tutorial

From left to right:

• The mark and the plugin's name. Clicking them takes the window back to its own instance when it is showing another one.
• Undo and redo, the two arrows. Every edit can be undone, including a preset load and a drag in the scene.
• The instances, as tabs. Every instance of this plugin in your project has a tab, named after it. Click one and the whole window turns to that instance: the matrix, the tabs and undo all edit it from here. The open tab is the black block. With many instances the tabs shrink, then scroll with the mouse wheel.
• ‹ preset · name ›. The chevrons step through the presets, and the name opens the preset browser. A * after the name means you have changed the sound since loading it.
• The link: which session this instance is in, and how many instances share it.
• Settings, the last glyph.

The scene shows the sphere around the listener twice. On the left is the globe, a ball you look at from outside. On the right is the equirect, the whole sphere unrolled flat: left to right is all the way round, bottom to top is floor to ceiling. The letters along the top mark back, left, front and right.

• Drag the globe to turn it. top, front and side snap it to a view.
• full gives the equirect the whole width.
• energy shows where the sound is. What came into the plugin is drawn in orange, and what the plugin adds in blue. The picture is off when a window opens, because it is the one thing in the window that costs processing.
• regions always draws every region's outline. Turn it off and you see only the region whose tab is open.
• Click a direction in the echo or the reverb to place the probe, a small orange dot. The plugin then draws what it would do to a sound from there: the echo's repeats as they travel, or the reverb's reflections where they arrive. The probe is worked out from the settings, not from the audio, so it answers even while nothing is playing.

The matrix is how something moves by itself. Its columns are sources, things that change over time. Its rows are targets, the parameters they move. A cell is how much one source moves one target.

The sources come in tabs:

• features are measurements of the input: level (how loud),attack (how sharp the onsets are), tonal (how sustained or pitched), andlow, mid and high (how much there is in each part of the spectrum). Each reads zero in silence, so silence moves nothing.
• sidechain has the same six, measured on the sidechain input instead.
• generators are three LFOs and three envelopes.
• region, in the encoder only, is how far the source is inside its region.

Under each source's name, the thin bar shows what it is sending right now, so you can see what a depth would do before you set one. The thicker bar under that is the source's amount, which scales every cell in its column.

making a row

There is always at least one row. To add another, click any value on the plugin's tabs. Its row appears with a dashed outline, as a provisional row. Clicking another value replaces it, and giving it any depth keeps it. Two clicks and a drag is the whole vocabulary:

1. Click the value you want to move, say width. A row appears.
2. Click a cell in it, say under tonal. It gets a depth of 0.50.
3. Drag the cell up or down to set how much. Now the sound widens as it rings.

• Drag a cell up for more and down for less. A negative depth moves the target the other way.
• Hold shift while dragging for fine steps.
• Click a cell to switch it between 0.50 and empty. Double-click it to empty it.
• A dot after a row's name means that row has depth on another tab.
• global amount, at the bottom, scales all modulation at once.

A region says where on the sphere something happens: which part of the field the echo hears, or where the reverb's room comes back. Each plugin has a fixed set, each on a tab of its own: the echo has a send, the reverb a send and a return. In the encoder the region is a source in the matrix instead (below).

A region's tab opens with its kind: everywhere, spot, band,sectors, dots, clouds or custom. Under it are that kind's own settings, such as a spot's size or a band's elevation, and a softness for how gently the edge fades. The kind is chosen once; its settings and the region's orientation can all be automated and modulated.

• shape and transform split the tab. shape is the kind and its settings. transform is yaw, pitch androll, each beside a rate that keeps it turning, then whether the region lets through what is inside or what is outside, and how much.
• In the scene, a region is drawn in ink: its edge where it is half open, and a light wash where it fades. While its tab is open it has handles. Drag the white circle to aim it and the others to roll it or move its edge; double-click a handle to reset it.
• convert to custom freezes the shape into a grid of weights you can edit one by one. The kind and its settings are kept underneath, so you can go back to them.
• copy and paste carry a region to another instance, or to another plugin. Paste a reverb's return into an echo's send, and the echo is fed exactly where the room comes back. The line under the buttons says what the clipboard holds. A copy is a copy: nothing stays connected afterwards.

In the encoder, the region's value is how far the source is inside it: 1 inside, 0 outside, and in between across the soft edge. Route it like any source to make a sound slow down, widen or fall quiet as it passes through part of the room.

Every bambi instance in a project joins one session by itself, with no setup. The session is saved with the project and comes back when you reopen it. The header shows the session and how many instances are in it.

• Every window can edit every instance of its plugin. Pick one from the header's tabs and the whole window turns to it; undo acts on the instance shown.
• Other instances appear in the scene in grey: in the encoder, every source and its path; in every plugin, other instances' regions as dotted outlines. They are only drawn; nothing about them reaches the sound.
• The link carries edits, never sound. No instance's audio depends on another instance, so freezing a track or bouncing stems gives the same result as the full mix.

The glyph at the end of the header opens settings over the window. On the left is what every instance has: its name, which you can type (return or escape hands the keyboard back to your host), the link session, and the ambisonic order, which comes from how many channels the track has. On the right is what only this plugin has, such as the reverb's quality while playing and while rendering, and what the host reports.