Console8 Updates (and more!)

Hi! If you’re using these plugins, especially on VST, you might want to update them!

Console8.zip(4M)
Console8Hype.zip(2M)
Monitoring3.zip(673k)
PurestWarm2.zip(613k)
Shape.zip(622k)

This is what I’ve been doing for the last couple weeks. It’s always a little like trying to sprint and falling down and spraining your ankle to hit a major bugfix scenario, but this hopefully straightens things out and allows me to return to plugin-making and releasing the cool stuff I’ve got in the pipeline.

So what happened? All these plugins share an experiment I did with PurestWarm and continued with Shape, looking to test it out before trying it in Console8. Turns out the experiment failed, but in such a way that it wasn’t immediately obvious until folks started measuring things. The plugins use an ultrasonic filter (or in Monitoring3’s case, define how Dark works) and since it’s a fixed filter, they try to set up how the filter works in ‘reset’, just once when the whole plugin is created for the first time in your DAW.

In doing that, they use a thing called getSampleRate. You would expect that if getSampleRate() returned a garbage value like ‘zero. zero samples per second. Have a nice day!’ then the plugin would crash or otherwise not get through testing… but these plugins ALSO do a thing where if you’re not running at high sample rate, they switch the filtering off, because it’s not useful running at 44.k or 48k: not enough room to suppress aliasing at those sample rates.

And if the plugin is asking ‘are you under 49 kilohertz in sampling rate?’ and the DAW is apparently saying ‘why yes, I have zero kilohertz! I killed all the hertz! ahahaha!’ and will only give the real value when the plugin actually runs and processes stuff… well then, zero is less than 49k, isn’t it? If the plugin asked ‘oh BTW are you 44.1k or 48k?’ it would’ve figured out something was wrong, but instead they happily just said ‘yeah we’re at low sample rate, don’t run the filter’ on ALL VST PLUGINS no matter what sample rate you were at.

And this affected my mixdown of my track Skronk, and I never knew it.

So now it’s fixed. Please re-download the plugins above (or get the collections of plugins below) and Console8 will use its ultrasonic filtering properly, which it wasn’t on VST.

You might think since it’s ‘ultrasonic filtering’ there would be no change in sound. Uh no :) the point is to suppress aliasing. I think you’ll find it DOES change the sound and make it what it was always meant to be, which also means if you need to recall stuff done in the last couple months and MUST have it be the same, you’ll need access to the original releases (this is an ‘update in place’ so you should replace your old plugins with the new ones and they’ll just automatically work with no changes to your stuff). So, if you go to those plugins’ pages on airwindows.com you’ll find, at the bottom of the post, a link to the original version still downloadable. In every case it’ll be, for instance, Console8original.zip(4M) with the word ‘original’, in lowercase, appended to the zip name.

I would suggest trying the updated version to see if you just like it better, though. I was using the VSTs because on Mac Reaper they’ll run a double precision buss and get slightly more of the sound I want from them. And the update, I think, was very helpful in doing that.

download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
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.