Airwindows

DeRez4

TL;DW: DeRez4 perfects retro digital tones.

DeRez4.zip (521k) standalone(AU, VST2)
DeRez4 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Lo-Fi’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

Github changed the systems by which Consolidated builds and stopped letting it have a certain Xcode, so some older MacOSes may be unable to use Consolidated this time. If you’re concerned that’s you, save a backup of the Consolidated plugin in case it goes wrong. The standalones still support unthinkably legacy machines, because I build all those by hand, not using Github CI :)

Still working like mad on Meter, but I’ve got something of a special treat.

What if, rather than go to great lengths to emulate something super vintage and unobtainable, you just… did something else, that ended up pulling a lot of weight and being great at exactly what the vintage thing did, at its best?

DeRez4 is the first retro digital tone-maker to do what it does without ANY bitcrushing. Seriously. It runs everything at full floating point resolution… double precision, where that’s available such as in Reaper using the VST build. It’s doing it all with a sort of frequency crushing… but not like any kind I’ve tried before. And while it makes use of my Bezier filters, the guts of it are totally made out of hard, pointy line segments laid end to end, which I’m not sure if that’s been used for this purpose before (after all, everyone trying to get the retro digital thing starts with bitcrushing and goes from there to layer ‘analog color’ over it…)

This one’s radically different from all that. The underlying frequency crush can be used to resynthesize pointy transients on upsampled audio, in line with some of the scarier high end audiophile designs. It’ll throw a layer of glitter onto anything you give it, but very much ‘fake digital’ in nature, not anything natural. That’s the underlying engine. At much lower frequency crushes, it adds a characteristic edge.

The other two controls, Bright and Bassis, are each double Bezier filters. One in front of the frequency crush, one behind. Bright is sort of able to resist aliasing but not really: its real strength lies in drawing neat little radiuses to round off every point the frequency-crush creates. Doesn’t matter what sample rate you’re at, it just helps it work better. Then Bassis functions as a Bezier highpass… and layered the way that it is, it brings a curious resonant quality to whatever you put through DeRez4. Then there’s an output trim, because these things can lead to peaks becoming more punchy and energetic than the original sound.

DeRez4 is able to make a strong claim for ‘better at retro digital vibe than even modeling the heck out of real retro machines’. It’s always possible to get real live raw hardware (at great cost) to go do this sort of thing for real and all… but in the absence of that, or if it’s a lot of trouble to run with that authentic workflow, it turns out there’s another path to consider.

That’s DeRez4: instead of emulating, do an entirely other thing, done at the highest possible resolution but generating a whole other kind of sound that turns out to do a startlingly similar job. Conveniently, and for free.

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 for x86
download Pi4VSTs.zip for 32-bit Pi
download Pi5VSTs.zip for 64-bit 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.

Date July 12, 2026
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Meter 0.2.3

https://github.com/airwindows/Meter/releases

This update introduces a visual cue for interesting-sounding high frequency information in the middle Slew section: useful transients will show up as a larger red dot, just like sonorities show up as blue dots in the Peak section! Also, the Zero Cross section is upgraded so that larger dots mean ‘more deep bass’ and it should balance appropriately if you’re trying to highlight that. Use reference tracks to see what’s going on with all this: the patron videos and Forbidden videos will now be using this version of Meter, and ConsoleX3 is getting a version where you can switch among the three displays by a control.

Thanks to Intrets from the livestream for lastminute #ifdef issue help :)

The updates to 0.2.2 are for getting that letter score going again. It’s got an A-Z letter for Intensity (peaks), Detail (slew), and Fullness (zero cross). They are essentially ‘more goes toward A’ but have all been upgraded so they want to see a ‘cloud’, not just the highest possible number. Then there’s a final letter grade (also A-Z but expect to see A-C most often here, like a report card) and this mostly cares about how well the other three meters MATCH and go with each other. Using this as the primary letter score means the meter tracks hit records MUCH more effectively, across far more genres, from Prince to Steppenwolf to Hall and Oates to Chuck Berry to Deadmau5 to Creedence to James Taylor to Cat Stevens. They end up at wildly different ‘peak intensity’ values but it absolutely works and seems to pick out the biggest charting hits surprisingly well given that it doesn’t know what a note is and is only looking at raw sound and how that works.

It’ll be interesting tailoring music to respond to this thing. Since the idea is that the meters should balance, you can work out what to do when things aren’t clicking, and scout out what happens if a section of a song takes the wrong path and does something unhelpful. It can’t tell you what to do, but if you know you’re balancing loudness with brightness with fullness, those are good clues :)

I’ve added a plus to the rating at the last minute for when the peak and slew meters EXACTLY balance, which seems to correspond to good things… and then I invented a whole color bar for showing WHERE in the song these new ratings kick in so you can know what made the change… and things got very out of hand. I’ll have a very long video and must annotate it because there’s too much already and the video didn’t even have 0.2.3 yet and this thing has to escape. Have fun!

Date July 6, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

LRConvolve3

TL;DW: LRConvolve3 gates one channel by the other, roughly or cleanly.

LRConvolve3.zip (502k) standalone(AU, VST2)
LRConvolve3 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Utility’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

So the LRConvolve plugins are all audio manglers, capable of doing awful things to a sound, or turning an innocent voice into the Swedish Chef just by inverting that voice at audio rates. It’s inherent to the convolution that you can flip the phase of a sound with another sound, and this is where things get most gnarly, even if you’re convolving stuff with simple sine tones.

But what if you wanted to do that, but cleanly?

Well, there’s degrees of ‘cleanly’, but LRConvolve3 exists to sit alongside the other two, looking cute, for when the full convolution is just too intense. And it does just that: the same, but ‘cleanly’. How? You pick one of the sides, and full-wave rectify it. There’s another control simply named ‘smooth’ (not the same as the Bezier control-smoothers I’ve been coming up with, this is from the same time I was doing the original LRConvolve) and all it does is add a time constant, turning your sound from full-wave rectified into basically an envelope that decays.

And that’s all you need to get the effect of ‘one side turns into the gate for the other’, either responding very crisply with Smooth turned all the way down, or using Smooth to make it a trigger input for the gating of the other. I demo it on a guitar taking the shape of drums, and then on a racecar fly-by also taking the shape of drums. You’ll probably look to more percussive sounds to supply the gating, but you can do whatever you like: for instance, do something extra through passing a sustained chord on the ‘sound’ side, and then routing a bass part or whatever into the gate, and you’ve got some extra overtones that are attached to the bass part and follow its attacks and dynamics. Or a drum spot mic, or a literal timing click: if you have to stretch a too-brief sound, that’s what Smooth is for.

While I work on more glamorous and dramatic plugins, it’s nice to drop a little widget that just does what it’s supposed to. Hope if it ever finds a need, it comes in handy. Like many utilities, LRConvolve3 could find many surprising uses, and it’s nice how it ties its effects so completely to other sounds you have around. That helps make each use unique :)

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 for x86
download Pi4VSTs.zip for 32-bit Pi
download Pi5VSTs.zip for 64-bit 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.

Date June 28, 2026
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Dynamics3

TL;DW: Dynamics3 morphs between vari-mu and expander!

Dynamics3.zip (694k) standalone(AU, VST2)
Dynamics3 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Dynamics’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

This is an essay in finding what something’s meant to be, and then running like mad to expand it.

What was once a Bezier-spline compressor with extra release speed if you needed it, turned into that, further tweaked, but with vari-mu: it modulates dry/wet now, not just amplitude. Does that make it a Fairchild? Absolutely not, in fact I didn’t even reference Fairchild sounds in developing it. The way that was dialed in was to get the sound, not to get ‘that’ sound. Yes, vari-mu references a vintage beast, even an expensive one, but it’s also a simple description of what happenes to ratio (mu) and it brought so much to the behavior of Dynamics3 that it stands on its own.

And yes, ratio can be adjusted through the dry/wet, meaning this version of Dynamics can naturally take on 2-buss duties without breaking a sweat… but it’s not a dry/wet, it’s an inv/wet. Normally, that has a specific meaning: you can apply the plugin, or you can subtract it to produce the opposite effect. Does this subtract the compression, hence the ‘invert’ part of the control?

No. What the inv/wet does, is let you do the opposite of compression, adjusted to get as close as possible to what the result SHOULD be if you got the perfect expanded sound as a complement to the compressed one.

That’s phrased a bit awkwardly, I’ll try again. If you have a compressed sound, and the start of transient attacks is a little dynamic ‘pop’ before the compression hits, the ‘inv’ range gives you an expansion, where the start of the transient is suppressed and then the volume flares up after that.

How much? It’s sensitive to threshold, and to release speed. Back off on either one, and the expansion will back off too. Or if you ramp it up, it’ll go into distortion but that’s better than the kind of spikes you’d otherwise get. If threshold is almost, but not quite, 1.0 (pure 1.0 is also a bypass to the plugin) then full inv (expansion) leaves everything much quieter, because it’s expanding down from that point. It doesn’t go to complete silence because it’s not a gate. If you speed up the release time, this also helps it not go to crazy expansion boosts, just like if you’re heavily compressed, faster release time will help it not be squished into silence.

The thing is, though, it’s almost not worth trying to put it into words. The whole Dynamics3 experience is that, if you have a sense of compression, you should be able to dial that in effortlessly and immediately. Attack to get the speed of attack, release for how fast it springs back, threshold down to where it does what you want, ratio (dry/wet) for subtlety, boom. If you don’t have a sense of compression, this plugin will teach you and make it seem easy and discoverable, as it should be.

Then, with one slide from compression to expansion, it can broaden the impact of transients until they’re dense and solid, or it can flare up the body behind a thin percussive attack, or pretend it’s a gated reverb effect, or de-ambience a room sound, or all those things combined, to taste, with exactly the same controls (under the hood, it’s a whole different algorithm, but it’s meant to feel like an extension of the same thing).

…as it should be.

Dynamics3 has been getting revision after revision, to get it to this place: coming out as the first glimpse of what’s going to be an amazing new ConsoleX3, where all the parts are this good and work this well together. If you’ve ever liked anything about any of the Bezier spline compressors… this’ll probably be your new favorite, as it is mine. All the others are of course still there, it’s just that I can’t imagine you needing them now :)

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 for x86
download Pi4VSTs.zip for 32-bit Pi
download Pi5VSTs.zip for 64-bit 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.

Date June 21, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Chris

DeRez4

Meter 0.2.3

LRConvolve3

Dynamics3

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