Ambisonic Encoders

Encoders create an ACN/SN3D sound field from ordinary source lanes or generate an encoded field directly. Choose an audio-input encoder when a REAPER source already exists; choose a spatial instrument when the plugin itself is the sound source.

Workflow

1. Choose an encoder and its output format or ambisonic order, then insert it on a correctly routed track with enough channels for that output.
2. Follow an ACN/SN3D output with an ambisonic decoder. For Ambi Encoder Modal in 8 BODY STEMS mode, route the eight ordinary lanes to the main speakers, a downstream direct panner, or Output Autogain Stereo/Quad for fold-down monitoring.
3. Route source lanes into an audio-input encoder, or load a preset and start the transport for a spatial instrument.
4. Establish the initial position or synthesis state, then explore movement, modulation, and field interaction while listening through the established output path.

Several encoders can analyze their own field and use its directional history to shape later movement or synthesis. See Listener Mode for the shared concept, control vocabulary, and differences among implementations.

Stochastic and Wrangler also provide a Parameter Surface: arrange as many as 24 preset cells and navigate their interpolated instrument state with automatable SURFACE X/Y controls.

Encoder editors retain their native control geometry inside a responsive viewport. A host may resize the window down to 480 by 360 pixels; horizontal and vertical scrollers expose the complete editor without shrinking its controls or changing point-field hit testing. Moving an editor to a smaller display requests a screen-fitting viewport automatically.

Audio-input Encoders

• Ambi Encoder Point: 1-to-64-lane point-source AED and gain automation into selectable first- through seventh-order ambisonics.
• Ambi Encoder Cloud: distributes as many as 64 source lanes into one to four first-through-seventh-order clouds.
• Ambi Encoder Surface Terrain: moves source-lane coordinates across nested procedural terrain spheres.
• Ambi Encoder Path: follows saved, imported, or hand-drawn spatial trajectories.
• Ambi Encoder Ray: places a mono source and listener inside a direct, early-reflection, and late-room field.
• Ambi Encoder Ray Bilocation: runs two Ray fields continuously and moves a mono source through their overlap.

Spatial Instruments

• Ambi Encoder Modal: distributes four to eight independent fictional modal bodies through first- through third-order ACN/SN3D, using a fixed shared 96-mode budget, a visible selectable Tetra 4 or Cube 8 Listener/Actuator environment, optional body stems, and directly editable AED points with Top, Side, and 3/4 cameras and position-stable OKLCH color.
• Ambi Encoder Medium: excites an eight-node cube of bidirectional fractional waveguides from mono audio, clicks, MIDI, or per-node Euclidean patterns, with percussive, bow, reed, and air-jet gestures, scale-locked note dispersion, shuffle-bag node routing, and strike-following directivity through first- through third-order ACN/SN3D.
• Ambi Encoder VOT: interpolates among sixteen waveforms while voices follow editable paths through the resulting timbre field.
• Ambi Encoder Vox: separates voice recordings into pitch, spectral, and noise components for phrase-based resynthesis and ensemble motion.
• Ambi Encoder Wave Terrain: turns closed contour scans across a procedural surface into oscillator waveforms and spatial positions.
• Ambi Encoder Wind: shapes broadband noise into gusts, turbulent air, and resonant material responses.
• Ambi Encoder Water: combines continuous flow noise with modeled droplets, splashes, and resonant bubbles.
• Ambi Encoder Pyrosphere: scores finite thermal entities through ignition, fracture, collapse, and aftermath, with a dedicated pressure jet plus four planetary-matter engines whose completed releases excite distributed thermal modal pairs.
• Ambi Encoder Cryosphere: scores finite frozen entities through strain, rupture, transport, and settling, with dedicated singing-ice and four speculative planetary-material processes whose stochastic events illuminate sparse mineral modal pairs.
• Ambi Encoder Insect: combines call-function templates with stridulation, tymbalisation, wing vibration, percussion, tremulation, and swarm motion.
• Ambi Encoder Pulsar: repeats short windowed waveforms from rhythmic rates into pitch, with recurrent-network waveform capture.
• Ambi Encoder Neural Ecology: grows four to sixty-four recurrent nodes whose adaptive four/eight-pickup auditory field navigates a Hunt/Tudor-referenced lattice score.
• Ambi Encoder Stochastic: uses second-order random walks to evolve breakpoint amplitude and duration curves; its SURF page interpolates complete generator states.
• Ambi Encoder Wrangler: couples oscillator pairs through comparator-driven feedback shift registers for repeating but unstable patterns; its SURF page includes the continuous per-voice curves.

Routing Baseline

Set the REAPER track width before inserting an encoder. The 64-channel encoders use the first (order + 1)^2 channels and silence the unused higher-order channels. Ambisonic effects and utilities occupy the field-aware chain between the encoder and decoder.