I’m aware of https://community.ardour.org/ambisonics. That method works nicely but it would be absolutely awesome if one simply could switch Ardour’s built-in panning system to an Ambisonics mode.
If you want to arrange for someone to implement an ambisonics panner for Ardour, we’ll be happy to accept the result (assuming it’s done right). There are already 4 example panners in the code (1in2out, 2in2out, Balance, VBAP), and anybody who knows ambisonics at the code level could do an ambi panner quite simply. Of course, the GUI is another story. There are lots of good reasons why a multi-speaker panner should not be ambisonics by default.
Thinking about it a bit more, maybe it’s not that easy. What about multichannel instruments like AVL Drums, for example? And of course, Ambisonics should absolutely not be the default panning system.
It seemed just like a great “Idea for Ardour”, that’s why I wrote that down here. Hope, that was ok. But if even an outside developer could easily do it, that really sounds promising. Thanks for the encouraging answer! Maybe this might be a Summer of Code thing with Virtual Reality becoming more and more important on YouTube …
You might re-use some existing code. e.g. zita amb-plugins for the panner itself and then build a similar GUI font-end as e.g. Non Mixer’s Spatialization Console – all GPL’ed code.