360pan suite is a collection of ambisonics plug-ins for immersive audio production, enabling 3D panning, monitoring, reverb, and rotation within your DAW’s video window.
Purpose and Core Panning
The 360pan suite is designed for creating ambisonics mixes that translate accurately to headphone listening, where audio remains fixed in space as the listener turns their head. Its central tool, 360pan, places mono, stereo, or four-channel sources into an ambisonics field using draggable pucks directly over the video window in your DAW. You can adjust gain, distance, and reverb width from popup sliders in the same overlay, so you never need to open a separate plug-in interface.
This workflow is intended for DAWs like Reaper or Pro Tools HD/Ultimate, where the video window serves as both visual reference and mixing surface. The suite’s design allows you to combine traditional mixing with immersive audio, making it suitable for post-production, film scoring, and VR content where precise spatial placement matters.
Key Capabilities and Signal Flow
The suite uses a unique signal flow where each 360pan instance sends audio to 360reverb through a private input, accessible only by these panners. This lets you adjust distance and reverb width per source, even with a single reverb instance. 360reverb also functions as a conventional ambisonics convolution reverb on its main input, with dry/wet and spread controls affecting only that path.
Position blur expands sound objects beyond point sources; set to maximum, it makes audio mono and head-locked, so it doesn’t move when the listener turns their head—useful for voice-overs or music that should stay fixed. For a wider head-locked stereo effect, pan music hard left and right and open position blur halfway.
Monitoring and Rotation Tools
360monitor decodes ambisonics to binaural for headphones or 5.0 for speakers, while pulling video frames from the DAW’s video window into a browser-style interface for looking around your mix. It can be CPU-heavy when visible, so keeping the original video window small reduces the load. 360radar displays audio activity and position within the video overlay.
360turner rotates or tilts ambisonics signals to correct microphone misalignment, working alongside 360radar for visual feedback. The suite also includes 360fuma2ambix and 360ambix2fuma for converting first-order FuMa and AmbiX formats. All plug-ins come in first, second, and third order variants (4, 9, or 16 channels).
Workflow and Practical Applications
In practice, insert a 360pan on each sound source track, set its position in the video window, and route it to a 360reverb for spatialized ambisonics reverb. Use 360monitor on your master ambisonics bus to check the mix in real time, adjusting pucks or reverb width as needed. For live or recorded ambisonics material, apply 360turner to correct rotation and tilt.
Typical applications include film and video post-production, game audio, and virtual reality sound design, where maintaining directional stability during head movement is critical. The suite’s ability to mix within the video window streamlines the process, making it easier to align sound with on-screen action.
Key features
- Pan mono, stereo, or four-channel sources into ambisonics using video overlay pucks
- Adjust gain, distance, and reverb width per source without opening plug-in windows
- 360reverb offers omnidirectional convolution with private inputs for each panner
- Position blur controls object size and enables head-locked audio
- 360monitor decodes ambisonics to binaural or 5.0 with video preview
- 360radar and 360turner for visualizing and correcting ambisonics orientation
- Format converters between FuMa and AmbiX first-order
Best for
Best suited for audio post-production and immersive media projects in Reaper or Pro Tools HD/Ultimate on macOS, where mixing directly in the video window and maintaining stable spatial audio for headphone listeners is paramount. Its head-locking and rotation tools also aid in correcting microphone array recordings.