Tools | Sounding Future

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Tools

Plugin

3D Audio

Music and AI

Interfaces

SPATAI

sonicLAB

SPATAI is an AI-assisted spatial-motion tool that generates trajectories for up to 64 sound objects in a virtual 3D acoustic space from natural-language prompts. It runs Large Language Models in the cloud or locally via Ollama or LM Studio, supports Cartesian and polar coordinates, and sends OSC or MIDI motion data to third-party spatialisers including IEM, Holophonix, IRCAM Spat, IRCAM Panoramix, L-ISA, TiMax, ADM-OSC, and SPAT Revolution.

Standalone Application

Generative Music

Sound Design

VR/AR

StarWaves

sonicPlanet

StarWaves is an audio-visual synthesiser for sonic-architecture and generative sound texture design. It places transmitter, particle, and beam objects in a non-gravitational 3D space whose kinetic interactions trigger granular-level sonic events, with scene capture, animated transitions, MIDI/OSC control, and a parallel VR version, used in sound design, generative music, and immersive composition.

Standalone Application

Ambisonics

Sound Installation

3D Audio

Zirkonium

ZKM | Hertz-Lab

Zirkonium is a free macOS toolkit for spatial-audio composition and performance, developed at ZKM | Hertz-Lab Karlsruhe to drive the Klangdom — a 47-loudspeaker dome at the ZKM Kubus. Current version Zirkonium MK3 (since 2015) provides parametric trajectory creation over time, automatic interpolation, event filtering, and real-time rendering on arbitrary 2D or 3D loudspeaker setups. The DSP server is built on Pure Data (libpd) and uses VBAP, Higher-Order Ambisonics (HOA library, CICM), and binau

Framework / SDK

Game Audio

3D Audio

Wwise

Audiokinetic

Wwise is an audio middleware suite for interactive media and games. It comprises a graphical authoring tool and a cross-platform sound engine, with components for spatial audio, interactive music, dynamic mixing, and integrated platform support, used in game audio production, automotive sound, and location-based entertainment.

WFSCollider

Game Of Life Foundation

WFSCollider is a SuperCollider class library for Wave Field Synthesis spatialisation with a graphical timeline, trajectory editor, and modular Unit Library audio plug-in system. It supports point sources, plane waves, and per-speaker indexing, with sample-accurate scheduling across distributed servers, used in WFS composition and large-scale loudspeaker array performance.

Plugin

3D Audio

Ambisonics

Waves Nx

Waves Audio

Waves Nx is a commercial monitoring plug-in that simulates a high-end mixing room over headphones via binaural processing and modelled early reflections. It supports stereo, 5.0/5.1/7.1 surround, and Ambisonic B-format monitoring (Nx Ambisonics component) for 360° and VR work. Real-time head tracking is supported via webcam or the dedicated Nx Head Tracker hardware; the plug-in includes EQ correction profiles for 270+ headphone models based on the Harman Headphone Target Curve.

Framework / SDK

Game Audio

3D Audio

Unreal Engine MetaSounds

Epic Games

MetaSounds is the procedural audio system in Unreal Engine 5, providing audio designers with node-graph control over DSP graph generation for sound sources. It supports sample-accurate triggers, runtime modification via the MetaSound Builder API, and integrated spatialization, used in game audio, interactive media, and real-time virtual production.

Standalone Application

3D Audio

VR/AR

Ambisonics

Unity Audio Spatializer SDK

Unity Technologies

The Unity Audio Spatializer SDK is the free, built-in plug-in framework inside Unity that allows third-party 3D-audio SDKs to spatialise audio sources on a per-AudioSource basis. Unity itself does not ship a built-in spatialiser plug-in, but exposes the spatialiser-plug-in API and an Ambisonic-decoder-plug-in API; spatialiser plug-ins are then provided by third parties (Meta XR Audio SDK, Steam Audio, Resonance Audio, VIVE 3DSP, Microsoft Spatializer, etc.) and selected per project in Project Se

Library

Web Audio

Generative Music

Tone.js

Tone.js community

Tone.js is an open-source JavaScript framework built on the Web Audio API for creating interactive music in the browser. It provides prebuilt synthesizers, effects, samplers, a global transport for event scheduling, and signal-rate building blocks, used for browser-based instruments, generative compositions, music education tools, and interactive sound works.

Standalone Application

3D Audio

Sound Installation

Audiohardware

TiMax SoundHub

Outboard

TiMax SoundHub is a commercial 2U hardware spatial audio processor with proprietary FPGA DSP for object-based, dynamic delay-matrix processing. It manages 32×32 or 64×64 channels with Dante or MADI I/O and runs shows autonomously without an attached computer; companion macOS/Windows software (PanSpace, Timeline, Mixer) provides spatial mapping, cue authoring, and show control. Used in theatre, opera, concerts, museums, theme parks, planetariums, and worship venues.

Standalone Application

Audiosoftware

3D Audio

SuperCollider

SuperCollider community

SuperCollider is an open-source environment and programming language for real-time audio synthesis and algorithmic composition. It comprises a real-time audio server (scsynth, plus the multi-threaded supernova), an interpreted, object-oriented language (sclang) for controlling the server, and an integrated editor (scide). It is the host platform for the Ambisonic Toolkit (ATK for SuperCollider) and a wide range of HOA UGens, and is widely used in live coding, electroacoustic composition, and spa

Standalone Application

3D Audio

Ambisonics

VR/AR

Steam Audio

Valve Corporation

Steam Audio is a free, open-source cross-platform spatial-audio toolkit developed by Valve. It provides HRTF-based 3D positional audio (with custom-SOFA-file support), Ambisonic spatialisation, physics-based sound propagation modelling occlusion / transmission / reflections / pathing, automated reverb baking based on scene geometry, hybrid reverb for large spaces, and dynamic geometry support. Distributed as integrations for Unity (2017.3+), Unreal Engine (4.27+), FMOD Studio (2.0+), Wwise (2023

Plugin

3D Audio

Sound Installation

Spatial Audio Designer

New Audio Technology

The Spatial Audio Designer (SAD) is a commercial plug-in suite for mixing and monitoring of 2D surround and 3D immersive audio formats (5.1 through 22.2, Dolby Atmos, Auro-3D, MPEG-H, IMAX 3D, DTS:X) in any DAW. It uses a virtual bus system independent of the host's channel limits and includes a Headphone Surround 3D speaker virtualisation for binaural monitoring, used in film, music, game audio, planetariums, and dome-projection contexts.

Standalone Application

Ambisonics

3D Audio

Sound Installation

SpatGRIS

Groupe de Recherche en Immersion Spatiale (GRIS), Université de Montréal

SpatGRIS is a free, open-source multichannel spatialisation server developed at Université de Montréal that supports up to 256 inputs and 256 outputs in five spatialisation modes: DOME (VBAP for speaker domes), CUBE (MBAP for non-dome layouts), HYBRID (mixed DOME / CUBE per source), BINAURAL (HRTF-based headphone monitoring), and STEREO. Distributed together with ControlGRIS — a companion plug-in (AAX / AU / VST3) that builds spatial trajectories inside the user's DAW and sends them to SpatGRIS

Standalone Application

3D Audio

Sound Installation

VR/AR

SPAT Revolution

FLUX:: Immersive

SPAT Revolution is a commercial real-time spatialisation engine for object-based and channel-based immersive audio production, supporting binaural, surround, Atmos-compatible, Ambisonic, VBAP, and Wave Field Synthesis (WFS) panning. It runs as a standalone application alongside any DAW via send/return/room plug-ins and OSC, used in studio post-production, live touring, theatre, museum and dome installations, and immersive research contexts.

Plugin

Ambisonics

3D Audio

SPARTA

Aalto University

SPARTA (Spatial Audio Real-Time Applications) is an open-source collection of audio plug-ins for the production and playback of spatial sound scenes, supporting Ambisonics up to 10th order. It provides Ambisonic encoders, loudspeaker and binaural decoders, rotators, beamformers, microphone-array encoders, room simulators, and sound-field visualizers, used in spatial audio research, production, and immersive playback contexts.

Standalone Application

Ambisonics

3D Audio

SoundScape Renderer (SSR)

SoundScape Renderer community

The SoundScape Renderer (SSR) is a tool for real-time spatial audio reproduction supporting multiple rendering algorithms within a unified framework: Wave Field Synthesis, Higher Order Ambisonics, Vector Base Amplitude Panning, Distance-Coded Ambisonics, Binaural Room Synthesis, and binaural rendering with SOFA support, used in research, teaching, and spatial audio production.

SoundField by RØDE Plug-in

RØDE Microphones

The SoundField by RØDE Plug-in is a free Ambisonic processor for converting A-format recordings (from tetrahedral microphone arrays) and B-format recordings into virtual microphone patterns and standard surround formats up to 7.1.4. It uses frequency-domain processing rather than the matrix-based approach of earlier Ambisonic decoders, used in post-production, broadcast, and VR audio workflows in DAWs such as Pro Tools, Nuendo, Cubase, Reaper, and Logic Pro.

Standalone Application

3D Audio

Ambisonics

Sound Installation

Sound Particles

Sound Particles is a commercial standalone immersive audio workstation built around a 3D engine and a particle system — conceptually a CGI engine for sound. It generates large numbers of sound instances from a single sample, animates them in 3D space, and captures them with virtual microphones to render in stereo, binaural, surround, Ambisonics (up to 6th order), or Dolby Atmos ADM. Used widely in film, TV, game-audio, and immersive music for crowds, weather, atmospheres, and large-scale sound d

Standalone Application

Coding

Generative Music

Composition

Sonic Pi

Sam Aaron

Sonic Pi is a code-based music creation and live coding environment using a Ruby-derived domain-specific language. Built on the SuperCollider audio engine, it provides synth definitions, sample playback, FX chains, and live-loop primitives, used in classroom computing education, live coding performance, and electronic music composition.

Plugin

3D Audio

Ambisonics

SkyDust 3D

Sound Particles

SkyDust 3D is a commercial polyphonic spatial synthesizer plug-in by Sound Particles — described as the world's first synthesizer with full 3D-audio support per voice. Up to 8 oscillators per voice (subtractive, FM, or hybrid synthesis), 256-voice polyphony, polyphonic step sequencer, MPE support, and per-oscillator spatial movement controlled by envelopes, LFOs, and movement modifiers. Outputs in over 30 formats including stereo, 5.1, 7.1, 7.1.2, 9.1.6 (Dolby Atmos), Ambisonics up to 6th order,

Plugin

3D Audio

VR/AR

Sennheiser AMBEO Orbit

Sennheiser

AMBEO Orbit is a free binaural panner plug-in originally released by Sennheiser in 2018 as part of the AMBEO 3D recording / VR ecosystem, intended to position mono and stereo sources in a 3D headphone mix using HRTFs based on the Neumann KU100 dummy head. It included a 'Clarity' parameter for controlling the amount of binaural colouration and a simple early-reflection / room-reverb module for five wall-material types.

Resonance Audio

Resonance Audio steering committee

Resonance Audio is an open-source spatial-audio SDK originally developed by Google and released as open source in March 2018. It provides high-fidelity Ambisonic-based spatial audio rendering optimised for mobile and desktop CPUs, including encoding and decoding of Ambisonics (AmbiX ACN/SN3D, compatible with the YouTube spatial-audio decoder), HRTF-based binaural rendering, sound-source directivity, near-field rendering, occlusion, and a Spectral Reverb effect. Distributed as native libraries pl

Standalone Application

Audiosoftware

REAPER

Cockos Incorporated

REAPER is a cross-platform digital audio workstation (DAW) for multitrack audio and MIDI recording, editing, mixing, and mastering, with a small footprint, scriptable interface, and broad plug-in format support (VST, VST3, AU, LV2, CLAP, JSFX). Multichannel routing throughout the signal chain and a per-track channel count up to 128 make it widely used as a host for spatial-audio plug-in suites in Ambisonic, immersive, and multichannel sound installation work.

Standalone Application

Audiosoftware

3D Audio

Sound Installation

Pure Data

Pure Data community

Pure Data (Pd) is an open-source visual data-flow programming environment for real-time audio, video, and graphics. Patches are built by connecting object boxes; the standard Pd-vanilla distribution provides core audio and MIDI processing, with extensions (cyclone, ELSE, GEM, IEM ambisonics) adding higher-level functionality. Widely used in academic research, sound installation, and live electroacoustic composition.

Standalone Application

3D Audio

Ambisonics

Pro Tools Ultimate

Avid Technology

Pro Tools Ultimate is the flagship edition of Avid's commercial DAW for music recording, post-production, and immersive mixing. It supports up to 2,048 audio tracks, 192 channels of HDX I/O, and Pro Tools | HDX hardware acceleration; integrated Dolby Atmos renderer (since v2023.12) with 9.1.6 support; Ambisonics mixing; native Sony 360 Reality Audio integration via the WalkMix Panner / Renderer (since v2025.10); ADM BWF master export. Used as the industry-standard tool at major film, television,

Standalone Application

3D Audio

Ambisonics

VR/AR

OpenAL Soft

Chris Robinson (kcat)

OpenAL Soft is a free, open-source software implementation of the OpenAL 3D-audio API. Provides distance attenuation, Doppler shift, directional sound emitters, environmental reverb (EFX extension), occlusion / obstruction, air absorption, multi-channel buffers, and audio capture. Output formats include mono, stereo, quad, 5.1, 7.1, HRTF binaural, UHJ, and B-Format Ambisonics. Backend support spans most native audio APIs: WASAPI, DirectSound, CoreAudio, PulseAudio, ALSA, JACK, OSS, OpenSL, PortA

Omnitone

Google Chrome WebAudio team

Omnitone is a JavaScript library for Ambisonic decoding and binaural rendering using the Web Audio API. It supports First, Second, and Third Order Ambisonics with rotation matrices for sound-field rotation, head-tracked playback, and integration with media elements and AudioBufferSourceNodes, used in browser-based VR audio, 360 video, and immersive web applications.

Standalone Application

3D Audio

Ambisonics

Nuendo

Steinberg

Nuendo is a commercial digital audio workstation by Steinberg targeted at audio post-production, game audio, and immersive sound design. It includes an integrated Dolby Atmos renderer (Stereo Direct, 7.1.2, 9.1.4, 9.1.6), Ambisonics support up to 4th order, MPEG-H authoring, ADM import/export, native panning up to 22.2, Auro-3D, Adaptive Background Attenuation, AI-powered dialogue transcription, and Game Audio Connect 3 for integration with Audiokinetic Wwise.

Plugin

Sound Design

Composition

NOMN FOAM

POLYTOPE KK

FOAM is a real-time bubble-acoustics and foam-synthesis plug-in based on direct physical modelling of gas-liquid interactions. It models 11 acoustic stages of a bubble's life across up to 16,384 simultaneous voices on multi-core CPUs, with physics-driven parameters for liquid identity, foam topology, and population dynamics, used in sound design, electroacoustic composition, and experimental music.

Noise Makers Ambi Bundle HD

Noise Makers

Ambi Bundle HD is a plug-in suite for Higher Order Ambisonic production up to order 7. It comprises Ambi Pan HD (3D panner), Ambi Limiter HD (peak limiter for Ambisonic signals), Ambi Verb HD (Ambisonic convolution reverb), and Ambi Head HD (HOA-to-binaural decoder with HRTF support), used in immersive music, 360 video, and VR audio production.

Plugin

Music and AI

Sound Design

Neutone Morpho

Neutone

Neutone Morpho is a real-time tone-morphing plug-in that resynthesises input audio into the timbre of pre-trained machine-learning models while preserving the input's temporal shape. It offers Macro and Micro interaction modes over latent variables of an autoencoder, with on-platform custom model training via Neutone Cocoon, used in sound design, music production, and experimental performance.

Plugin

3D Audio

MPEG-H Authoring Suite

Fraunhofer IIS

The MPEG-H Authoring Suite (MAS) is a toolset for the creation, conversion, encoding, and playback of MPEG-H Audio content. It comprises the MPEG-H Authoring Plug-in (MHAPi), Authoring Tool (MHAT), Conversion Tool (MCO), Info Tool (MHIT), Production Format Player, encoder, and vvPlayer, used in broadcast, immersive music streaming, and object-based 3D Audio production.

Plugin

Ambisonics

3D Audio

mcfx Plug-ins

Matthias Kronlachner

mcfx is an open-source suite of multichannel VST plug-ins (mcfx_convolver, mcfx_delay, mcfx_filter, mcfx_gain_delay, mcfx_meter) for processing high channel counts in a single plug-in instance, with versions up to 128 channels. It is used for multichannel loudspeaker setups, Ambisonic post-production, and microphone-array processing in DAWs such as Reaper and Ardour.

Standalone Application

Audiosoftware

3D Audio

Sound Installation

Max

Cycling '74

Max is a commercial visual programming environment for music, sound, graphics, and interactivity. Patches are built by connecting graphical objects on a canvas; the MSP layer provides real-time DSP, Jitter handles video and 3D graphics, and Gen enables low-level signal-rate code generation. Used widely in interactive sound installation, electroacoustic composition, and real-time spatial audio (often as host for the ICST Ambisonics Tools and similar externals).

Standalone Application

3D Audio

Sound Installation

L-ISA Studio

L-Acoustics

L-ISA Studio is a desktop spatialisation application for object-based immersive audio mixing, comprising the L-ISA Controller (touch-friendly UI), the L-ISA Processor Desktop (spatial and room engine), and the L-ISA Audio Bridge (virtual sound card). It supports up to 96 audio objects routed to up to 16 outputs in formats from 5.1 through 9.1.6 and 16.0, plus binaural with head-tracking, used in live touring, theatre, music production, and installation contexts compatible with the L-Acoustics L-