Ambisonic tools and utilities

Most current software packages do not properly deal with and/or fully support ambisonic files. This is likely (I hope) to be a shortlived situation. So, some of the following utilities will hopefully soon be history …

For more general information, try this site's main page.

AMBCALC a Perl script that prints out channel values for a given azimuth and elevation.
Should work on any platform with Perl installed, thusfar tested on Linux.
AMBCHAN a Perl script that converts channel names/notations, and likewise for groups of channels (same comment regarding platforms as ambcalc ).
AMBINFO a Perl script that reads WAVEX header (same comment regarding platforms as ambcalc ).
AMBMAN a Perl collection of utilities for manipulating, converting etc. ambisonic files.
WAV2AMB a Perl script that 'corrects' the headers on Wave Format Extensible files (same comment regarding platforms as ambcalc ).

For system/software requirements and also some estimates of what order of ambisonics each of these will work with see the separate page.

Download AMBISUITE

The above programs use common subroutines and therefore come as a package, a 'suite' of programs (called AMBISUITE).

The latest version is 0.5.3 (20080918) and has important changes/fixes. You should upgrade.

The next release is coming ….and will take advantage of developments in Sox. SoX 14.0.1 now fully supports editing four channel files (making the first order manipulations much easier), 14.1.0 writes *.amb files allowing a smooth path for chained operations (at the moment the code keeps asking if this is the last operation and if so, should it convert to 'out.amb'). In the new code all intermediate ambisonic files will be in *.amb format.

You have a choice between normal zip that you should be able to unpack on any platform (unzip ambisuite.zip) or the better compression of bzip2, which you may or may not have the software to unpack. The difference in file size is actually minimal. (Both files are under 60 KB for 0.5.3.)

This is still fast-developing software. New features added are there for testing and bug-reporting as much as for usage. You are advised to upgrade frequently. Please check output and report any unexpected results. Thank you.

October 2007, updated September 2008.