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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.

Mastering

TL;DW: Mastering is Airwindows style, and can do things nothing else can!

Mastering in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Subtlety’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Mastering.zip (602k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This plugin was a wild beast when I started working on it: it’s now tamed to the point where I don’t think you can do lots of harm by accident with it. It began as FOUR bands of Kalman filtering complete with the treble management available in Air4, and I had to run one of the bands backwards to make it work (as far as the direction you moved the control), and it constantly tried to do huge tone-obliterating things with the tiniest movements of the bands against each other.

Soon sorted THAT out. Meet Airwindows Mastering. You’re meant to use it with Meter, to adjust stuff in the ‘peak clouds’ that wouldn’t be immediately obvious to the ear. This isn’t ‘an EQ and a limiter/clipper/etc’.

The top control is Glue. It defaults to zero. You can turn it up to handle the most brutal unpleasant super-highs, but it’s meant to be used around the middle, where it will moderate the ‘red spikes’ high treble can give you, controlling them without entirely making them go away. The idea is that you still want variation in those, rather than just ‘clipping’ them all to one point.

Scope is like Air4, or the air band on ConsoleX. It’s named that, because it’s how you control the amount of super-fine detail on things. If you crank this, everything will seem like it’s under a micro-Scope. In case you don’t want that, you can safely turn it down to retain ‘highs’ but tame just the glitter. This works in conjunction with Glue.

Skronk and Girth are sort of like ‘tone’ controls, except they are relative to the lower sub-lows band, also done with Kalman filters, which moves separately in conjunction with these. The way it works, if you boost Girth stuff gets way bigger and fuller, to where it’ll immediately start filling your peaks region with bassy information. If you cut it, it doesn’t seem to remove the bass, but the whole texture of it changes and becomes more leaned out and sparse, without in any way lessening bass impact. Girth is specifically about the sensation of over-fatness or lack of it. Skronk is that, but for aggressive high mids. Cut Skronk and things get a lot more polite. Boost it, and the thickness steps back a bit to allow the aggression to step out. This is not really about frequencies, it’s about the interactions with the Kalman filters which don’t just stick to certain frequencies (get too lively with these and you’ll hear an unusual grind to the sound that’s probably best avoided: middle settings are best)

And you might think you know what Drive is, but NOPE. In fact, it started out as Airwindows ‘Zoom’, and then stopped even being anything like that. Drive ended up being a simplified, cleaner form of Zoom that governs, not an output stage, but a trim amount for the individual Zoom controls on EACH other control. Namely, Scope, Skronk and Girth (the subs are left clean as they are what Girth hinges off).

So the adjustments to these three controls also affect the subtler forms of Zoom on them, and Drive lets you offset each of those a little more, to finetune the effect. It will also end up boosting, or cutting, the overall level a bit. However, bear in mind this ties in with the three controls above it, so if things are getting over-dense, over-girthy, if Skronk is getting too aggressive, you can use Drive to pull everything back a little. If you’re getting a sound, but it’s just slamming things too hard, you can dial in the optimal ‘peak cloud’ keeping everything pretty well maxed but not as just a featureless line of smashed audio.

This is not for loudenating. This is for getting your PEAKS to slam in exactly the optimum way, which in fact will make your stuff hit harder relative to loudenated stuff that has been normalized down to matched volume. In a replay gain situation you can do some damage with this if you know what you’re doing, and if Meter is showing you where every peak is getting to, and whether they’re bassy or loud or bright.

Lastly, Dither lets you bypass (for instance, if you’re using a later dither to do 16 bit CD audio: this only does 24 bit dither for modern day work), or use Dark (same as Monitoring2), or Ten Nines (same as Monitoring3), or TPDFWide, PaulWide, or Not Just Another Dither (same as the original Monitoring). It’s more or less in order of ‘liveliness’, and since it’s 24 bit it’s entirely subliminal and you can’t really do any harm with it. If you’ve got a favorite, choose that, or try to get a sense of what suits a given project or track. Other adjustments will have more effect, but you get to choose among Dark/TenNines/TPDFWide/PaulWide/NJAD/Bypass as inspiration for your other adjustments. It’s like Ditherbox, but up to date. If you don’t want to be fancy and you’re producing 24 bit output, just use TPDFWide, which is regulation TPDF that just happens to resist picking random values that act like it’s mono dither :)

This is not mastering as you know it, but it’s Airwindows Mastering. I’m confident this will work for me (I won’t be trying to master over headphones in real world use, though!) and if you were interested in getting things bent to your will in Airwindows Meter, you’ll find this surprisingly effective. 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.

BiquadHiLo

TL;DW: BiquadHiLo is the highpass and lowpass filter in ConsoleX.

BiquadHiLo in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Biquads’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
BiquadHiLo.zip (510k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Pretty straightforward: this is effectively the same thing as the highpass and lowpass used in ConsoleX. Except, in practice it’s absolutely not, because in ConsoleX both of these are distributed filters. That means as signal hits the Stonefire section with dynamics, it will have hit some of the highpassing and lowpassing, but not all of it: some of it will happen after the dynamics. Some of it will happen after the four-band parametric EQ, which is somewhat nonlinear. The lowpass in particular gets to work as a distributed filter against aliasing, especially if you’re running at high sample rate.

But here it’s just those filters as a one-piece unit.

That also means you can use it as those filters, but in a much more lightweight form than in ConsoleX. I’m hoping ConsoleX is working out for people (it will be a while before I’m finished explaining all that, and getting it working on everybody’s DAW, if that’s even possible!). But though it is prettier and a lot fancier, it’s way more complicated.

In the video I made, I demonstrate how you might be running something like a guitar into virtual tape (ToTape8 in this case) and from there into ConsoleX. But there are some things you simply can’t do when processing the sound AFTER the tape. Sometimes there’s a reason to shape the sound going in front of the tape, so it can hit those harmonics harder with less extra frequencies flying around… and BiquadHiLo can work for ‘trapping in’ a sound like that so it can hit tape even harder and produce a really direct, clear sound.

And of course you can use ConsoleXPre for exactly that purpose and have all the EQs or even dynamics going, both in front of and after the tape, but much like you have access to three bands of the parametric EQ in ‘Parametric’, and have the dynamics in ‘StoneFireComp’, you have the additional filters in BiquadHiLo.

If all goes well I can have the ‘mastering’ (a very airwindowsized take on mastering) plugin by next week, but while I work on more fixes for ConsoleX, here’s a spare filter to have :)

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.

ConsoleX

TL;DW: ConsoleX is the fully featured, biggest Airwindows console.

github.com/airwindows/ConsoleXChannel/releases
github.com/airwindows/ConsoleXBuss/releases
These are the Channel and Buss plugins that make up the ConsoleX system
github.com/airwindows/ConsoleXPre/releases
This is just the tone shaping of ConsoleX, standalone, to be used as additional tone shaping or with other Console versions

Version 0.0.3 has the ability to save state per instance, thanks to baconpaul’s code for airwin2rack and Consolidated showing me how. That means now you can start using it while I continue to fix crash bugs and the likes, as it can operate like a real plugin at last.
Version 0.0.5 checks some array bounds more rigorously. Fingers crossed!
Version 0.0.6 fixes that the Treble gain knob wasn’t getting the user-specified behavior of the others.

ConsoleX.zip (2M)
This is a set of standalone retro/generic ConsoleX plugins (AU, VST2) and also includes example files for using AirwindowsGlobals to configure the main (JUCE-based GUI) plugins, and a folder containing the ReaScripts to set up Airwindowmation on Reaper. Note that the non-GUI retro plugins still have 36 controls and may not all fit on your screen, so I can’t guarantee they will be useable in all situations. If you can’t reach the ‘Fader’ slider at the bottom, that will pose challenges.

ConsoleX is my ultimate mixing system, whether for retro vibe or the next big thing, and I’ll try to explain what I’ve built into it. There’s too much here to tell all at once, so here are the highlights.

The basic signal flow uses Stonefire’s Kalman filters combined with Air3 for an air band, and applies the dynamics you’d find on a big-console channel strip, but parallel across Stone and Fire bands.That means it’s easy to apply simple compression that still lets sub-lows through, or to tighten the deep bass with gating, or to do a variety of wild dynamics tricks. It’s like two big-console dynamics sections in one (or, broad-band EQ-like tone shaping with a difference).

Four EQ bands lend themselves to sharp, sonorous areas of focus. When not in use it’s like no processing is there, but dig in and the bass, low mid, high mid and treble really thump, punch, honk and glitter. The EQ design’s similar to some things about ToTape7 and 8’s head bump, but more adaptable. Each band is fed by raw sound pre-compression, so they saturate the audio with peak energy, but they gate along with Stone or Fire so you can still clamp ’em if needed.

There’s a special trick for those willing to run at elevated sample rates: the lowpass and highpass are distributed, spread out through the signal flow of the whole plugin. They bypass when turned all the way down (these things follow SSL rules, like no highpass or lowpass being counterclockwise, and the narrowest Q of the EQs being counterclockwise) but when you crack open the lowpass it begins doing a supersonic filtering that’ll directly address aliasing through the plugin and the whole mix, while allowing nonlinearities to produce the harmonics you’d get off analog gear.

There’s a special knob, Discontinuity. It’s available as a standalone plugin, but ConsoleX puts Discontinuity on every channel and on the 2-buss. Hard counterclockwise means you’re applying air nonlinearity as if your sound topped out at 70 dB: in other words, practically none. Middle is around 100 dB and you’ll begin to feel the effects. Beyond that, you’re getting into air distortion beyond the hugest PA systems, just because it might be fun. This is your key to making stuff sound huge, sound loud, sound completely beyond what we’re used to hearing from DAWs of the last thirty years. Treat it like dynamics: wisely, and with caution. It’s there to set the peak apparent loudness of your track.

There’s a vibey meter based on what I learned from Airwindows Meter, but instead of producing charts and measurements to study, it produces a light show. Blue light represents sonority at whatever volume those peaks are at (quiet is at the center, clipping is the edges of the meter). Where Meter draws red and green dots on white to represent peaks brighter or mellower than the optimum, the ConsoleX meter sustains those lights and reverses them, against a background of black. That means if you see red light, that’s bassy. If you see green flashes, that’s treble. And if the meter lights up a brilliant cyan, that’s the bright end of maximum intensity. So you can watch for red or purple if you’re looking for bass, greens and cyans if you want brightness, blue for the loudest parts, and you won’t get over-analytical about it. The ConsoleX meter shows you roughly how loud the peaks are, and their character, in a way you can vibe to without losing mixing focus.

There’s a ConsoleXPre plugin, which is all the tone shaping stuff of the Channels and only lacks the Console processing. This is for if you want to run ToTape7 or 8 on channels for things like heavy guitars, but you want to condition the sound going TO the tape, and then also have full control over the sound coming back OFF the tape. There’s great missives and narratives by the ever-respected Slipperman on how to do just this, and it absolutely works in the box using ToTape and these plugins. You can also run things like reverbs into other full ConsoleXChannels, by putting Console9Buss at the top of that aux channel, adding the reverb or what have you, then back to ConsoleXChannel to fully control and augment the processing (that’s something I saw Chris Lord-Alge doing in videos, and it’s fantastic)

Lastly, every single thing I’ve mentioned exists exactly the same way on the Buss plugin (decoding the output of the Channel plugins, please maintain unity gain between Channel and Buss) so anything you can do on a channel you can do on the 2-buss. This drastically changes the character of the mix, making ConsoleX future-proof: it ought to be able to handle anything you can dream up.

And then, I’m introducing AirwindowsGlobals, a user-accessible configuring text file that lets you do completely outrageous things with the look of all Airwindows Pamplejuce-based plugins. And you’d think that would mean ‘the ConsoleX plugins’, except that Airwindows Meter already works with AirwindowsGlobals. Surprise! There will be more.

And for my fellow Reaper users, with the help of Airwindows fan Robert Kennedy, I bring you Airwindowmation. This is a Reaper script, that should work for Mac and Windows directly if you can install ReaLearn and get Reaper scripts working on your machine and sort out the trickiness of control surfaces. I simplified it as much as I could. It is not actually automation, it’s grouping. You can take a bank of faders (like the 12 long-throw faders on my Yaeltex dedicated ConsoleX control surface) and colorcode them, and then have a given colored fader automatically control the ‘Fader’ parameter on ALL ConsoleXChannel instances with a matching track color, on the fly. Much like how you can update AirwindowsGlobals on the fly. It’s deeply spontaneous, which I think is essential for modern human music-making.

I’ll be doing some livestreams for the purpose of walking through mixes using ConsoleX, and will resume regular plugin posting in January at some point. I look forward to sharing all this with everyone… and diving into the music making like I haven’t been able to do for years. Join me!

ConsoleX has too many controls to fit into Airwindows Consolidated, or the 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.

kPlate140

TL;DW: kPlate140 is a next-generation Airwindows plate reverb.

kPlate140 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
kPlate140.zip (593k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Time for the big plate!

kPlate140 is a lot like the smaller version, kPlate240, to the point that you might ask, what’s up with that? Can’t you simply make the 240 version sustain a little longer, maybe dial in some EQ, and not need to have a whole separate plugin?

Much like kPlate240, kPlate140 is a 5×5 Householder matrix with a plate-style delay density, Pear filters, and the use of SubTight. Where a lot of reverbs out there will be different EQ settings etc. on one basic algorithm (or a small number of them), it’s true that it’s got the same sliders doing the same things and if you can use one you can use the other… but the way these are designed involves generating thousands or hundreds of thousands of possible Householder matrices and testing them to try and work out what would give the best sound. That means they’ve got better during the time I’ve developed the technique… but it also means each new ‘best algorithm’ is unique. Sometimes there’s a lucky break, like the original Galactic one (a 4×4) that was used again for Galactic3, sometimes not so much like the original kCathedral that people felt was metallic.

And then when you’re trying to do a literal plate which very much has its own sound qualities… and some years ago I did build a DIY real-world physical plate reverb, so I’m familiar with the sound though I couldn’t get it up to EMT140 quality and didn’t keep it… well, dialing in the sound involves getting all that stuff tuned up uniquely to the plugin in question.

kPlate140 isn’t meant to duplicate kPlate240. My take on the gold foil reverb is that it’s cloudier, more understated: from reports of people who use both sorts, it’s got a thing of its own but it’s the big 375 pound monster (600 pounds packed for shipping) that really gets people’s attention. And so, kPlate140 takes a different angle, with all of its parts tuned for that flashier, deeper, more fiery sound that’s not part of the more subdued 240.

140 plates come in all sounds and varieties: much like with the earlier attempt at plate reverbs, kPlateA through D, each one will sound different. kPlate140’s the one that is yours, much like kPlate240 is. I’m hoping this will come in handy in situations where you’re looking for a plate reverb plugin, but are going for that BIG sound. You get to have both! Have fun bathing in reverb :)

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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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.