TL;DW: Sweeten is where you can find super-clean second harmonic.

Sweeten.zip(492k)

So this serves a few purposes. Sweeten is one of the super-minimal, one knob plugins. It makes second harmonic: much like SingleEndedTriode, or Inflamer. The first purpose is to exist, so if you’re thinking ‘I gotta sweeten this sound, now which Airwindows plugin of the three billion and twelve does that? Conflagration? No, that can’t be it’ then you can go ‘is there one literally called Sweeten’, and now there is! And it does what you’d expect, even harmonics (second harmonic, specifically). That’s all it does.

Another purpose is because I use stuff like this in my designs. So it’s useful to have a chunk of code that I can take and put in the midrange section of an EQ, or something, if I think it’s lacking that subtle nonlinearity which comes out of some circuits. Sweeten is specifically designed to let me do that quickly and easily, and if I make a tool for myself which is actually neat and efficient, I give it to people.

The only thing Sweeten can do that you can’t already do with Inflamer is be simple, and maybe one or two fewer math operations, and that’s IT. This isn’t new (second harmonic isn’t new, either). My hope is that it’s such an elegant, easily identifiable little device that it’ll come in handy. It’s also using the stepped-control, bit-shift-gain thing I do lately, so one thing about it is that it’ll prevent you overprocessing. If you turn it up until you can hear it a little too well, drop back a step and then you can’t tell it’s doing anything, but it very much still is. For many types of processing (second harmonic emphatically included!) the optimal setting is where it’s doing its thing but at no point is it ever distracting or sticking out as a mixing mistake. Sweeten is predisposed to quickly get you to that point with no fuss.

I’ll be using it: if anybody else finds it useful, that’s even better :)

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.
VCV Rack module

TL;DW: Inflamer is an Airwindowsized take on the waveshapers in Oxford Inflator.

Inflamer.zip(501k)

How do you take a famous, beloved plugin and make it better?

In a recent livestream, I saw a video make the very convincing argument that the famous Oxford Inflator is the combination of two very simple waveshapers. Like, spectacularly simple. One’s a bit more complicated than the other, and one is essentially just second harmonic, nothing more. The person making the video set up the two simple waveshapers and demonstrated that for all manner of settings on the real Inflator, they could make a Melda waveshaper produce identical outputs.

Of course, you didn’t get the UI. You didn’t get the band splitter. There’s a clip meter of some sort: also not included. However this meter, these controls work: nope. But… now there are algorithms that are public, some of ’em so simple as to defy property (hard to argue that you can own one line of code that makes things second harmonic, it’d be like me claiming to own sin() )

What could you do, to make this better in any way?

Well, that’s where my recent experiments come in. Meet Airwindows Inflamer (NOT Inflator). It doesn’t do the same things, quite. There’s no band splitter. There’s a curve control, but it doesn’t go -50 to +50, it goes from 0 to 1. And while it blends the two waveshapers… it does so in a more cumbersome and possibly more pure way.

Inflamer is different because it’s using my BitShiftGain style gain trimming, internally, as if it was a dry/wet, but with the two waveshapers instead of a dry and a wet. The Drive control is also bit shifts (very accurate divisions by powers of 2). The Effect control, as with the real Inflator, is normal and is in fact a dry/wet, and there you can have subtle adjustments to what is, I hope, a sonically optimized version of the effect.

But you cannot have the band splitting, or fine gradations of Curve. In fact many settings of Curve will end up being a slight volume drop when used at unity gain (Drive in the middle). It is possible a bunch of people will shoot this out against the real, iLoked, for pay, bestseller plugin, and will decide mine is crap because it is often quieter than the real one.

GOOD. I’m not trying to rain on anyone’s parade. You have to know what you’re doing to evaluate this. It’s much like how, when I start doing takes on Bricasti, they’ll be in my own style. I am not cloning things, even when the underlying algorithms are trivially simple. Inflamer is different and the range of adjustments are in 6 dB steps on Curve and Drive and often you might find the result comes into the mix 3 or more dB quieter than it would from the Sony plugin, and that’s as it should be.

And if I’m correct that leaning on these insights into digital math gives their own kind of benefits, I’ve managed to make an Inflamer which is more mastering-grade, more transparent and sonorous, and better sounding (IF you can live with the only settings I allow you to pick) than the real one. That’s why I’m restricting it the way I am.

There you have it. Inflamer is obviously not Oxford Inflator, has less options and restricted choices, and if you shoot them out head to head without matching levels carefully, it will probably always come out quieter than Oxford Inflator. And it is only some waveshapers, simplified and restricted even more than the original.

And for some, it’ll be just better, in critical listening. Sometimes it takes radical methods to beat an already stellar plugin. I hope you like Inflamer, and that it doesn’t inflame you too much, unless you like that sort of thing.

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.
VCV Rack module