Airwindows

Channel4

Channel4 is the latest Airwindows port. This plugin has always been popular: once I had someone shoot it out in a blind test against commercial rivals, and it trounced some heavily hyped and widely known plugins!

At the time, I was amused and distressed, because I would have liked to see one of my $50 plugins in that comparison. To use the freebie seemed like missing out on some helpful sales.

Now that I’ve switched over to Patreon for Airwindows’ only means of support, it doesn’t matter and all the plugins are steadily becoming free :)

Channel4 uses a very good-sounding saturation function, a calibrated slew clipper and a highpass to approximate the tone coloration of a recording console. (the plugin Console4 approximates the space and depth on the mix buss, which is different.) Because the bandwidth-limiters are set up based on measurements of real gear (through impulse responses), Channel4’s console type is labeled ‘Neve/API/SSL’. It doesn’t actually contain any of those things or any convolution kernels, but the presentation of the sound ought to suggest those voicings.

There’s also an argument for doing it that way, because in many cases you can’t hear those limitations unless they’re being way overloaded. Channel’s a very clean, pure ‘coloration’ plugin, especially with the drive kept at 50% or under. It’ll voice extreme sounds the way it’s labeled, but you would struggle to consistently set plugins like Slew to those targets because mostly you can’t hear what it’s doing, especially on normal/musical sounds.

I’ve got a big list of further free VST ports, and am looking into some bugfixes for PC hosts that aren’t handling generic VST2s right, and I’m actively supporting users on several forums and email and Patreon messages, so if you’d like to see this continue to expand, please support the Airwindows Patreon, that is now the way things are done around here :)

Date August 15, 2016
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

Slew

My first Windows VST (and Mac VST) port was Console4, the very latest version of the best selling plugin I’ve got (now free, supported by Patreon.)

The second one is the very first plugin I made for Airwindows (or at least the first one listed on this website).

Slew is a simple plugin to let you do slew clipping. You can use it to morph and transform percussive sounds or hats, you can give a unique and interesting ‘grind’ to instruments or glue stuff together into a retro, old-school-sampler, grungey grind, or you can use it on things like reverb sends to really amp up the sense of distant loud sound in a room or space.

It’s free, and in the zip file are an Audio Unit (.component), a Mac .vst, and 32 and 64 bit Windows VST .dlls for you.

Hope you like it! Lots more is on the way, and that’s not even counting when I reach the Patreon level that I start putting out the for-pay plugins. I have lots of Audio Unit freebies for people to enjoy, and I’m busily porting them. All of them ;)

Here is an extra video about using Slew on ITB heavy guitars, to get Tube Screamer-like qualities but in a new way.

Date August 11, 2016
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Console4

Console 4 is the most recent version of basically my flagship Airwindows plugin. It works through a channel plugin on every sound source, feeding at unity gain into the buss plugin which overrides the digital summing with Airwindows summing (more internal space, more depth, and with Console 4 it now has glue making the top-end more listenable).

You can also watch the half-hour long introduction video that goes into a lot more detail about how it’s used, how it works, how you make ‘big kicks and snares’—Console doesn’t let you crank any given channel up to full volume, but it’s designed to layer stuff so if you need giant sounds the best way is to make them composite sounds, everything layered from separate channels in the mix. Rather than layer samples and put them on a single loud track, keep the layers accessible in mix. That does mean if you wanted things like sines to be superloud you’d have to get creative, but the principle’s clear.

Speaking of principles…

You may notice no demo link, and also there’s no Kagi shopping cart link. There’s a reason for that. Kagi went bust Sunday. I may still get my last two months of sales out of whoever’s divvying up the assets, but as of this Monday you cannot pay me for my work through Kagi, because there is no Kagi. They served me for close to ten years, always with perfect efficiency and scrupulous honesty, but the commission off my work wasn’t enough to keep ’em going.

I could go find the newest-trendiest shopping cart e-commerce people, but when I started shopping-cart shopping I found them all horrible, tacky hypemongers offering to do things like find people who’d left a cart un-checked-out, and spamming them with reminder emails like ‘Hi, I’m your shopping cart and I’m looonely! Do you miss me? I miss you! Surely you just forgot me?”

I ran away before I threw up all over their e-commerce portals. After all, I have never spammed or bugged people, never advertised, and what’s more I give people free updates for as long as I live, none of which ‘makes sense’ in this happy future of badgering people for every cent, preferably by hyping them into a rental arrangement and DRMing the stuff until it’s nearly ready to explode all by itself, never mind when the rent is due or the authorization servers are having a bad day. (but I digress)

There’s something completely different I can do—something I would never have done, except Kagi went out of business and I have no reason not to be completely rebellious and flip the marketplace table.

Ever heard of a thing called Patreon? It’s not for discovering new artists. Really, it’s more of a… payment processor. For people who are already well established, who are appreciated for what they do, and who are busy devoting their lives to giving the world something for ‘free’ (like comics, or perhaps music, or art). Much like I already do for existing customers: I’ve promised all Console owners that they will have all Console updates for free.

Console4.zip

There you have it. I am going all in on Patreon, and that is the full release version of Console 4, with the new Mac and PC VST builds, for free. Please remember this when I have figured out the details and started my Patreon. From now on, I will be relying completely on that to survive. I’ve seen more than one person (for instance, Vechs, or Jim Sterling) who are doing great with Patreon, usually because they too are rebelling against some commercial thing and making a bid for total freedom from obligation.

From now on all Airwindows plugins will be ported to Windows and Mac VST as well as being Audio Unit, and they will all be free from now on, and if I get enough Patreon support I will release all source code under the MIT license and document it as I go so that everybody can use the tools and concepts I’ve built to create their own software. That will be my legacy, and if that ain’t a worthy Patreon goal I don’t know what is.

This includes old versions of plugins for when people preferred a certain version, so the total number of plugins to cover is over 250. That means if I do one a month it will take me more than 20 years. If I work like a maniac (well, more like a maniac) and put out one a week, that’s still around five years just to turn Airwindows into a sort of audio plugin library and DSP school. And it will all be AU/VST with VST covering Mac VST2 and Win VST2 (built on older OS versions so the plugins work on the very widest range of hosts). I feel this isn’t a bad strategy because if I set up the Patreon so I can actually survive on it, I can make the rate of these ports (and free releases of the existing AUs) conditional on whether I was able to eat that month, which seems fair. :)

That’s not counting new research and new plugins… but I have a lot of VST plugins to do, to catch up. Over 250 of them. I’d also ask pirates and haxxors (who don’t have any VST airwindows but what I make, and don’t have most of the AUs) to please leave this ‘making them all free’ process to me through Patreon and my own website. If all goes well, all the plugins will be free in the end (even with source code!) so if you could not mess this up I’d be grateful. ;) leave it to me, please.

Oh, and the VST versions do ‘double replacing’, which means they noise shape to the 64 bit floating point buss. Technically that makes them higher sound quality than Apple’s CoreAudio can offer, though I promise you really won’t notice (and the VST versions also do 32 bit ‘replacing’ so they’ll work on all hosts)

Consider Console 4 an advance on this new concept. If it works, and if I can live for five or twenty years doing it, every possible Airwindows plugin will be part of everyone’s toolbox and the code will be out there making people’s products better.

Private to Native Instruments: hey, maybe you guys might want to chip in just to meet whatever the threshold is for ‘release free ADClip with source code under MIT license’! I will be letting people pay to mess with the release schedule directly, so past a certain threshold people will be able to single out specific plugins and fast-track them and get the source opened. We didn’t come to an agreement for a one-time no-royalty payment, but now might be your chance! ;)

Oh, also: Patreon :D (I updated the link once the site was ready, and then I started making all the words links, and it got funnier and funnier. patreon patreon patreon! OK, I’m done ;)

Date August 3, 2016
Author Chris
Comments 33 Comments

ADClip6

ADClip6Demo is a universal binary Audio Unit plugin for loudness maximization. While it can be used for clean peak-clipping, and is great for that, if the words ‘competitive loudness’ make you sad, stop reading now.

At this time I don’t have the full version of this plugin for download :(

Still here? OK. Here’s the deal: ADClip was already one of the most formidable weapons for loudness. The last version, ADClip5, introduced some new ways to monitor what you were doing, and a pesky high frequency bug that bit a few people who were using it on VERY bright content. That bug’s squished, which is one reason the new version’s come out.

Another reason is this: there’s a new monitoring mode that compensates for input gain. So if you’re boosting inside ADClip, you can use that to listen at equal loudness to the results and be sure you’re not getting fooled by simple loudness increase (you should be able to hear where the sound gets smaller as it’s squashed by clipping), plus using that it’s easy to bypass the effect and compare it directly with unclipped, unrestricted output.

But the real reason is this: the sound doesn’t get smaller when you crush it. It gets bigger. ADClip6 under heavy clipping has at least a full octave of deep bass under what ADClip5 could do, which was already more than most loudenators can offer. You can plainly hear this in the demo, and you can dial it in any way you like: exaggerating it, or pulling back the Subs Retain until you have the full scale of the music intact, but at a previously unreachable loudness.

If that wasn’t enough already, the main signal path plus the Subs Retain path also use a feature called Fatten Body, to transition more gracefully between clean audio and the smashy smashy. You can use it to finetune the fullness of the resulting output. To get the cleanest possible output in ‘safety clipping’ situations set it to zero. If you’re mastering for bigness, use it to balance the body and fullness of the track with the loudness and punchiness gained through driving ADClip6 hard.

And there’s a Soften Clips control, which can adjust how much ADClip6 de-glares the clipped highs. All of these work fine at their default settings of 0.5 but you should tune them to the needs of the audio you’re processing! Be careful as ADClip6 doesn’t react like normal clippers, it keeps going and going. Use subwoofers to monitor what it’s doing on the low-end, and compare the volume compensated version with the bypassed, unclipped version. Remember, added punch and openness is good, but ‘twice as loud as anybody else’ is just annoying even if it sounds awesome to you! Please don’t use this tool for evil. <3

ADClip6 declares no latency so you can track with it as part of a zero-latency DAW or live setup, but it will delay the signal by exactly one sample: I figure that’s not going to affect performance timing, and on the 2-buss it won’t affect relative positionings of tracks. We might be able to see better DAW performance when all the plugins used are declaring zero latency, so I’ve made this change. For use in submixes and places where you’re smashing tracks with a clipper to get specific tones, I recommend looking at the Airwindows plugin OneCornerClip, which is more of a waveshaper and delays zero samples. ADClip needs to also soften the exits from clips, so it can’t do that. Or, you could just use it and deal with the one sample internal delay (for instance, on an overall drum buss).

ADClip5 is $50.

Date February 28, 2016
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

Chris

Channel4

Slew

Console4

ADClip6

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