Ambiotica

[Uncle E]

Charles Vestal, the creator of the Schwung shadow OS for Ableton Move, has released the Ambiotica re-generative ambient processor. I'm still figuring it out but so far it reminds me of Brian Eno's Bloom app:

https://charles.pizza/apps/ambiotica/

[Naenyn]

Thanks for this tip. Looks nice! And, what a URL, charles.pizza.

[charlesv]

Hey that's me! Thanks for checking it out. It's a combination of looping delays, granular generation and a tuned resonant reverb with chord selection. It's all a little ambiguously spacey, but happy to answer any questions!

And for what it's worth, it's available for iOS as an AUv3 as well as Mac (AU/VST3), Windows (VST) and Linux (VST).

[Caine123]

are there no videos yet? kinda interested.

[Uncle E]

Hey that's me! Thanks for checking it out. It's a combination of looping delays, granular generation and a tuned resonant reverb with chord selection. It's all a little ambiguously spacey, but happy to answer any questions!

And for what it's worth, it's available for iOS as an AUv3 as well as Mac (AU/VST3), Windows (VST) and Linux (VST).

Could you give a technical breakdown of what the Orbit, Flux, and Event Horizon controls do? The descriptions on the product page are hard for me to interpret.

[Sandra F]

are there no videos yet? kinda interested.

Yes, check YouTube…

[charlesv]

Hey that's me! Thanks for checking it out. It's a combination of looping delays, granular generation and a tuned resonant reverb with chord selection. It's all a little ambiguously spacey, but happy to answer any questions!

And for what it's worth, it's available for iOS as an AUv3 as well as Mac (AU/VST3), Windows (VST) and Linux (VST).

Could you give a technical breakdown of what the Orbit, Flux, and Event Horizon controls do? The descriptions on the product page are hard for me to interpret.

There are two independent tempo-synced loopers/delays (long feedback, finite tails, except Satellite, which freezes at the top):

- Orbit, from 1/2 bar to 8 bars
- Satellite, from 1/8 bar to 2 bars

Both knobs set the loop length, and only Satellite’s also sets the level, but on Satellite the two are tied to one knob in opposite directions: turning up shortens the loop (2 bars → 1/8 bar) while raising its level and pushing it toward freeze, so the longest loop sits at the quiet bottom and the top is a short, frozen, sustained stutter. Orbit’s level is constant regardless of length.

Constellate is a granular control setting grain size and pitched spread together. The grains are long (a granular pad, ~310 ms–1.3 s), and firing rate just follows grain size (~3× overlap, not an independent control). The pitch spread is quantized to consonant intervals only — unison, ±octave, ±fifth — with scatter raising the probability of leaving unison plus the buffer-position spread.

Flux adds modulation to the reverb tail (plus a stereo drift detune) and feeds tails back into Orbit, which feeds into Constellate, etc., for a regenerative granular drone.

Tail is reverb decay (and lengthens the Spectra ring with it).

Spectra controls the level of a series of tuned resonators set to the chosen chord.

Event Horizon is effectively a drain macro, bringing down feedback, decay times, chord ring and the regen feedback (and at the bottom it empties the loop/micro buffers entirely).

Gravity is the opposite, bringing everyone up — more feedback, longer decays, granular sparkle (bigger grains + more scatter), freeze and modulation. It pushes Orbit’s feedback and Constellate’s texture up too; only the literal loop-length divisions stay fixed.

Dilate controls the direction of the loop and grain buffers, turning them into reversed loops and grains.

It’s intentionally ambiguous and non-specific as it’s all macros and you can see describing them in detail is a little overwhelming for a UI. It's intended to be played through rather than have each piece individually dialed. Hope that makes sense!

[charlesv]

are there no videos yet? kinda interested.

Yes, check YouTube…

There’s a demo video on the site but also a few demos:

[tonycore]

is there a way to clear the buffer?

[Uncle E]

That's a good point. I change presets to do it but I can see how you might not want to lose your current settings.

[Touch The Universe]

Looks nice and sounds nice

[tonycore]

Figured out the buffer emptying move: bring Event Horizon down.

[El°HYM]

This is looking just lovely.

Any more info on how it was made?

Thank you for providing LINUX!

[charlesv]

This is looking just lovely.

Any more info on how it was made?

Thank you for providing LINUX!

It's using JUCE under the hood which allows for nice and easy cross-platform builds; the animations are all just plain C++.

This started off as a module for Schwung, the Ableton Move firmware mod: www.schwung.dev, but the Plug-in adds some things like the chorded reverb and simplifies a bit to make it more performative.

The entire thing was inspired by the signal chain in this video:

My general approach was to try to create these distinct modules with the signal chain, expose a ton of manual parameters to tweak to bake in musical values, and lots and lots of testing and iterating. One nice thing I did for this plugin was create an offline UI and audio renderer to make screenshot and video generation easier, as well as verify across multiple layouts for iOS, but it also helped me verify and resolve issues like runaway feedback, clicks on grain boundaries, etc.

Edit: and if the question is did I use AI: yes, like almost all modern development. I'm not a developer by day (I do work immersed in code however, on embedded firmware tooling), but I write and read code, and Ambiotica was developed (or directed if you prefer) over weeks of human design, testing, manual adjustment and iteration, including manual code writing, not just a "please make me app" prompt.

I would not describe it as vibe coded, but if you're allergic to AI in your plugins, this is indeed present! Though, I'd imagine it's hard to avoid anywhere these days given common practices.

And to be clear, there's no AI-generated _audio_ here, the DSP is all deterministic and explicit!

[ericzang]

is there a way to clear the buffer?

It seems the Event Horizon can be used to do that, but there is a little drop out when the control reaches 1% for me. Reaper 7.74 vst3, win 11.