On 07/31/2011 01:05 PM, rosea grammostola wrote: absolutely essential. essential for production, but not for listening. not related to ambisonics. but dead useful. not essential either. but very much recommended, as it contains configurations to encode ambi into uhj stereo and back. for ambi use, you want to include fons' separate "reverbs" package, which contains some very nice b-format IR reverbs. unrelated. it only does room and speaker correction. it's probably my fault it got included in the list, since i once described how to set up a diy ambi rig that includes drc. but that's optional. not strictly related, although helpful if you want to create your own IR reverbs for jconvolver (or any other convolver), or if you want to measure your room and/or speakers to perform DRC. very helpful. or any other lightweight alternative to ardour, if it's just about signal routing. if the question is "what do i include in my distro", then by all means add all the software you mentioned. if the question is "what is the minimum software stack i need to play around with ambisonics, then keep it simple. in any case, you may want to include mplayer, as it's one of the few players that does multichannel correctly (at least up to 8 channels) and will let you enjoy those soundfield recordings out on the web without having to import them into an ardour session.