Airwindows

ADClip2

ADClip2Demo was an experiment, to see how ADClip would be if it had loads of parameters you could alter.

Input Gain was a boost, as you’d expect.

Edge Smooth is part of the basic ADClip code. It’s letting you scale back the edge softening on clipping: less means harsher edges.

Highs Restore is from 3DClip, and the technique’s still in use in ADClip4. It’s saving treble energy that’s being clipped, and sneaking it back into the signal again where it’ll fit. This is a dangerous technique, but does get you more loudness from the treble. I discovered it when studying Slate FG-X and noticing that the Slate plugin totally shatters above certain gain levels, in an unpredictable way. I made mine so that it wouldn’t shatter, using a different implementation of the same basic technique of energy redistribution.

Lows Restore is the same thing, only for subs.

Output Threshold lets you play more safe, or less, depending on how you roll.

If you’d like ADClip2, buy ADClip4 and email me to ask for the earlier version. I’ll send it, though I think you should be using ADClip4, which is just better even if it doesn’t have a zillion knobs all over it :)

ADClip2 runs one sample of latency.

Date October 20, 2011
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Clip2

Clip2 is a lot like Clip, except the antialiasing was tweaked a bit and there’s a slider. The slider lets you set a threshold, because I had a user who asked for the ability to bring the clip threshold down that way.

One result is, you can teach yourself about peak versus RMS energy using Clip2. You just bring the slider down, from the 0 db threshold down to -24 db, and listen for what happens. Since there’s no gain trim, it won’t fool you by making ‘louder/distorted’ seem better, and you can find the point where you hear clipping more easily.

This is worth doing: people ignore peak energy at their peril. You may not directly hear the transients that go way above the ‘body’ of the sound, but they’re still sensed, and getting familiar with what peak energy is like can be a huge advantage. Very few sounds really need to be mixed so loud that they can’t have peak energy, and deft use of peak energy makes all the difference in a mix. That’s what keeps a mix from going flat and boring.

Date September 20, 2011
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

SoftGate

SoftGateDemo is an AU universal binary plugin, to help with sampling and sample instrument creation!

The purpose of this one is more like mastering noise reduction or de-essing. As the gate closes, it also rolls off highs- instead of going for outright gated effects, it’s designed to not really close completely, just to soften and suppress hiss and background noise. This is for the purpose of working with instrument samples that must decay to silence, or reverb impulses that do likewise.

Bright Threshold and Darken Speed should be pretty obvious, and Base Silence is the control that’s like a de-esser: it’s the depth to which the plugin can gate. In noise reduction often it’s better to just step on hiss and noise rather than trying to wipe it to digital black, and this plugin is all about letting you transition from a fully bright, unaltered sample to an attenuated and highs-softened one seamlessly.

Sample instruments you make will have a warmer, less fatiguing sound due to the softer background hiss, and reverb impulses will decay into the distance better- you can dial in your preferred decay, and there’s a SoftGateLinked plugin included so you can work with stereo files, as well as mono files, properly!

SoftGate is $50.

Date September 18, 2011
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

SubsOnly

SubsOnly is a utility plugin to use with Voxengo SPAN, in Density Mode. That will give you the best ‘VU style’, sense-the-loudness-of-the-track, metering, and when you put one of these utilities in front of SPAN, it’s calibrated so equal levels will give you appropriate amounts of extreme subs. If the levels are out of whack, your balances are also out of whack. (Not all mixes will produce the subsonic frequencies SubsOnly tests for, so it’s okay if they’re not present, but they should not be blowing away the outputs)

SubsOnly is a very simple algorithm: it’s just twenty-six IIR lowpasses in series. This produces an outrageous but very primitive lowpass, so you can also use it as an audio filter. It should sound a lot like listening to your mix from an adjacent house, or something, and you can use it to see what instruments are taking up subsonic space and get a sense of how the beat comes across at a distance.

This algorithm is available in Ditherbox, for convenience. That way you can switch it in for mix checking, without having to load extra plugins.

Date August 28, 2011
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Chris

ADClip2

Clip2

SoftGate

SubsOnly

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