Isolator2
TL;DW: Isolator2 is Isolator, but with control smoothing and a new resonance booster.
WARNING: in the video, my Reaper audio is hosed, but it’s OBS/SWB Audio Capture doing it, not the plugin! Sounded fine to me and if you try it it should be fine!
Welcome to my nightmare! So much is changing that I can’t even track it, but one thing that doesn’t change is I’ve got a plugin for you, and more in store. If you’ve got bug reports and things, hang onto them and I’ll find a way to catch up. For now: I am scrambling to get ready for an important trip, and everything is in flux. I have four old computers going back to Apple as trade-ins, and a big Eurorack case going to a local music store to be sold with its collection of modules and all their support things (not the one still in the video, but my first one). This is also why my video’s sketchy: everything has migrated onto my current laptop, which is great but not at all ready to have all this working, so it’s a week-long struggle to get it all up and running again in the complicated audiovisual setup I’ve become accustomed to.
So please bear with me: by next week I’ll have ironed out the plugin video making thing. It’ll be worth it: I’m on track towards a pretty amazing portable music-and-video-and-art making rig and if I can perfect it I’ll tell you how to do it. And I don’t mean the Raspberry Pi, though you’ll notice that now Isolator2 ships for Raspberry Pi too (granted, for use in 64-bit Reaper: I’m not sure I can also supply 32-bit Pi binaries off the same machine, if Pi experts have advice here I’m all ears)
Isolator2 is Isolator, my very steep lowpass or highpass or shelf filter, but now it’s got smoothed coefficients so you can automate it and make it move better. Also, it’s even steeper. Also, it now has the power to give you added resonance! So you can put an edge on your filter/isolator sweeps, for a really narrow high-resonance sound that’s very striking as a ‘synth filter’ tone. You should play with it as the video is broken and doesn’t show it properly :) again, I will fix, by next week. I have always used a program called LineIn to get audio into OBS from the DAW, but on the new laptop it can’t be run even in Rosetta, and the thing I tried did not work so I’ll have a different thing by next week.
Might have a stream on Wednesday, might not. We’ll see.
As said in the video, here are the things I’m working on now that I’ve got the big library-update and the port to Raspberry Pi 400 done: I have a Console update in store that will not be a Mackie 8-buss but instead a re-imagining of the tricky Console5 that’ll be super vintage sounding, I have more ‘amp sim’ options from earlier days for you to play with, and I am on the track of a major tape-plugin experiment that could give me late 70s tones with a huge amount of configurability, and sounds that had been lost to time. It will be called Doubly, and will be less an ’emulation of hardware’ than a synthesis of concepts that underlie what made those magic late-70s records sound so unusual. Back then things weren’t as standardized and studios sometimes set up their seemingly technical noise-reduction systems by ear, and got to unique places through manipulating that equipment slightly outside the true technical parameters… and I think I can get that into a plugin :)
Sorry again about the video glitches. I’ll have it fixed by next week, I promise :)
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.
That was a wild experience :D Heavy filter. Good luck for your projects. Plugin(s) inspired by end of 70s albums – great. So many interesting sounding albums… the transition from dry early 70s to bright and spacey 80s – Van Halen, Bowie, Frank Zappa’s Joe’s Garage (love that album sound), Steely Dan, Punk, Disco, AC/DC, Fleetwood Mac, Joy Division and Motörhead. Excited to learn more about it!
Thank you for the plugin! I like the lowpass and high shelf modes, but the highpass mode seems to show some weird unexpected behaviour when I analyze the resultant spectrum, with a very weak slope and some resonant notches aroung the cutoff frequency. Is this a bug or desired behaviour?
Your works are admirable. Thank you so much and best wishes.