I suspect that - any file format that has any level of sophistication (read: complexity) will likely not get take-up (maybe even UA is too complex. Straight old B-format is fine). Its not what features are included that counts.... that's the engineer's mistake. - any file format which can't relatively-easily be output by a DAW will likely fail (Both UA and AMB require an encoding step after DAW output) - any file format that takes control away from the composer will be rejected by the composer. Abstracted formats which force the spatial composer to think in certain ways will only see takeup by those unaware... eg: thinking of spatial audio as mono-channels of sound which are then 'spatialised' in a cartesian coordinate system. In such formats, although the engineers may not realise it, they become as much a composer of the results as the composer themselves (see papers by Agostino Di Scipio on 'techne')
Etienne On Sun, Oct 28, 2012 at 9:27 AM, etienne deleflie <edelef...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Richard, > >> Now the attention in previous posts was very much on the phrase "most >> sophisticated format", which was guaranteed to wind people up; whereas the >> key word is really "available". The UA format is not really available to >> ~composers~ to use. The description is very much one for prospective >> developers - acquiring wavpack, and one way or another implementing all >> those equations (and apparently creating a WAVE file with a large number of >> silent channels!). > > I really didn't want to get pulled into a defence or argument about > ambisonic formats ... but, just to clarify ... the choice to include > some empty channels in UA is intentionally designed so that authoring > environments don't need to change all the channel routing when working > at different orders. The choice of Wavepack was determined on its > ability to compress empty channels to take up no space. Wavepack also > efficiently losslessly compresses all sound data. > > Already on these two points UA is far more practical for composers. > You only need one setup to work at different orders. UA was actually > designed *for* composers. I agree that there are many remaining tools > required for it to be *actually* practical for *listeners*. > > But there's the grab ... I think the ultimate mistake is to think that > ambisonics should be a consumer oriented format. (both ambisonia.com > and soundOfSpace.com distribute the files as already decoded speaker > feeds) That's where so many issues start to creep in. When a consumer > gets an ambisonic file then: > - the audio player needs to be "smart", it needs to do "work" far > beyond what audio players are used to doing > - speaker agnosticism is a false benefit ... in reality, ambisonic > order choice is largely determined by the targeted speaker array. Note > there ... "targeted speaker array" is the opposite of "speaker > agnosticism" > > The way I see it .... Ambisonics is a production format. > > Etienne -- http://etiennedeleflie.net _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
