Airwindows

Zoom

TL;DW: Zoom is a bank of Density-like waveshapers for subtly modulating peak energy.

Zoom in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Distortion’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Zoom.zip(495k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This is a little piece of what could become a new Mastering plugin, but I’ve got a lot of testing to do to work out whether that should happen. Zoom is waveshapers: as many as five stacked up for high gain levels, and most settings will use at least a couple. They’re applied sort of in parallel: the basic idea is a lot like Density, but handled very differently.

The purpose is to try and alter, very strongly, the peak energy and only the peak energy of the sound, while leaving the loudness more or less alone. That’s why the ‘negative’ settings, below 0.5, don’t get as much quieter as those in Density. It’s taking the hottest peaks and further boosting them while cutting back quieter stuff. Boosts still work as in Density, except the character will be a little different.

So, you might find the sounds of this interesting, or find that it’s an amazing overdrive or ‘weird expander’, or whatever, but those are all obvious changes that you can hear because they’re modifying the RMS loudness of the signal. And that’s fine too. I’m just saying, for the last month I’ve been on a deep dive into Meter and the concepts around it, and I’m working towards something specific. I would like to see whether you can take an already good track and make it significantly better by heavily modifying just the PEAK energy and getting that exactly the way I want it. A new version of Meter is coming out and I’ll be doing more ‘vinyl hit record videos’ to demonstrate what I’m talking about, and to do that I have to write new plugins that specifically master audio to work with Meter and work on the stuff I ‘can’t hear’… at least, not directly. If I’m right, perfecting this stuff will cause tracks to sound inexplicably amazing (and they will have to start out with the potential for amazing: some don’t need help, and for others it’s very obvious what must happen.)

For instance, I might have various 80s hit records where, due to the taste in mixing and mastering, there’s constantly stray peaks 6 to 12 dB hotter than everything else, and I’d need to remap them to be a more continuous range of peak energy. Or, the area is too dense and could use being opened up subtly, allowing the hottest peaks to ‘un-saturate’ slightly without it being really audible, again to get me an area of peak energy that’s as evenly distributed as possible.

And that’s what Zoom was coded to do, and why it’s hard to hear what it’s doing until you crank it up to the point of obviousness. It is also a simple waveshaper so you can do that while oversampling it in the DAW, which of course I won’t be doing because used normally it’ll barely create any harmonics at all. It’s a ‘zoom lens’ for audio: everything is still in focus and looks the same, but the presentation has shifted in the desired direction, probably only discernable by Meter.

I might still be working on Meter and far from ready to put out a Mastering that’s entirely based on my untested theories, but the new Meter should be coming up just next week, and if you wanted to experiment as I am experimenting (or just slam stuff, I’m not your Mom) then here is Zoom. Have fun!

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date October 20, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Galactic3

TL;DW: Galactic3 is exactly Galactic again, but with better undersampling.

Galactic3 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Galactic3.zip(544k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This is always a bit tricky: I try to revisit my biggest hits and make them better. The last time I did that with Galactic, not only was it merely different, it had a bug that Galactic doesn’t have: four variables that didn’t get initialized properly. Galactic2 is now fixed and presumably bugless, and is still just ‘different’, a variation on what Galactic does.

Galactic3 is straight up better. Because it’s exactly Galactic again… but instead of the linear interpolation it used to use (like CrunchCoat) for high sample rates, it’s now using my new Bezier curve technique to interpolate, like kCathedral3 and CreamCoat.

First, that means it should have better tone at high sample rates. Second, in theory it should gracefully handle even really outrageous sample rates (Galactic will eventually start scaling the verb space down in size, Galactic3 won’t). But most importantly, that means you have a Derez control like CreamCoat, except on the reverb engine of Galactic. So you have exactly the sounds of Galactic, but you can further undersample them for a cool ‘reduce sample rate’ effect… and in doing so, increase the reverb space in size. How much? To unreasonable size: galaxy-sized.

To use the new tone with the same apparent room size, decrease Bigness until the giant space is back to what you want again.

Galactic3 takes in audio (dry/wet control available) and uses the Replace control to determine how much of the new sound coming in should replace the space that’s currently there. Detune shifts the pitch for both channels (in a quadrature pitch shift arrangement that means maximum widening for each sound) and Brightness controls both the brightness going into, and coming out of, the reverb. Replace, Brightness and Detune are designed to be playable on the fly to make your ambient spaces or evolve them. Bigness is the reverb buffers, so you can still alter that but it will make crashing noises when you do (that will then become more infinite spaces). And Derez, the new addition, will snap the whole pitch of the reverb space up and down without otherwise glitching it, so in theory it’s playable as well.

I think this one is really fun! As you can see it fits with my experimental-music aesthetic (didn’t even have to add Srsly2 on the end of it to make it superwide… though of course I could, and so can you). If you’re not quite that abstract, you can still use it on pads for more normal things. Just set Replace to a lot higher, set the Brightness and Bigness appropriately, and use Detune to chorus out your new huge enormous synth pad, or whatever else needs to have an unreasonably huge and wide stereo field. I’m pretty sure this can become your go-to for epic fields of reverb, no matter what’s meant to be causing them. And Derez adds darkening abilities beyond the scope of original Galactic. Honestly, I think I finally managed to make it better rather than just different. Let me know what you think :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date October 13, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Hit Record Meter (0.1.8)

TL;DW: Meter uses analysis of peak energy to rate songs for hit potential.

github.com/airwindows/Meter/releases

Here’s what’s new in version 0.1.8! Meter now focuses entirely on peaks (RMS is used for some internal calculations and the size of the dots in the Zero Cross section).

Each section is labeled: Peak Loudness, Slew Brightness, Zero Cross Bass. They all show red, blue and green dots. It’s always the same data, just arranged differently, like this…

Peak Loudness shows the dots on a dB meter (labelling the horizonal lines as -6, -12, -18, -24, and -30 dB). This is the same as a normal RMS meter, except it’s only showing peaks: if they are not showing up at the bottom of the meter, the RMS loudness is too loud to let them go down there.

Slew Brightness arranges the dots by slew factor, so brighter ones will be higher (as a rule).

Zero Cross tracks how long the audio could go before crossing zero, so this is not only presence of low bass, it’s also about whether there are higher frequencies to interfere with that bass. It’s also labelled now, at 200 hz, 40 hz and 20 hz (which is the bottom of the meter). Again, it tracks not just whether bass exists, but whether it’s allowed to dominate. If you notice, there are lines higher than 200hz around where the ‘Zero Cross’ label is: those lines are 2k and 20k, and most audio shouldn’t even get near there for zero crossings. Refer to music you like as a reference for how this ought to look.

There’s a line of text now that tells you about three things: the original Loudness measurement (which isn’t RMS, it’s the raw density of how many peaks are present), a new measurement for novelty (how much the pattern of peaks changes, making a different sound), and a measurement of how many bright, loud, and dark peaks happened. Dark peaks aren’t always bass, they’re just peaks where the slew isn’t high enough, just as bright peaks are all slew and treble. Meter now keeps track of this to tell you if you’re over-bright or over-dark.

And there’s a rating, like there was before. But now it’s not ‘peak loudness’. Now it’s novelty MINUS peak loudness and MINUS how off-balance the bright/dark peaks are. The idea was to track down roughly how striking the sounds were, even though Meter doesn’t know what a note is or understand music per se. Turns out, this new Meter is very good at singling out breakthrough songs that broke a big act (for instance, its favorite Led Zeppelin track is Good Times Bad Times) and career-making records like Sergeant Pepper. It likes punchy, dynamic music like the B-52s and the Beastie Boys and Chic. Its favorite Aerosmith track seems to be Walk This Way, and it’s sorted the Yes tracks I’ve so far recorded, into a list that is almost exactly sorted by record sales.

If you think that’s interesting and want to mix stuff to make Airwindows Meter happy, the results you get will probably sound good once you’re done. I can’t make it give you Top Ten hits, that stuff was back when we had a record industry. But it can help you get striking and exciting sounds. You can also use it to match other music you know: study the meters and make your music match what you see on your target music and that should help. But to pursue hits as Meter understands them, allow for a bunch of headroom and then use up ALL that space with peak energy. It likes things a little dry, not loads of reverb, and it likes it when the arrangement leaves spaces: if possible, space like the song is breathing in tempo with the desired music. Definitely pay attention to whether bright/dark is out of balance, but you can either go for the hi-fi sound of bright/dark peaks, or you can just try to make all the sounds peak out as loudly as possible, which means mixing everything to be loud and sonorous. Both work.

There’s more tools coming for working with all this, but this is a good update for being able to keep track of what you’re doing with all those plugins. If Meter breaks or fails to work for you, I’ll try to get help as to fixing it: I’m out over my skis working with JUCE but with the help of the Pamplejuce framework, I can try to provide GUI plugins. Have fun!

Date October 6, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

ToTape8

TL;DW: ToTape8 is Airwindows tape emulation with gain staging, bias and optimized Dubly!

ToTape8 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Tape’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
ToTape8.zip(569k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Sometimes, things move kinda fast.

ToTape8 comes right on the heels of ToTape7, rather than a couple of years later. Why? Necessity. So much was right and new with ToTape7, but it was letting itself down. It wasn’t clear how to set levels on it as there was only ‘TapeDrv’ in the middle of many other controls. There was lots of control over the Dubly, but it’d never made its way into a ToTape version before and quickly showed a gritty, fierce character that actually limited the amount of good Dubly could even do with the tone. Yet it took up four controls, getting in the way of an output level control while still allowing use with Consolidated and the VCV Rack version.

Clearly, the answer was to immediately get COVID! But in recuperating from that, there was time to revisit ToTape and Dubly, and the new Dubly is out, and here’s the next generation of ToTape. Already. And probably about two years worth of ‘better’, if you’re wondering, because that was just waiting to be unleashed: all the other stuff was ready to support it.

It’s now obvious how to gain stage ToTape, with an input and an output control… but it’s more sophisticated than it looks, because ToTape8 has a safety clipper built in (same as ToTape7). This is ClipOnly2, running after ToTape so no matter what you do the output is safe for a final mixdown… but since there’s an output control now, the output control goes after the tape emulation and before the final clip. So if you want to pull it back to ‘tape overdrive only’, you can set the output to about 0.4 or so (depends on your other settings), shy of the ClipOnly2 clip. Or, if you want a much cleaner tape effect with more powerful peaks, leave it as default or even turn it up: the Input control can have you hit the ‘tape’ less hard, and since idealized tape needn’t have noise you can gain stage it any way you want (there can be a kind of noise in a future variation that’s more lo-fi, this is more for being able to put on tracks and mix buss without wrecking the tone)

With no tape noise, what does the new Dubly do? Amazing things. Now that it does a kind of compression (not a clone of hardware, but a simpler, optimized compression to clean up the grit) that’s tied with the Dubly frequency, the formerly crunchy Dubly has been reduced to two controls, but they’re amazing and way more useful than the original four. Tilt simply adjusts the Dubly amounts against each other. Maybe 0.5 is not, in fact, the perfect setting. Try other settings! Anything close to the center will be musical and useful, cranking it to 1.0 will give you the ‘Dubly encode trick’ used in studios, and turning it down to 0.0 gives you only decode, at the most extreme amount possible. So, it’s named Tilt because it works like a tilt EQ, but it comes from the existing Dubly. Then, the Shape control varies the cutoffs of the Dubly encode and decode, AND the response of the compressors, against each other. What this does might not be obvious, but once you try it, there’s nothing more obvious. Tweaking this adjusts the midrange hype. You can have the mids be more searing and compressed and lively, or you can dial them back until they’re dark and vibey. You get a funky expanded dynamic tone you’ll immediately recognize from certain Seventies records. It’s at your fingertips with the Shape control.

Does that mean setting it to neutral does nothing? Nope, this is the best part. Just by being there, Dubly does a special thing with the ToTape overdrive/saturation. It cancels harmonics, and this is why real tape machines are often thought of as near-magical ‘clean level compressors’. ToTape8 pulls this off pretty well, even though it’s minimal and clean enough to use in real audio work (not just sound design). Note that this is not ‘aliasing control’ though it’ll sound like it is, compared to the gritty ToTape7 (vibey though it is). ToTape8 does use filtering in both the Dubly encode and decode, but not in an ‘elaborate brickwall filter because it thinks it is oversampling’ way, in a way that’s designed for better tone and ability to run at zero latency. What’s happening is, the nature of Dubly means anything producing harmonics tends to also have the harmonics taken back out again, because they’re treated as additional noise. It’s that simple, and still works in minimal form in spite of not cloning any hardware box, and that’s why ToTape8 gets the sound it does.

That’s the new stuff, Flutter and Bias and Head Bump and Head Bump Frequency still work the way they do in ToTape7. I think they’ll be even easier and more pleasing to work with now that the Dubly stuff has been brought up to par. Let me know if this plugin sounds better than ToTape7. It ought to :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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.

Date September 29, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 11 Comments

Chris

Zoom

Galactic3

Hit Record Meter (0.1.8)

ToTape8

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club