The 360pan suite is a suite of plug-ins for Windows and macOS designed to provide up to third-order ambisonics mixes for immersive audio: audio from all directions, intended for headphone playback, that stays where it is even when you turn the head.

You can do all your panning, distancing and even mixing in 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.

What is the 360pan package for?

The 360pan suite allows you to deliver ambisonic audio, AmbiX audio in b format to be precise.

There are many names for the type of video that 360pan Suite can provide this spatial (or localized, immersive, 3D) audio for:

• 360° video
• VR Video
• Virtual reality video
• Panoramic video
• Spherical video
• to name the most common

These types of videos require a soundtrack that can rotate when the viewer's head with VR glasses, head-mounted device (HMD) turned on, or their phone is turned on.

There are several playback platforms for 360 VR videos.

• Facebook 360
• Oculus Video
• YouTube 360
• SamsungVR
• Tour
• Live
• SteamVR
• PlayStation VR

They all chose Ambisonics as the technology that enables interactive audio mixing. This means that post-audio people need to produce Ambisonics mixes. Ambisonics mixes are in a format called b format, which consists of four channels (for first order, nine channels for second order, and sixteen channels for third order). Format B comes in two channel orders: AmbiX or FuMa.

YouTube requires Ambisonics soundtracks in AmbiX format, so that's what 360pan offers.

Facebook requires 2nd order Ambisonics, the 360pan suite offers this.

360pan

360pan allows you to pan mono, stereo, or four-channel input files in Ambisonics, using disks that move on top of the video window (Pro Tools HD/Ultimate).

Reverb gain, distance and width, along with the disc itself, will appear in the video window (Pro Tools HD/Ultimate) when a panner is inserted and 'show puck' and 'show overlay' are turned on. The three sliders appear when you click the three sliders icon that appears when you hover over a disc in the video window.

signal flow

It is possible to use 360reverb in a traditional way using sends and busses, but it was designed to be used in a more intelligent way:

Mono or stereo sources are converted to Ambisonics, while giving a left-right, up-down, and distance position on the Ambisonic bus. A panner is inserted into each sound source track to do this. So panners get mono or stereo (or up to 4 channels) of Ambisonics input and output.

Each 360reverb creates a private Ambisonics input, a kind of backdoor, accessible only by 360pan instances. Each 360reverb appears as a send destination in each 360panner. This links the 360pan to the reverb in such a way that you can adjust the distance and width of the reverb per source pan. This goes for an unlimited amount of sources, even if there is only a single 360reverb in your project (which is the most common configuration).

In addition to all this, the usual main reverb input still works (also simultaneously with the private input).

Position Blur

Rotate position blur to create sound objects that should appear larger than a point source. The pan position will then be their center and they will become larger in the mix.

Head Lock Audio

If the position blur is all the way up, the audio will be mono and will not move when the listener turns their head. You can use this to mix voiceovers or music (mono) that shouldn't move.

Stereo music pan hard left and right and half-open position blur to create a head-locked effect in an Ambisonics mix, which does not require separate head-locked tracks.

360monitor

360monitor extracts video frames from the video window and sends them to a browser-style drag-and-pan screen while decoding the Ambisonics mix to binaural for headphones (or 5.0) for speaker playback, so that you can look around and hear your soaking mix as you do it.

In the image, the selected mixing format is 8 channels (8 channels). This 360 monitor is therefore on an eight-channel bus (7.1). It doubles the audio to 2 channels for listening with headphones. It does this in the manner technically described in Appendix 2 'Ambisonics for binaural conversion' of the 360pan suite manual.

Tip: 360monitor can be CPU heavy when visible. This is because it is transporting frames from the Pro Tools HD/Ultimate video window to the 360monitor user interface. The smaller the Pro Tools HD/Ultimate video window, the lighter the 360monitor operates.

360reverb

360reverb is the first truly omnidirectional convolution reverb. A single instance can provide pan-following reverb with individually adjustable reverb width for an unlimited amount of sound sources.

The dry/wet balance and spread controls only work on the main (traditional plug-in) reverb input. 360reverb accepts Ambisonics input and provides Ambisonics output. There is a separate private input that can be selected in all 360pan plugin instances.

The dry/wet balance and propagation controls do nothing on the private audio lines that each 360pan has for the reverb. The reverb distance and width parameters for the private inputs are set in the 360pan plug-in (or via the pop-up faders in the video overlay).

360limiter

The 360limiter is a first to third order Ambisonics, look ahead, brickwall peak limiter with adaptive automatic release timing determination and added EBU R128 volume measurement (LUFS).

Your spatial audio mix will sound great compared to other mixes from other professional sources, like Google Spotlight Stories on YouTube.

Live Ambisonics recordings generally have a large dynamic range, where occasional peaks can prevent the user from gaining without clipping the peaks. When uploaded online (or any other delivery platform), your mix may sound quiet compared to the rest. This is where the limiter comes into play. The 360limiter can transparently smooth out these spikes, allowing the user to win the program without clipping.

SPECIFICATIONS: