360pan suite is a plug-in suite for Windows and macOS designed to deliver 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.
There are a lot of names for the type video that the 360pan suite can deliver spatial (or localized, immersive, 3D) audio for:
- 360° video
- VR video
- Virtual Reality video
- Panoramic video
- Spherical video
To name the most common. These type videos require a soundtrack that can turn when the head of the viewer with VR goggles on, or his phone, is turned.
There are a number of playback platforms for 360 VR videos.
- Facebook 360
- Oculus Video
- YouTube
- SamsungVR
- Jaunt
...to name a couple. All of these chose Ambisonics as the technology that allows for the interactively turning audio mix. This means that audio-post folks need to produce ambisonics mixes. Ambisonics mixes are in a format called b-format, which consist of four channels. B-format comes in two channel orders: AmbiX or FuMa. YouTube requires AmbiX b-format ambisonics soundtracks, so this is what 360pan delivers. Facebook requires 2nd order ambisonics, 360pan suite 2 also delivers this.
360pan
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.
Signal Flow
It is possible to use the 360reverb in a traditional way using sends and busses, however it is designed to be used in a more clever way:
mono or stereo sources are converted up to ambisonics, while giving it a left-right, up-down, and distance position in the ambisonics bus. A panner is inserted on each sound source track to do this. So panners get mono or stereo (or even 4channels) of input and output ambisonics.
Each 360reverb creates a private ambisonics input, kind of a backdoor, only accessible by the 360pan instances. Each 360reverb shows up as a send destination in each 360panner. This ties the 360pan’s to the reverb in such away that you can adjust distance and reverb-width per panned source. This goes for an unlimited amount of sources even if there is only a single 360reverb in your project (which is the most usual setup).
Besides all this the usual main input of the reverb still functions (also simultaneously with the private input).
Position blur
Turn position blur up to create sound-objects that should appear bigger than a point-source. The panning position will then be their center, and they will become larger in the mix.
Head-locking audio
If position blur is turned all the way up, the audio is mono and will not move at all when the listener turns his head. You can use this to mix voice-overs or (mono) music that shouldn’t move. Pan stereo music hard left and hard right and open up position blur halfway to create a head-locked effect in an ambisonics mix, That does not require separate head-locked tracks.
360monitor
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.
Tip: 360monitor can be heavy on the CPU when it is 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 360monitor operates.
Head tracking
Audio Ease, Amazon and Ali-Express all sell a head tracking unit that can be attached to your headphones and can steer the 360monitor. That more closely resembles the way your mix will be listened to by the end-user. Appendix 3 in the 360pan suite manual describes the use and calibration of the head tracker.
360reverb
360reverb 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).
360radar
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.
360turner
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.