Airwindows

NC-17

NC-17Demo is a universal binary Audio Unit plugin that takes the lead in the new breed of loudenator plugins typified by the Slate FG-X, but louder, more musically coherent, much less CPU hungry and at one-fifth the price. (yes, that’s going to be considered the bar: this copy was written at a time when I had a lot of Slate on the brain)

The main thing I wanted was this: the sound can’t just get disassociative, when it goes for stupid loud you have to both get the bass and also lock onto the lead vocal with ruthless clarity. It’s better to sound a little dirty than to sound a little dissipated. It’s better still to not abuse these tools in the first place… *shrug*

When the dust settled, NC-17 was up and running- named as a joke on FG-X and because what else would you name a plugin for making stuff obscenely loud?

It’s not got MORE bass than FG-X but the bass is quicker and more driving, rather than filling in after the kick- it’s not cleaner, but it’ll project the intensity of a lead vocal out to considerably hotter levels without losing focus. It’s more CPU-friendly. It’s surprisingly transparent for this type of loudenator, and it is one-fifth the price of its only rival.

Changes to version 2.0 were very interesting. The point was to include antialiasing, because it uses saturation processes, and that went great- textures got more analog in character, it hangs on to the underlying tonality more- but a lot of internal values had to change to adapt to the new mechanics, and the end result got tuned in to a noticably different sound.

That sound is rather interesting. It still has the ‘dirty’ quality of the original NC-17, but it does a new thing. It manages to put snare and kick hits on top of everything else, no matter HOW much gain you add- and the boost control allows for FOUR TIMES as much gain as before, 12 db more to be precise. Nothing else can do this. When you’re willing to wreck the sound with distortion, this is the only thing that will really keep the beat from submerging. No, you can’t have that and the beat and a ‘clean’ sound all at the same time. For clean sound, master less loud ;)

NC-17 is $50.

Date September 27, 2010
Author Chris
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3DClip

3DClip was a pretty alarming loudenator!

It had six controls. LOUDER, Highs Retain, Highs Voicing, Lows Retain, Lows Voicing, and Max Clip Level. It was the introduction of Slate FG-X style techniques to Airwindows clipping.

That means a specific thing. Back in the day, when the FG-X hype was at its peak (I was trying to save up for surgery for a cat with a tumor, and the cat later died for lack of this surgery so I did not like this hype that was directed straight at clippers such as my ADClip), I was studying what that plugin did to get its impressive loudnesses, and why it broke up when pushed too far.

Turns out it stored up energy to release elsewhere in the sound—and 3DClip was my way of doing that more primitively. Why make a sophisticated, CPU-hungry and fragile thing to do this when you can simply sneak the energy back in using Haas effect to mask its presence?

And so the Airwindows alternate technique was born. It bears no resemblance to the much more complicated FG-X method of doing this, but it works about as well.

3DClip runs one sample of latency.

Date September 27, 2010
Author Chris
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ADClip

The original ADClip was invented to deal with an issue with clipping: you get a hard, fatiguing sound. Soft clipping reduces this problem, but makes things sound more trashy and grungey.

What ADClip did to fix this was, keeping track of the surroundings of a clipped sample. If it’s in the middle of a batch of clipped samples, it outputs the max clip level. If the sample is unclipped it passes it through, automatically, with no change (this is different from soft clipping which affects legitimate samples)

But if a sample clips and the PREVIOUS sample wasn’t, ADClip outputs an intermediate value. And if a sample clips and the NEXT sample isn’t (it runs a sample of latency to do this), likewise.

What this does is, it softens onsets of clipped waveforms. Stuff that’s going to hit clipping gets those sharp corners ’rounded off’. More importantly, high frequency stuff that would hit clipping (and perhaps overstress the playback DAC) tends to get scaled right back. You can’t push highs through ADClip at the same level that you can clip lows and mids. It actively fights clipping itself into digital glare, and one side-effect is that if you are hitting it with bright audio, the ‘clipped’ result will be mostly as loud as sheer digital clipping, but the peak samples of all the highs will be hitting in all different places. They’re not all at the same ‘iron bar’ clip point, just the clipped lows are. The highs effectively get soft-clipped without touching any of the legit unclipped sample values.

The first ADClip has three controls: boost, hardness, and max clip level. Hardness adjusts the effect of the unclipping, scaling from an exaggerated effect to pure digital clipping.

You should be using the most current version of this plugin, but if you want earlier versions (demo-able) or even this first version for which I don’t have a demo, buy the current version and email me and I’ll send the earlier one.

The first ADClip runs one sample of latency.

Date September 27, 2010
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Channel2

Channel2 is the classic freebie analogifying plugin, Channel, brought up to date. The selector switch bug is fixed, so you can play with the Neve and API settings! There’s anti-aliasing for a slicker, less digital sound! It’s better than ever and still totally free.

Channel2 works in three ways. First, there’s a very faint touch of highpassing, reining in the extremes of digital bass to more of what’s practical in analog circuits. This was worked out by measuring impulses from real hardware, but the application is very simple. Then, there’s a slew clipper that restricts the slew rate of the plugin. Lastly, there’s the same type of saturation present in Density, but applied in the simplest way, and then blended with the input signal as dry/wet—which means the curve becomes gentler and gentler as you saturate less. It’s this super-gentle saturation curve that people loved in Channel.

Channel2 runs one sample of latency.

Date September 24, 2010
Author Chris
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Chris

NC-17

3DClip

ADClip

Channel2

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