Airwindows

Fracture2

TL;DW: Fracture2 is a wavefolder that allows more extreme disruption.

Fracture2 is straight up a West Coast wavefolder, in a plugin. You’ve got Drive, Fracture, Threshold, Output and Dry/Wet controls. Drive is basically overdrive like in Mackity, and you can get unity gain at a setting of 0.1, and Output and Dry/Wet are what you’d expect.

Fracture makes the signal go exponential before folding. What this means is, if it’s at zero you’ll get a simple wavefold. With a sine, that’ll create a distinct overtone (stronger than the original Fracture) which will slow down as it nears the top, then reverse. As you increase Fracture, the pitch of the wavefold increases because the wave you feed in will start folding faster and faster the more it folds: it will also open up the unfolded part of the wave, making it more dynamic. On non-tonal sounds, this makes the effect dryer and punchier and more aggressive.

Threshold is by request from a fan who asked in Youtube comments, and whom I’ve got some things in common with. The idea is basically, can you make the folding part only take up a certain amount of space, like back to the zero point but not past? Turns out you can! And what this does is, it lets you have a volume control on the fold part. So, at zero threshold, you have a soft clip (or, with Fracture, a weird expando-clip like High Impact). As you increase it, the wavefold comes out of the clipping, expanding down (or up) from the flat-top of the wave, with 0.5 going to the center of the waveform and 1.0 doing a full-amplitude wavefold.

Because this effect lends itself to the Rack port of my plugins (where you can feed audio rates into any controls), all the controls except Fracture are smoothed for better automation. I don’t do this all the time, but it just seems to be the kind of effect where you might be sending sine waves into it (revealing zipper noises) and then modulating it like crazy, so it’s using the same smoothing that’s in the Z2-series filters.

Hope you like it!

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

Date June 25, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

MV2

TL;DW: MV2 is a dual-mono reverb based on BitShiftGain and the old Midiverbs, adapted to high sample rates.

MV2.zip(560k)

Back in the days of really old school digital reverbs, there were a couple weird and obscure ones that had a special mojo. I’ve got one: the original Alesis Midiverb. It’s quite low-fi and only has RCA jacks, but there’s a certain something about its sound.

Turns out one of its secrets isn’t so secret: the first two versions of the Midiverb don’t have a multiply unit. That means you can’t do certain reverb things correctly. Reverbs use a kind of delay effect called an allpass filter, which involves multiplying by 0.618 (I’ve sometimes generalized this to ‘the golden ratio to N decimal places’, where N equals ‘a lot’). But the old Midiverb couldn’t do that… so it made an ‘allpass filter’ by multiplying its stuff by 0.5. A bit shift.

Airwindows fans will know that there’s something special about a bit shift: especially in floating point, you can change volumes by 6dB pretty much losslessly. No, make that ‘totally losslessly’ since in floating point you’re only changing the exponent and could change it right back and lose absolutely nothing: the mantissa is never touched.

What would happen if you took this old school way of doing allpasses, and made a modern reverb out of it, using full-quality floating point to do it? What if you followed up by making the regeneration also strictly ‘bit shift’, increments of 6dB or infinite regeneration, losslessly? What if you added a way to roll off highs by averaging output samples of the allpasses, and did THAT entirely using bit shifts as well? And allowed for a big number of allpasses (26, all different increasing prime lengths), and gave varying treble rolloff by independently controlling which of the allpasses got the average treatment?

Here’s the new MV: all this, but adapted to high sample rates. The previous one’s still there! But if you try to use it at 96k or 192k, the whole tone and delay time will be shifted to higher pitches, shorter reverb blooms (bloom being the type of SFX this is). MV2 uses undersampling so it can run at high sample rates and sound the same… and so it can use less CPU at the elevated sample rate.

You can dial in different degrees of highs roll-off using the bright control, or leave it at 100% shiny. Combining this with more restrained regenerations like 0.51 or 0.26 at medium-to-high sizes will give you very decent ‘impossibly huge reverbs’ of various characters. MV doesn’t do early reflections or plausible spaces, just the infinite wash, but that’s somewhat configurable. It’s also a really primitive algorithm compared to some of my others: this is a case of me updating older stuff so it maintains usefulness in the modern day, it’s not about me making a new greatest reverb. Though, you know, if you like it that’s perfectly fine :)

It runs dual-mono, so you can dial down the size a bit (not too much or it’ll get nasty, you’re removing allpasses from the chain) and use it as an ambiance generator, and it’ll put all reverb tails ‘behind’ the sounds that make them: centered stuff stays centered, wide or stereo stuff goes super-wide. For this reason it’s very suited to use on auxes and submixes: you can add ‘space’ that’s very pure-sounding.

It can do full, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and I think 1/16 level regenerations: set the feedback and it will use the bit shift amount nearest below the setting, so no matter what you do it will always retain its audio character. And the whole thing runs inside a PurestConsole instance except for the regeneration, which is extra… which means that if you build up a wall of infinite reverb, it can’t go into reverb runaway because distorted samples will wrap around and get quieter: you’ll have to trim down the output, but this makes infinite regeneration super-usable without applying any kind of compressor or limiter inside the loop. Since you can also do zero regeneration and it’s just a pile of allpasses, you can also do a ‘gated reverb’ effect if you like, which is good at airing up the mix but then getting out of the way.

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

Date June 18, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

StarChild2

TL;DW: StarChild2 is a weird digital ambience/echo plugin adapted to high sample rates.

StarChild2.zip(590k)

For all that we try to make plugins have natural, acoustic or electric, retro vibe qualities, sometimes there’s a thing which breaks the rules by creating a distinctive voice that has nothing to do with naturalness. I’ve got an old Alesis reverb like that: very primitive, but deep as anything. There have always been odd little boxes with a style all their own, like the Delta Labs Effectron, which is low-fi but uses delta-sigma modulation like an SACD (but much more crudely!)

In that spirit, here’s StarChild. The inspiration came from the old Ursa Major Space Station. That said, StarChild sounds nothing like a Space Station, but it does sound like it’s out of this world. Like Space Station, it produces series of echo taps which aren’t perfectly regular. Space Station has little rhythms that it does, while StarChild works on prime number sequences: that produces a sputtery sort of delay line in which it won’t reinforce any one frequency.

What you get is a curious delay/ambience effect, in stereo (it’ll widen stuff that’s only in the middle). It can work kind of like a natural ambience that’s a room in a horrible shape, or you can crank out the duration and get weird stretched textures with a variety of granularity. It’s an odd little plugin: didn’t sell that well in its earlier incarnation, yet this revised newer form is hotly anticipated: a bunch of people really started wanting it when Kagi (my payment processor) went out of business and suddenly it couldn’t be sold. (yes, this is from back before Airwindows was free!)

Now, years later, this is a version of it that’s savvy to sample rates. It’s undersampled so you can run at 96k or even 192k while getting the same delay times, the same sounds, and at more or less the same CPU load of the 44.1/48k version. It’s been a while since we’ve seen this plugin, and rightfully so: it sounds really weird and bad! But that’s exactly why you can make distinctive noises with it, and who’s to say you don’t want to sneak an ear-catching sound in there?

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

Date June 11, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Galactic2

TL;DW: Galactic2 is a super-reverb REdesigned specially for pads and space ambient.

Galactic2.zip(571k)

Galactic has been a huge success, no pun intended. It might be the most popular of my first batch of feedforward reverbs, and it’s still available, from its banks of 4-wide householder matrix delay lines, to its pitch shift stereo widening.

So, why revisit Galactic? What is there to even improve? Well, it’s a matter of taste. My newer big reverbs and realistic reverbs go for a bigger reverb matrix with a distinct, more organic texture to it. And I wasn’t really satisfied with how you worked with Galactic: I’d imagined a thing where you’d have reverb space going, and then you’d ‘paint’ in other sound, perhaps with a slider, or just by overloading the existing space with other stuff.

And so, here we are. Galactic2. Drive, Sustain, Darken and Wetness. And a tone that owes more to the K series plate reverbs, than Infinity or Verbity. Sustain starts to feed back forever a little ways past two-thirds up, with halfway being long decays, and very short sustain being your kill switch. It’ll creep up in gain at full crank, so be careful with that. Drive is how you feed in new audio while it’s going, Wetness is probably going to be full crank for most use cases, and Darken goes from totally, scintillatingly bright to mellow and distant-sounding, both as part of the total output of the reverb, and as part of the feedback loop (so if you have bright stuff going, and you Darken, your sustain will start to get darker as it continues, which can add realism).

I keep saying it’s like the kPlate reverbs, but I checked the code and it’s still 4-wide Householder matrixes, like the original. So what makes this so different? Its handling of stereo, is what. Either you’ll love or hate it. This is why you should love it. Unlike the original Galactic, this isn’t a pair of matched reverbs using pitch bends to stereo-ize them for mono things. Galactic2 is a SINGLE giant stereo reverb that uses all the same delay values, but uses them crossways: one channel accesses the matrix vertically, the other accesses the matrix horizontally. It’s ‘the same’, but all the echoes are arranged differently. These are way harder to come up with but it’s what was used on the kPlate reverbs, except those are 5×5 matrixes and this is still a 4×4. There’s just a teeny bit of crossmodulation to round it out.

What this means is, if you put stuff in the left, it makes a sort of cloud of reverb sound that’s also mostly on the left. If you put stuff in on the right, likewise: you’ll get ‘space’ happening mix right.

And if you put stuff in mono… you get WIDE center content. The whole texture is wider than what original Galactic can do, without use of chorusing or pitch shifting to widen it. That gives it a completely different character, which is why you’ve still got original Galactic to use if you want. This is a second bite of the apple. It’s about trying to get even deeper into space, and I hope you enjoy it :)

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

Date June 4, 2023
Author Chris
Comments 11 Comments

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Fracture2

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StarChild2

Galactic2

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