Hi Svein,
Thanks for the prompt response. I understand only too well the pricing
problems for stuff like this, even though i am insulated from all that by
being employed by the Uni (at least, till September next year). We had
experience of this in the early days of the Composer's Desktop Project when
the hardware costs were kept low by the need, based on a philosophical
decision, to have the whole system's price below that of a reasonable
piano, which meant we sold a reasonable number for the day (1986 was when
it came out) - well over a hundred SoundStreamers (the hardware bridge
between the Atari and the PCM701 audio interface) were sold. At the same
time, our associates in the York Electronics Centre were marketing the
first versions of a truly groundbreaking bit of software, Midigrid, written
by a colleague from the Department of Electronics (Andy Hunt)
(http://midigrid.fullpitcher.co.uk/moreaboutmg.html).
They priced the software based on a similar model to yours (and insisted on
me developing a dongle which put up the costs even further) against the
advice of those of us in the business (so to speak). The result - way lower
sales than they estimated and that it deserved. The whole thing nearly
disappeared altogether tho' it has survived in some niche markets. Hence my
comment about "counter-productive".
On the question of with-height - I presume that, at the very least, the
binaural out produces height?
On route outputs to audio channels, the problem is that it isn't just the
channel ordering that matters, it's what speakers are connected where and
if you have (say) a 5.1 rig, a stereo rig and an octagon sharing an audio
interface and/or speakers, some kind of output matrix is pretty well
essential.
UHJ - theoretical analysis/listening tests would be an interesting project!
Dave
On Apr 1 2011, Svein Berge wrote:
Hello Dave,
Thanks for the feedback! I'll answer each comment separately. As a
general comment, I should say that these products aim to be as useful
as possible to as many users as possible while limiting the feature
set to something that is easy to document, understand and support. The
free player serves two purposes for me: To increase the general
interest in B-format, but of course more importantly, as promotion for
the plugin, where any income will come from. It was therefore
absolutely necessary to strip it of enough features to make the
upgrade worth the price for enough people.
1. lack of with-height surround playback
With-height surround has always been one of the big selling points of
ambisonics, but not the only one. In my opinion, and I know opinions
are divided, other features will be more popular among current
recording engineers and sound designers. The plugin (but not the
player) supports a limited set of 3d layouts with up to 8
loudspeakers. If there is enough interest to justify the time
investment (remember: nobody other than users are paying for this) I
might make specialized versions for 3d playback over large loudspeaker
arrays, but the plugin is intended to appeal to the masses, where
horizontal outweighs 3d by orders of magnitude.
2. route outputs to audio channels
This might be a candidate for improvement. I will make a note of it.
The player supports the three most common channel orders for 5.1. The
plugin allows you to drag the loudspeakers around to change the
channel order, and so has less use for it.
3. here's no option to play UHJ
I don't think the harpex algorithm works with UHJ, although no
theoretical analysis has been done. I've listened to some UHJ
recordings, and they _sounded_ nice, but I feel it would be
disingenuous to advertise UHJ support if the theory does not support
it. Anyone is free to experiment with UHJ-to-B converters in
combination with Harpex-B of course.
4. No loop or playlist mode on the player.
These are already noted as candidates for improvement.
5. counter-productively expensive (compared to Reaper or Plogue)
As you all know, the marginal cost of software is close to zero,
everything is in the development. So, when you compare a specialized
product to a mass-market product, it makes no logical sense to compare
their feature set without at the same time dividing by the potential
sales numbers. It should be noted that I am not paid by anyone to do
this work, so the business model here is that the users must pay for
all of the development. Since this plugin in practice requires the use
of a soundfield-type microphone, which is not really a mass-market
product, I don't expect to recoup any reasonable wage for the time
spent on it. From a customer's point of view, the price should be
considered in relation to the cost of all the other gear involved -
the microphone, recorder, computer, daw etc and the relative value
added by the plugin. I think it's a good deal, but don't expect much
sympathy from academia.
Svein
On 1. april. 2011, at 10:43, Dave Malham wrote:
Yep, I've downloaded it too and it does look nice - I am _very_
envious of that display!
The following comments are on the free player. Aside from any
worries I (and no doubt many of those who remember "active
steering" quad decoders) have about any sort of active level/
position dependent processing, the current version has, as far as I
am concerned, some limitations which rule out its use at present.
The most serious of these is a lack of with-height surround playback
(except, presumably, over phones). I mean, come on guys - this is
the 21st century! The player also does not have any means (as far as
I can see) to route outputs to audio channels (Windows version, not
checked the OSX one yet). This is one of the big limitations of VLC
which has stopped us pursuing that as the optimum cross platform
player. There's no option to play UHJ...which is still important. No
loop or playlist mode on the player.
Anyway, more next week when I have had a chance to get into our
studio and try it out (if I can figure a way to route the signals)
Dave Malham
PS - I think the full plugin is counter-productively expensive! I
mean, come on - a plugin that costs more than many hosts that it
might be used in like Reaper or Plogue and almost as much as the
full Max/MSP/Jitter package, all of which have far more
functionality and represent much higher investments in development
time and resources. Fair enough (I suppose) for people who can
afford to shell out for Protools - but for anyone else???
On 31/03/2011 17:15, Richard Dobson wrote:
On 31/03/2011 11:59, Svein Berge wrote:
.
In addition, there is a free B-format player application, which is
intended for playing back b-format material. Hopefully, this can
make
some modest contribution on the popularity of b-format as a surround
sound format. The player is available for windows, osx and linux.
Hi, just downloaded it; plays very nicely, and looks great. One
thing though - it looks like it is exclusively a decoder, i.e.
treats any generic multi-channel file (.wav) as if it is BFormat,
so it seems it can't double up as a general multi-channel soundfile
player - which would be quite handy. Of course one reason for the
AMB format was specifically to disambiguate plain m/c files from
bformat ones, to make such operation easier.
Richard Dobson
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