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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.

Pop3

TL;DW: Pop3 is the dynamics from ConsoleX.

Pop3 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Dynamics’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Pop3.zip (709k) standalone(AU, VST2)

As I work on all the things that go into ConsoleX, now and then it becomes useful to give you a little preview. Pop3 is like that. It’s the latest Airwindows compressor, but also gate, this time.

I hope it’s pretty simple to understand, because in ConsoleX you get two of them per channel/buss, one for the Fire band and one for the Stone band. (if needed, I’ll put out a StoneFire compressor to help you practice that). In this case, it’s a fullrange dynamics processor tailored to my needs with ConsoleX.

For the compression section, Threshold brings down the squish. It doesn’t use makeup gain, so you use it to restrain the sound. Attack and Release work as you’d expect, though Pop3 runs a new sense circuit that’s very transparent in action. The Ratio control is simply a dry/wet: if you have signals peaking really hot, over 0dB, you’ll have to set Ratio to 0 to truly bypass the compression. Since this’ll be available in multiple places on multiple bands it’s designed to be more a ‘glue’ type, though you can run audio really hot into it in order to get an exaggerated result. In the final version you use the Stone and Fire controls to boost post-compression if you want.

The gate section had to be designed into Pop3, like it is in ConsoleX. It triggers off the uncompressed signal, so whatever you do with compression has no effect. It uses its own threshold (coming up from zero) with a release that goes from slow to brutally fast, and a handy Sustain control which stretches out the gating to control whether it’s sputtery or crisp. This gate is good at tightening things up, especially with the sustain feature there as a primary control, and again: works totally independently of the compressor, so you can sculpt those dynamics (or put percussive bumps on things using the gate ratio to dial in the spike and then blend it with the regular signal) and then shape your primary audio to make it more squishy. I found that just kicking in the compressor slightly gives a huge change in texture compared to only using the gate.

I wanted it to be extremely approachable because you deal with two of them in parallel in ConsoleX, and not even with a normal crossover, instead with multiple Kalman filters and a set of parametrics that bypass all the compression (but which are in fact gated, but the different parametrics and the Air band respond to different gates).

The glimpse of ConsoleX interface is only a rough draft: in particular, I gotta add user control over whether that 3D effect is on the knobs at top and bottom. Some people will prefer it flat, some will like the extra room provided by some of the knobs being seen edge-on. Also I have a lot of work to do on the dynamic positioning and reflowing of controls, perhaps with some divider lines to help highlight which knobs went where. Suffice to say, all my days and all my attention are focussed on this now, and I hope it comes out (right now it’s not running properly in my DAW Reaper, so there’s bugfixing too)

Talk to ya later, and I hope you enjoy the chance to come to grips with Pop3.

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.

Air4

TL;DW: Air4 extends Air3 with controllable high frequency limiting.

Air4 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Brightness’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Air4.zip(509k) standalone(AU, VST2)

I’m pleased and honored to bring you Air4, which extends Air3 in a way that can help people trying my Meter plugin, and unable to get good high frequencies without bombing the slew section with red ‘overslew’ spikes.

Back in the day, because of natural limitations of analog media and disc mastering, we didn’t have extended treble, and yet there were still bright hit records. We more readily hear brightness when it’s really upper-mids, but the really high stuff has special characteristics: first, it’s harder to hear, and second, it conveys a spatial position in air. That position is ‘CLOSE’. Within arm’s reach, within a few inches, within a few millimeters… of your eardrum.

This is because air is lossy, but digital isn’t. Digital loses nothing, it just adds various distortions while it goes (this is why oversampling fans get excited about that: the extra distortions are rarely nice). For that reason, it’s easy to make digital sounds unrealistically ‘close’, and this characterizes nearly all digital mixing.

We see this in Airwindows Meter as massive red spikes. Because there’s absolutely no flexibility or ‘glue’ to the highs, what happens is you get all the sonic cues of ‘far too close to my ear’ before you get the brightness lift you’re expecting. Air3 only aggravates this: it’s based on Kalman filtering, and it can boost ONLY that airy glitter, and then you’ve got that problem. Fine if you want that effect, but then you’re also distorting.

Air is the control for doing that, and Gnd means ‘ground’ and is literally everything else, so you can also adjust levels with it. Then there’s the new controls. DarkF means ‘dark filter’, and it’s the same as the control in Sinew (remember that? you already have it, but I saw it as a tube-fuzz sort of thing). And Ratio is basically a dry/wet for just DarkF, just Sinew (which, when it was invented, didn’t get one: really novel stuff often appears as a super minimal plugin first).

As seen in the video, if you adjust DarkF it produces a hard limit on the slews. It defaults to just over 0.5, which automatically stops ‘red spikes’ in the Slew section of Meter, no matter what treble boost you do. This’ll be an aggressive sort of ‘glue’ for the highs, or a safety highs-restrictor if you want to not mess with the red spikes of brightness.

To use it the way I use it, maybe lower the DarkF a bit, and then sneak Ratio back from full crank. What’ll happen is, the spikes will gradually creep up towards their original volume, forming a spread-out cloud rather than a hard clipped line, except they’ll be quieter than they were. The idea is to find the loudness you want for these bright peaks, and then work out how wide a range they’re to cover. Doing this gives you brightness, but without the brittle harshness of digital treble boosting.

I hope you like Air4! I’m working on ConsoleX every day now, and it’ll get there. It’s a LOT of work.

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.

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.

Older Posts

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handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club

altruistmusic.com

Dave Robertson and the Kiss List

Decibelia Nix

Gamma1734

GuitarTraveller

ivosight.com – courtesy Johnny Wishoff

Podigy Podcast Editing Service

Super Synthesis Eurorack Modules

Very Rich Bandcamp

If you’re pledging the equivalent of three or more plugins per year, I’ll happily link you on the sidebar, including a link to your music or project! Message me to ask.