At CES 2025 Samsung + Google announced a partnership on a spatial audio technology that would be a competitor to Atmos but wouldn’t be encumbered by the licensing that Atmos brings.
While I’m sure there’s marketing hype BS in this announcement, and I don’t know that enough is known to say much about whether this will catch on, but at least it will be supported on YouTube. The container will be based on IAMF, for which decent technical specification exists (which says nothing about actual encoding/decoding of Eclipsa, but which supports carrying ambisonic spatial audio today)
I am reminded of some comment about Mixbus supporting Atmos, and that Ardour couldn’t given license uncumberences, but at least some bits of interface code may exist inside of Ardour side. Is this Eclipsa announcement at all interesting at all for Ardour? Is it worth keeping an eye on this?
For years, I was an advocate for ambisonics over license-encumbered spatial audio. However, a dive into the actual history and capabilities of Atmos mostly persuaded me that it is actually the right technical improvement on what ambisonics was attempting to do and didn’t quite get right.
The licensing, however, is a problem. I don’t know anythng about Eclipsa at this point other than in the vaguest possible sense.
From what I have read elsewhere (link below), it sounded like Eclipsa is the marketing name for IAMF. They are the same thing. I only found a repository for IAMF, no Eclipsa.
