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Chris

Hi! I've got a new plugin you can have! These plugins come in Mac AU, and Mac, Windows and Linux VST. They are state of the art sound, have no DRM, and have totally minimal generic interface so you focus on your sounds.

Srsly3

TL;DW: Srsly3 is Srsly2, with a Nonlin control to analogify the filters.

Srsly3 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Stereo’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Srsly3.zip(532k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Those who are familiar with Airwindows know that Srsly is a sort of take on a famous stereo processor, the Hughes SRS. The first version, Srsly, uses a bank of very tight resonant filters to adjust space psychoacoustically and simulate the sound of ambience around human ears (based on illustrations that ran in Popular Mechanics). The second, Srsly2, took that and added aggressive mid/side processing to more closely resemble existing SRS boxes, thanks to a Crate SRS box I was able to get by way of example.

Srsly3 is the same thing as Srsly2, except all those filters are replaced with the kinds of biquad filter found in Airwindows BiquadNonlin. That’s the one where I figured out how to apply the filter modulating used in Capacitor2, which simulates nonlinearity in cutoff frequency of ceramic capacitors (specifically Murata capacitors made of barium titanate), but applied to biquad filters which are a lot more adaptable than Capacitor was.

You don’t have to understand any of that, it’s just the way I got to this result.

It means you get a Nonlin control, where setting it to 0 means you have Srsly2 again. And then when you turn it up, especially when you have your filters at a higher Q setting (sharper resonances), the filters get modulated by the voltage pressures they themselves see from the signal passing through. And it fuzzes them out in a way that makes Srsly3 sound more analog than it’s ever sounded before, with more of a vibe and texture to the vivid stereo sounds it can make.

I would say play with it and see what kinds of settings sound good to you. And if you liked Srsly2 and found it useful, now you’ve got this which starts where Srsly2 left off, and then takes it to new places. BiquadNonLin really sounds most interesting on tight resonant peaks, which is what Srsly is made out of, so with a bit of luck this will really click for Srsly enjoyers. Hope you like it!

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

Meter (0.1.9)

TL;DW: Meter uses analysis of peak energy to rate songs for hit potential.

github.com/airwindows/Meter/releases

Here’s Airwindows Meter v0.1.9, with even more interesting color mappings! I’m sorry the explanation is so long-winded, but this is (for now) literally unique and doing something that’s never been done before. Three out of four meters here are unique and the peak meter doesn’t work like anybody else’s peak meter, either. So, everything that it does, takes some explaining. If you don’t want that, just run lots of reference audio into it and learn how to make your audio more like your references by matching the behaviors and colors. That’s fine too! Still here? OK, here’s how it works.

Top meter is a peak meter. NO RMS, only peak. On modern music it will show just a line of clipped bad sound, with the top of the meter representing 0dB. All the other parts also refer to what’s happening to peaks. There’s no display of RMS at all: that’s for pretty much every other meter, and not interesting here. One exception: bass dots are sized according to RMS, so if you see a burst of green dots you know that’s a bass event and can adjust it accordingly. You still want to make ‘loudness’ in this our modern world, but it is done through making a dense cloud of peaks from 0dB to however far down you like: -12dB or -18dB are not unusual. These are shown as dots: the color dot most likely to give you good results is blue dots. That means the loudness is being balanced by brightness correctly. If you clip there’s a discreet red line down at the bottom, but you can still see what’s happening with the other peaks.

The second (now half-height) display is a Slew meter. It’s showing exactly the same information, but organized differently. On the slew meter, brighter is higher up. (if you have red/green color blindness, ‘gred’ dots above the blue dots are brighter, and below the blue dots are darker/bassier). On this meter, the red (bright) dots are drawn more obviously, and the green dots are a lot more subtle because it’s the ‘bright’ meter and bassy stuff is the backdrop. This too can produce red warning signs at the bottom, ‘over-slews’ meaning your stuff threatens to be way too bright to sound good. This meter also gives you a running average of the brightness of your peaks: having bright and dark in balance is good, but you can either balance them or just have everything ‘loud’ and rely on sonority. That works too.

The third (now half-height) display is a Zero Cross meter. That represents the bass balance: if a low tone is causing the waveform to go many samples without crossing zero, and you make high frequency information louder, you’ll interfere with the Zero Crossing and it’ll fail to register the bass (just as the listener will fail to hear the bass if you’ve got the balance wrong). This one’s marked in hertz: a line up top shows 200 hz (common for old retro sounds that lack bass, and there’ll be a cloud up there if you don’t have good bass extension), then there’s another line at 40 hz (of interest to dance/EDM producers) and the bottom of the meter is 20 hz. This will immediately show you if your sub-bass is absent or out of control, no matter what speakers you have. The dot size shows RMS here (like the green dots on the Peak meter)
and with a little practice it should speak volumes to anybody needing to work with heavy and deep bass and have it translate.

The fourth display, previously a simple chart for some internal parameters, is now a lot more interesting! It now shows three parameters against a colored background.

Sonority acts like the intensity of the peak loudness. Even if you’re not clipping or limiting, if this is high then your music will rip right out of any playback system and make other stuff sound weak. Sonority means every inch of display is packed with blue dots (representing peak energy, lots of it, all of it near the top of the meter). If you had a super-narrow band of solid blue right against the top of the meter, this is basically the same as modern loudenating, just with a slightly better flavor about it and less digital edginess to it (if it’s over-bright, the dots will no longer be blue).

Novelty is important. If you have a dense cloud of blue dots, Novelty shows how wide a range they’re covering. This can be as wide as 0dB to -18dB or even -24dB (seen in some classic Talking Heads, Parliament, James Brown etc). You’ll see the cloud of dots covering more space on the top meter if Novelty is reading a high score, and it’s an important part of hit record sounds that are big, wide, open and appealing, not just ‘painful to listen to’. This measurement is key to many hit records. Note that you can only get it to work by having something happening at all volume levels at once: just going really quiet isn’t going to help Novelty that much. The time period it responds to is roughly like human breathing, but the best way to enhance it is to clean up the mix so it relies on peak energy more.

Intention is the green line that represents the letter score people care so much about: if it gives you a score, that’s the highest this line got (there is a discreet reset button top left that will restart the meter). On the bottom edge of the zero cross meter, there are reminders of what these lines mean, and Intention is ‘both plus balanced tone, minus RMS’. This is your star quality score, your hit score. You can’t make it better just by going louder unless you’re simply not using all your dynamic range for peaks. You can balance brightness with bass extension, and you can try to get either the peak density or the range to be greater, depending on if you want to sound loud and aggressive, or open and inviting. Or, you can do a little of everything.

The background color varies to show the ‘sound color’ of your result. This one I can’t make red-green color blindness friendly, but some parts of it will still give helpful information. So, on this, green is your hit record color, but it’s your POP hit color. On this background color, red is ‘dark’ and blue is ‘bright’. That makes the green a ‘colder’ shade of green if it’s over-bright, and a red or yellow if it’s dark and lacking in treble detail. However, there’s one more twist: the green’s also modulated by whether Sonority or Novelty are higher. If it’s all Novelty and open airy spacey poppy textures, that’s a super-bright green, to the point where the line across it goes white. This is very common in hit records. But if it’s all Sonority, and still a hit record sound, and still balanced, the meter will go nearly black! And that’s also a hit sound, but it’s more an underground, metal, aggressive sound, pummeling you with loudness and intensity. And then, another classic sound (heavy rock, old Led Zeppelin) involves having all of these lines very close together, so it’s balanced and neither too open or too dense, for a deep green. Remember that Sonority is not just loud peak sounds, but how densely different peaks are packed against each other, and Novelty is how widely they’re distributed in dynamics, versus just getting blasted with peaks all of which are loud. In other words, your ‘target’ might be the brightest green, or total black, or anything in between.

In this version, all the chart lines have the same ballistics and drop back to zero when nothing’s happening: only the letter grade stays at maximum. This is a big change from previous versions, but it’s producing much more reliable ratings than before, so I’m prepared to put it out and get back to using it for a while, rather than simply developing it. I’m confident that working actively with music’s peak energy will work out well for people. In fact, I’m looking to integrate a version of this into ConsoleX when I’ve finally got that ready to go: there won’t be room for the whole thing, but I think I can do a ‘2-d’ version of a Novelty meter combined with the blue/red/green peak coloring and have something that’ll show useful information in a much smaller space.

Deciding to make slew and zero cross half-height turned out great! Thanks to Jrel at gearspace for the suggestion. Meter v0.1.9 should fit much better on a broad range of screens: it doesn’t really lend itself to being resized but ought to handle it fairly well, in particular it ought to work at many different widths and still function. I hope this gives you a new window (indeed, an Airwindow!) on your sound, as it does for me.

Zoom

TL;DW: Zoom is a bank of Density-like waveshapers for subtly modulating peak energy.

Zoom in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Distortion’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Zoom.zip(495k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This is a little piece of what could become a new Mastering plugin, but I’ve got a lot of testing to do to work out whether that should happen. Zoom is waveshapers: as many as five stacked up for high gain levels, and most settings will use at least a couple. They’re applied sort of in parallel: the basic idea is a lot like Density, but handled very differently.

The purpose is to try and alter, very strongly, the peak energy and only the peak energy of the sound, while leaving the loudness more or less alone. That’s why the ‘negative’ settings, below 0.5, don’t get as much quieter as those in Density. It’s taking the hottest peaks and further boosting them while cutting back quieter stuff. Boosts still work as in Density, except the character will be a little different.

So, you might find the sounds of this interesting, or find that it’s an amazing overdrive or ‘weird expander’, or whatever, but those are all obvious changes that you can hear because they’re modifying the RMS loudness of the signal. And that’s fine too. I’m just saying, for the last month I’ve been on a deep dive into Meter and the concepts around it, and I’m working towards something specific. I would like to see whether you can take an already good track and make it significantly better by heavily modifying just the PEAK energy and getting that exactly the way I want it. A new version of Meter is coming out and I’ll be doing more ‘vinyl hit record videos’ to demonstrate what I’m talking about, and to do that I have to write new plugins that specifically master audio to work with Meter and work on the stuff I ‘can’t hear’… at least, not directly. If I’m right, perfecting this stuff will cause tracks to sound inexplicably amazing (and they will have to start out with the potential for amazing: some don’t need help, and for others it’s very obvious what must happen.)

For instance, I might have various 80s hit records where, due to the taste in mixing and mastering, there’s constantly stray peaks 6 to 12 dB hotter than everything else, and I’d need to remap them to be a more continuous range of peak energy. Or, the area is too dense and could use being opened up subtly, allowing the hottest peaks to ‘un-saturate’ slightly without it being really audible, again to get me an area of peak energy that’s as evenly distributed as possible.

And that’s what Zoom was coded to do, and why it’s hard to hear what it’s doing until you crank it up to the point of obviousness. It is also a simple waveshaper so you can do that while oversampling it in the DAW, which of course I won’t be doing because used normally it’ll barely create any harmonics at all. It’s a ‘zoom lens’ for audio: everything is still in focus and looks the same, but the presentation has shifted in the desired direction, probably only discernable by Meter.

I might still be working on Meter and far from ready to put out a Mastering that’s entirely based on my untested theories, but the new Meter should be coming up just next week, and if you wanted to experiment as I am experimenting (or just slam stuff, I’m not your Mom) then here is Zoom. Have fun!

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

Galactic3

TL;DW: Galactic3 is exactly Galactic again, but with better undersampling.

Galactic3 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Galactic3.zip(544k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This is always a bit tricky: I try to revisit my biggest hits and make them better. The last time I did that with Galactic, not only was it merely different, it had a bug that Galactic doesn’t have: four variables that didn’t get initialized properly. Galactic2 is now fixed and presumably bugless, and is still just ‘different’, a variation on what Galactic does.

Galactic3 is straight up better. Because it’s exactly Galactic again… but instead of the linear interpolation it used to use (like CrunchCoat) for high sample rates, it’s now using my new Bezier curve technique to interpolate, like kCathedral3 and CreamCoat.

First, that means it should have better tone at high sample rates. Second, in theory it should gracefully handle even really outrageous sample rates (Galactic will eventually start scaling the verb space down in size, Galactic3 won’t). But most importantly, that means you have a Derez control like CreamCoat, except on the reverb engine of Galactic. So you have exactly the sounds of Galactic, but you can further undersample them for a cool ‘reduce sample rate’ effect… and in doing so, increase the reverb space in size. How much? To unreasonable size: galaxy-sized.

To use the new tone with the same apparent room size, decrease Bigness until the giant space is back to what you want again.

Galactic3 takes in audio (dry/wet control available) and uses the Replace control to determine how much of the new sound coming in should replace the space that’s currently there. Detune shifts the pitch for both channels (in a quadrature pitch shift arrangement that means maximum widening for each sound) and Brightness controls both the brightness going into, and coming out of, the reverb. Replace, Brightness and Detune are designed to be playable on the fly to make your ambient spaces or evolve them. Bigness is the reverb buffers, so you can still alter that but it will make crashing noises when you do (that will then become more infinite spaces). And Derez, the new addition, will snap the whole pitch of the reverb space up and down without otherwise glitching it, so in theory it’s playable as well.

I think this one is really fun! As you can see it fits with my experimental-music aesthetic (didn’t even have to add Srsly2 on the end of it to make it superwide… though of course I could, and so can you). If you’re not quite that abstract, you can still use it on pads for more normal things. Just set Replace to a lot higher, set the Brightness and Bigness appropriately, and use Detune to chorus out your new huge enormous synth pad, or whatever else needs to have an unreasonably huge and wide stereo field. I’m pretty sure this can become your go-to for epic fields of reverb, no matter what’s meant to be causing them. And Derez adds darkening abilities beyond the scope of original Galactic. Honestly, I think I finally managed to make it better rather than just different. Let me know what you think :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

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