Airwindows

Isolator2

TL;DW: Isolator2 is Isolator, but with control smoothing and a new resonance booster.

WARNING: in the video, my Reaper audio is hosed, but it’s OBS/SWB Audio Capture doing it, not the plugin! Sounded fine to me and if you try it it should be fine!

Welcome to my nightmare! So much is changing that I can’t even track it, but one thing that doesn’t change is I’ve got a plugin for you, and more in store. If you’ve got bug reports and things, hang onto them and I’ll find a way to catch up. For now: I am scrambling to get ready for an important trip, and everything is in flux. I have four old computers going back to Apple as trade-ins, and a big Eurorack case going to a local music store to be sold with its collection of modules and all their support things (not the one still in the video, but my first one). This is also why my video’s sketchy: everything has migrated onto my current laptop, which is great but not at all ready to have all this working, so it’s a week-long struggle to get it all up and running again in the complicated audiovisual setup I’ve become accustomed to.

So please bear with me: by next week I’ll have ironed out the plugin video making thing. It’ll be worth it: I’m on track towards a pretty amazing portable music-and-video-and-art making rig and if I can perfect it I’ll tell you how to do it. And I don’t mean the Raspberry Pi, though you’ll notice that now Isolator2 ships for Raspberry Pi too (granted, for use in 64-bit Reaper: I’m not sure I can also supply 32-bit Pi binaries off the same machine, if Pi experts have advice here I’m all ears)

Isolator2 is Isolator, my very steep lowpass or highpass or shelf filter, but now it’s got smoothed coefficients so you can automate it and make it move better. Also, it’s even steeper. Also, it now has the power to give you added resonance! So you can put an edge on your filter/isolator sweeps, for a really narrow high-resonance sound that’s very striking as a ‘synth filter’ tone. You should play with it as the video is broken and doesn’t show it properly :) again, I will fix, by next week. I have always used a program called LineIn to get audio into OBS from the DAW, but on the new laptop it can’t be run even in Rosetta, and the thing I tried did not work so I’ll have a different thing by next week.

Might have a stream on Wednesday, might not. We’ll see.

As said in the video, here are the things I’m working on now that I’ve got the big library-update and the port to Raspberry Pi 400 done: I have a Console update in store that will not be a Mackie 8-buss but instead a re-imagining of the tricky Console5 that’ll be super vintage sounding, I have more ‘amp sim’ options from earlier days for you to play with, and I am on the track of a major tape-plugin experiment that could give me late 70s tones with a huge amount of configurability, and sounds that had been lost to time. It will be called Doubly, and will be less an ’emulation of hardware’ than a synthesis of concepts that underlie what made those magic late-70s records sound so unusual. Back then things weren’t as standardized and studios sometimes set up their seemingly technical noise-reduction systems by ear, and got to unique places through manipulating that equipment slightly outside the true technical parameters… and I think I can get that into a plugin :)

Sorry again about the video glitches. I’ll have it fixed by next week, I promise :)

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 March 27, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

All Airwindows Plugins Now Run Natively on Raspberry Pi

TL;DW: you heard me!

download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
MediaFire backup of LinuxARMVSTs.zip

I’m Chris from Airwindows, and you can do this… ON A SIXTY DOLLAR COMPUTER.

That would be a Raspberry Pi 4B with 4 gigs of RAM, effectively the same as the Raspberry Pi 400 I’m using in this video. Oh… also, though the system is apparently locked at 48K sampling rate to match the HDMI audio output I’m using, these tracks are all 24/96 and are running just fine. You might get more performance than I got if you’re not using 96k tracks.

Take these plugins and put them in the VST folder that Reaper is looking at. You can either use the hidden folder that’s default (“.vst” which doesn’t relate to what suffix the plugin has: they’re still .so files, but the FOLDER starts with a period to hide it in the Linux file manager) or point Reaper to the folder you’re keeping the plugins in.

That’s it. Now you can use all the Airwindows plugins… repeat ALL the plugins, all 290 or so of them, and all new ones going forward… on Raspberry Pi, with Reaper or any other DAW that’s legally allowed to use VST2 plugins (me and Reaper have licenses for this, so it looks like we’re good to go). All the plugins, free and open source, on a sixty dollar computer (or eighty if you want more RAM, or around a hundred to a hundred and sixty if you want the Pi 400 like I have, and also want to get all its peripherals as part of a kit)

Seems to work pretty good. Tell your Pi-using friends, and there will be more where those came from. This is now an officially supported platform. :)

This happened because my Patreon let me do the much more demanding update of a few weeks ago (including crucial Linux fixes) and then go out and get a Pi to make these on. The procedure is the same as compiling the plugins on x86 Linux. But you won’t have to, just use the ones I made for you :)

Date March 23, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 9 Comments

Silhouette

TL;DW: Silhouette replaces the sound with raw noise sculpted to match its dynamics.

Silhouette.zip(588k)

I thought I’d let people play with the precursor to Texturize, which so far has not made it into the Patreon era of Airwindows… meet Silhouette!

I know what you’re asking. “Why does this plugin look like a busted Subaru in a snowstorm?” And the answer is, it doesn’t: I had a car crash (and did not die! And only blew out a tire, and didn’t go head-on into a truck or anything!) and the busted Subaru is from that. I’ve got it back on the road now, this time with snow tires just in time to absolutely not need them :) and that is purely a side issue and some of why I suddenly stopped constant livestreaming.

Silhouette is not a busted Subaru. It is a busted PLUGIN :D And what it was for is, playing finished music through and seeing if you could still make out a beat. It was an anti-loudness-war plugin, made long ago to illustrate that point. And it replaces the whole sound with a blast of noise which retains the dynamics of the underlying music… if there is any. Dynamics, that is.

Texturize was this, tone-shaped to match the sound of the underlying music (mostly going a lot more bassy). And Texturize proved a lot of fun for people, some of whom asked, can we have that but brighter? So be careful what you wish for. Silhouette now comes with the same wet/dry control as Texturize, so you can use it as a subliminal noise generator. But it’s ALL bright, so you have to turn it down further in order for it to ‘hide’ behind the audio. And that means it can’t really do what Texturize does: it’ll stick out.

But in sticking out, the subliminals it will generate are VERY different from what Texturize does. I’d describe it as hype and energy and tension. Be careful not to turn it up too high: it’ll be incredibly obvious anytime you do. Some sounds, some mixes, will just never work with it.

But isn’t it fun sometimes to not care about that and just try out something wild to see what it does? Silhouette finds its use in that space. I hope you like it.

In other news, though I’m not chasing the livestream thing at the moment (I can occasionally get back into that, I think, just not this last week) I’ve got some plans underway. I’m actively moving towards releasing all the plugins in Raspberry Pi compatible form (thankfully, if this works at all it’ll be a lot more straightforward than the big plugin overhaul of 2022) and have been asked to do more in the line of Evergreens content and how to get classic tones (guitar, bass, drums, keys, what have you). I believe this will be more appropriately done in edited-youtube-video form, so I will need to learn Final Cut Pro and select bands (Steely Dan comes to mind) that aren’t fighting react-channel usage so I can show people how the records are made and play original vinyl so you can hear the real mixes as they are meant to be heard. I’ll work on this, and will continue putting out plugins :)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
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 March 20, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Texturize

TL;DW: Texturize is a hidden-noise plugin for adding sonic texture to things.

Texturize.zip(603k)

It all started with snake oil… or should I say secret snake oil?

There’s talk lately of a plugin which has gotten a rather critical reception: a plugin said to put subliminal noise into the sound, to produce near-magical enhancements of tone and all good things. But you can’t hear it directly… you gotta vibe it, listen and embrace the magic, and then you’ll believe…

People were, shall we say, critical of this approach :)

Since I’m free to code what I like, thanks to Patreon and all (and thank you, all who’re pitching in there) I took an interest, and now you have Texturize. It is NOT literally this other plugin, or their patents, or the specific method by which they make the magic concealed noise that makes everything better.

But what it IS, is a riff on several previous plugins I’ve had for years and years, to produce a very similar function… but THIS one, you can tweak and you can also crank it up and listen to only the noise to hear what it’s like. Ruin the magic… but learn how the trick is worked. And it turns out it is really not snake oil at all… it’s just another thing to do with audio, and it does seem to work, and everyone making a plugin of this nature will have their own ‘take’ on it: if you like mine maybe you’ll try out the other folks’ plugin with more of that open mind, having proved that the concept is sound. Or just use mine, which is open source and free :)

You get three controls. Bright makes the effect key off high frequencies more aggressively, to the point of hyping up energy, and Punchy varies between a softer, fuller sound and a real spiky choppy effect. And then there’s Dry/Wet, the heart of the plugin, where settings of 0.5 or less are probably going to keep the noise entirely inaudible, as it’s meant to be. Not heard… but felt. And the sonic transformation’s really interesting, all the more if it’s not obvious. It reminds me of how tape flutter can bring texture to pure tones, chorusing against nearby reflections for a fatter sound, but here it’s just noise… but noise doctored to act like the music and hide behind it.

And then of course you can crank it up until you plainly hear hints of the noise… or slam it until you only hear the noise. But to actually use the plugin properly, keep things at 0.5 and don’t push Bright or Punchy or especially Dry/Wet to where it’s gone too far: tweak it on that subliminal level, turning Wet down if you need to, and see what you get.

I might well start using it. It really does seem to work. Go ahead and fool with it and strip all its secrets… and see whether you believe, too :)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
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 March 14, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 12 Comments

Chris

Isolator2

All Airwindows Plugins Now Run Natively on Raspberry Pi

Silhouette

Texturize

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club