Hiya.
Has anyone ever used TidalCycles with an ambisonic system before ? (setup is 13.4) Anything special needed to configure it?? Any cool tricks ??
Hey - do you actually need to use an ambisonic decoder or are you happy just firing sounds out to different orbits?
If you were making an ambisonic studio mix, you'd just be abstracting away the speaker array to a generic spherical target. You'd then render that down or decode it to different hardware speaker arrays targets. I've not done this in Tidal but it'd need an ambisonic decoder somewhere in the output signal path.
It's very difficult to develop work that really makes use of the spatial definition unless you can work on the final array or at least a decent multi-channel system. Will you get to work on the 13.4 system before the performance?
I've done some things using the ambisonic toolkit with superdirt, including binaural encoding:
Doing ambisonic encoding for each sound hits the cpu limits pretty hard, but encoding as b format and then decoding once at the end seemed more promising.
In the end though I've found that just treating a multichannel system as a ring of speakers using a basic superdirt configuration works well enough and is a lot simpler. Being able to properly live code altitude would be fun though!
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The performance was on Saturday and they sprung it on me that it was an ambisonic system a few days before, and so I was frantically googling ambisonic decoders. It ended up just taking a stereo mix and then they had an ambisonic plugin in Max that mapped it to their system.
But I think I will get to work with them again in the future, so these replies are all super helpful.
I'm just imagining a jux rev that works on the z-axis 
Ah cool, sounds interesting. What was the venue?
I guess routing your master output through a plugin will do something. Were they mixing it on the fly?
Keep us up to date with whatever you discover.