Over the recent weeks, including at the recent spatialization workshop in France , the SpatDIF.org site has really grown, under the coordination efforts of Nils Peters. SpatDIF is “a format to describe spatial audio information in a structured way to support real-time and non-real-time applications.”

Currently the most interesting sections are the ‘Papers’ and the ‘Wiki’. The following information is from an email by Nils to SpatDIF mailing list. He highlights some aspects of the current SpatDIF state and the structure of the wiki.

Roadmap: http://tinyurl.com/atjoqo

The plan for how to get from here to there.

Proposal of core descriptors: http://tinyurl.com/ba5ews

In the wiki you can find a proposal of core
descriptors which we think are the least common denominators across
spatial rendering applications. However, this proposal is not finalized and there is a lot of potential to contribute.

SpatBASE: http://tinyurl.com/b5ku7r

SpatBASE is a database for spatialization software. The motivation
behind SpatBASE is to collect information of specific rendering features of different spatial sound renderers and what kind of parameters and syntaxes are used. Put simply, all information from existing spatialization programs which seem to be useful for the SpatDIF development.

As a positive side effect, it may also serve as a web page to discover new, alternative rendering concepts.

There is also a special section for applications dedicated to the
control of spatial rendering processes.

SpatDIF – extensions: http://tinyurl.com/d2ovr3

Besides the core descriptors, we need to develop a way to deal with
specific concept-related parameters. A promising idea is the development of so-called SpatDIF-extensions, a set of descriptors which is specific for a group of renderers. e.g. the Ambisonics-extension for Ambisonics renderer, or a directivity-extension for applications which can deal with source directivity, etc…

Contribute – http://mail.bek.no/mailman/listinfo/spatdif

The mailing list is the way to get involved with providing feedback or contributing to SpatDIF. See you there!