Daniel Courville's website & downloading his free software plus taking a look at the various articles & papers on ambisonic techniques he has made available.



Thanks to the generous sponsorship of the Hochschule für Musik Winterthur Zürich and the Swiss Center for Computer Music a set of Ambisonic VST plugins have been written by Dave Malham and Ambrose Field from the Department of Music, University of York. England. They have been placed in the public domain as a service to the musical community in general, and electroacoustic musicians in particular, with two conditions;
  1. All rights in the software reside with the sponsors. You may use the software, without charge to you, for any reasonable and legal purpose. You may also redistribute it but you may not sell it or charge for it (except for a materials charge). You must inform users of its source and acknowledge its use.

  2. Although all reasonable care has been taken to ensure that this software is fit for use and in no way infringes any rights, copyrights or laws, by downloading it you accept full responsibility for all consequences, losses or outcomes however caused. You thereby absolve the sponsoring organisations and the code authors of all liabilities.
Currently there are two plugins available in the Swiss Center range;
  • B-pan Ambisonic Encoder

  • B-dec High resolution First Order Ambisonic B-format decoder

These are new versions, as of May 2005, with several bug fixs and internal extensions to improve handling of Nuendo 2 problems. They have been tested in Nuendo 2 on PC, in the latest beta version of AudioMulch on the PC, in Plogue Bidule and Tracktion on the PCand Mac (OSX) and in Max/MSP on the Mac.

Mac Users

Please note that there have been reports of problems with earlier versions of the plugins on the German language versions of OS9, the International and American versions seem more stable. However, we are no longer supporting OS9 and there will be no further builds for this platform, only for OSX.


More VST Ambisonic packages

are available from York University's Department of Music Music Technology group at;

York Ambisonic VST Plugins


VST Plugin code

The code for the gui-less version of BPan can be downloaded from this site. This code is released by permission of the Hochschule für Musik Winterthur, Zürich in an effort to increase the utilisation of Ambisonics within the community of electroacoustic musicians. The code is released under the standard GNU General Public licence for general use.


Last updated on Sunday June 18th, 2006 (removal of bug report form due to Spam problem)

Learn more about Ambisonics

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