Airwindows

Cabs

TL;DW: Cabs is an Airwindows guitar speaker cabinet simulator.

I think you should listen to this plugin :)

I’ve been asked for ITB guitar plugins before. Never been all that interested, because I like real amps and real tubes etc: have never found a lot of enthusiasm for going to great lengths to digitally fake all the colorations of some amp/speaker or other, because when the soul’s not there the color is irrelevant.

This is different. I took on the challenge of updating my old Cabs plugin: originally dynamically convolved cab impulses, except they hadn’t been MADE with that in mind so it became a series of wild experiments. I wasn’t happy… then.

Cabs completely overhauled everything I’d attempted. It’s undersampled, so it’ll run on whatever sample rate you like, efficiently. It’s got the same tricks of allowing you to heighten the particular speaker coloration it uses, or dial it right back to nothing.

But around that core is a completely different approach to getting ITB amp tones. I’m using the cab size and ‘room loud’ controls to let you dial in the exact presentation you want, from clear and up front power-soaked clearness to complete wall-of-stacks meltdown, and beyond (in classic Airwindows fashion). This is done through an alternate approach to loudness emulation based on the destruction of audio signals through ultimate volume, such as a Space Shuttle takeoff, and what happens to the waveforms there.

I think you should listen to it. Careful that you don’t jump for odd settings right away and get confused: for instance, settings of Room Loud beyond say 0.6 are not really real-world things. Settings of the cab tone intensity beyond 0.6 or 0.7 might be a bit weird. The way the cabs take on character and intensity is related to cab size: everything is basically related to everything else. You have to know what sound you’re trying to get, to clone something real-world. This is not a preset box, at all, at all. You have to be a real guitar tone maven to dial this in to convincing amp clone territory.

OR… or… or!

You can use the range of adjustment here, with the controls that give you a basic idea of ‘what you’re doing and how you want it’, combined with for instance Edge or the upcoming Dirt plugin (softer saturation) to get tones that DO NOT EXIST but act like real amps in significant ways. You can get tones that you can’t get in the real world, and dial them in to match what’s in your head: in some cases maybe to a point that the real world amps couldn’t reach.

And track through them because the whole rig (when using entirely Airwindows plugins) runs NO LATENCY, so it’ll feel as close as it can to the real thing, and respond with electric immediacy.

And then unlike any real amp situation… once you’ve got the final mix done, you can wiggle any of these parameters to where they need to be for THE SONG and tune the tones to best suit whatever else is there, even if it didn’t exist when you were tracking it. This is a freedom of the DAW experience (don’t go too overboard, make decisions!) and it might bring you the results you need.

And all of this can be lightly applied to any other tone: real genuine amp-and-cab that was tracked too quietly or didn’t pick up enough mojo, synths, drums, you name it!

I think you should listen to this plugin. It makes a lot of new things possible and it is free, because I am Patreon-supported and use that to pay the bills and keep myself working full-time on all this.

It’s going to be double-time, too, because I’ve got the results from my testing (anyone who knows my Soundcloud can check this out, download the tracks for 24/96 at https://soundcloud.com/airwindows). I don’t believe long double gains you anything over double, but both are significantly different that using floats for everything, and it’s not all that subtle. And so I am overhauling my entire codebase and redoing ALL the plugins, as straight up double precision, for (on Intel) nearly twice the performance… and overhauling everything that is out of date or uses poor coding practices, while I’m at it. This will affect Linux, for instance: I’ve got a change that will lead to significantly less audio thread blocking from Linux’s rand() call, and everywhere this will give you performance boosts even outside of Linux. It is a colossal task. I hope you folks like the results, which will take more than weeks but less than months, I think.

I’ll be getting back to work now, thanks for hearing me out and I hope you like Cabs :)

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 February 27, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 10 Comments

Edge

TL;DW: Edge is a seven-stage distortion with Hypersonic filtering and tone shaping controls.

Edge.zip(611k)

With all the talk I’ve done recently about Hypersonic and HypersonX, one must ask: what if you just made a distortion out of it?

This is Edge. It’s seven stages of hard clipping with Hypersonic-style filtering between each one. It’s real bright and has silly high gain, and it’s going to become more useful real soon.

That’s because it’s one piece in the DI Guitar system I’m devising: a set of plugins that combine my style of aliasing reduction (using biquads, so zero latency) with guitar-grade distortion and a reissue of a classic old plugin of mine that’s totally revitalized for the modern day… but that would be skipping ahead :)

Suffice to say Edge is the high-gain distortion stage of such a system. It should run pretty efficiently, and it’s got a carefully designed set of controls. The gain of course is obvious.

Lowpass is basically your cutoff frequency: this isn’t designed to be swept (though you could if you’re OK with some crackles) but is a very efficient Hypersonic-style lowpass that you can set from 25k right down into the deep bass. Since it doubles as the ultrasonic filter, dialing back on the extreme highs will give you even better aliasing performance (run at elevated sample rates to use this properly) and also gives you an interesting tonality at the cutoff which isn’t exactly resonance, but it’s a bit like it. The way the phase shifts going into successive stages of gain boost and clipping produces a distinctive tone.

Highpass is your secret weapon for when you use it as a guitar amp: get the rest of the system huge and beefy, and then dial in the lows using this input highpass, for maximum texture.

Output and Dry/Wet are for use when you’re just making it be a hard clipper. It’s never going to be exactly a hard clip because of all the stages and the way the EQ interacts with the sound, but between the highpass, lowpass and the gain on tap you’ll get many sounds out of this one. Unlike stuff like ‘Tube’ this is never intended to be smooth. It’s just edgy in a distinctive way that might come in handy. (more to reveal on that, before too long)

I 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 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 February 20, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

HypersonX

TL;DW: HypersonX is like UltrasonX but with seven stages instead of five.

HypersonX.zip(586k)

This one’s pretty straightforward. If you know UltrasonX, this is the same thing but for Hypersonic. These are ultrasonic filters for use at high sample rates such as 96k: for less processing than it would take to oversample a bunch of stuff you can run the whole mix at an elevated sample rate and put filtering between nonlinear stages: it works better to do a little filtering in many places, and it helps the mix from seeming overprocessed.

HypersonX is steeper, because it’s seven stages instead of only five. It cuts off a little higher, so it should go right past 20k without hinting at rolling off or softening anything. But since it (like Hypersonic itself) is seven stages, that means you’ve got to find seven spots in your mix to stick the respective stages of the filter.

Like UltrasonX (and like future Console versions I do that will use this technology), you have to have one each of every stage of HypersonX, from input to final 2-buss. That means you don’t have to repeat ’em across all channels: for instance, if you’re running stage A and B on the channels, and C, D and E on submixes, and F and G on the 2-buss, that’s way less filters than you’d have if you placed just one Hypersonic on the start of every single channel, AND it will work better because it’ll keep every little nonlinear stage in check. Otherwise, they can seize on small bits of aliasing and alias them further until they combine and become obvious. Single filtering at the input won’t protect you from this. Distributed filtering will.

This might not be for everybody. The thing is, if you’re running at high sample rates and you want to resist aliasing and have a warm, analog tone that still retains clarity, this might be for you… and similarly to other Airwindows inventions, the cumbersome nature of HypersonX could become your secret weapon. Who wants to carefully arrange to have one each of seven types of inaudible filtering across your signal path, from channel start to end of 2-buss? Possibly you, if the resulting tone speaks to your musical tastes. The barrier to entry is a setup that’s a pain in the butt and fussy rules for how it works (you can combine it with the original PurestConsole if you’d like to also have the cleanest possible Airwindows Console mix, that’s a whole other set of fussy rules!) but you might find the results a little spectacular.

I hope so! The next thing for me is building this into the next version(s) of Console, and I believe it will help things a whole lot. But with HypersonX, you don’t have to wait. Use it on its own or combine it with any earlier version of Console (not Console7 or PurestConsole2, which have their own filtering, but Console 5 or 6 or PurestConsole or Atmosphere or PDConsole which didn’t have ultrasonic filtering built in) and begin constructing your own in-house mixing board, and get your personal sound.

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 February 13, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Hypersonic

TL;DW: Hypersonic is Ultrasonic, but steeper and higher cutoff.

Hypersonic.zip(594k)

By request, here are some updates to my ultrasonic filtering asked for… and some that weren’t expected :)

Hypersonic is the same as Ultrasonic, except it’s running seven stages of filtering instead of five, and it cuts off a little higher: for these reasons, it’s the Airwindows ultrasonic filter that ought to not soften the super-highs even for golden ears and sparkling youths :) I don’t think the original Ultrasonic sounds bad and I use its type of filtering in my work a lot, but I also like depth in sound and the presentation of a soundstage that’s not too upfront and close. It makes sense that the slight softening of super-bright frequencies that original Ultrasonic gives you, wouldn’t work for everybody: not everyone wants ‘glue’ or ‘analog’ or ‘recording console’, sometimes you just want the purest digital you can get.

I think there’s a fair chance this filter will work out for folks whose aesthetic leans toward the superultramegahyperbright, even if that ain’t me. It combines enough filter stages to act like a 14th-order Butterworth, and it cuts off just high enough beyond 20K that you should get everything up to insect-repellent audio, unsoftened.

I’m also working on something else that may give rise to big changes (I know, it’s like 2022 is all the promised big changes, but this one might be extra interesting). Compare Ultrasonic to Hypersonic… CPU-wise. I am pretty sure that I’ve got Hypersonic outperforming Ultrasonic on every possible platform, even though it has two more filter stages than Ultrasonic. The question is, am I making a choice that is hurting the sound?

A bit of background. There are a lot of devs who like using 32-bit floats for audio math. They’re fast, can be calculated in parallel… but everything you do with them, you erode away louder samples by constantly truncating your internal variables to roughly 25 bits. You’ll never hear that doing it once… but for every little calculation, which could be thousands or tens of thousands? I think that’s a hidden difference between digital audio and analog audio, and I think it matters.

So much so, that I run an internal buss in my plugins that is 1,099,511,627,776 times more high-resolution than that. It’s served me well, and I like the sound I get. But I’ve also run across folks who use a slightly different arrangement: they’re not dithering floating point like I am, but they ARE using a high-res buss. How high res? 536,870,912 times better than the more efficient floats, that’s how high res. Now, what I’ve been doing is one trillion ninety-nine billion five hundred eleven million six hundred twenty-seven thousand seven hundred seventy-six times more high-res than your average float. But who’s to say that we can’t get by with only five hundred million times better than your average float? :D

And so, we have Hypersonic. It’s using more filters than Ultrasonic, but running faster, and it’s still five hundred million times more accurate than your average float-based audio software, and it still dithers to a 32-bit buss such as CoreAudio on the Mac. But hey, if you’re running Reaper or something else with a double precision buss, it doesn’t have to dither at all as it’s working natively at that resolution! So my challenge is this: does anybody, myself included, hear ANYTHING more truncate-ey or degraded about Hypersonic when compared to Ultrasonic, even though it’s running more stages of filtering? I challenge you, tell me if you think you can hear a drop in quality here. I’m all about the overkill, but I suspect I can get there on the native Reaper 64-bit buss: and of course everything AU or otherwise that does run a 32-bit buss gets dithered to that buss whether it’s Mac or PC or Linux, and I’m thinking I can start to bring some really serious performance gains to everything. I will of course keep an archive of all the Airwindows plugins as they existed before re-hacking them in this new way, so you will be able to have access to the previous plugins (of all kinds) that ran the ultra-super-hyper-overkill audio buss. Might be desirable for mastering folks, or those who are incredibly fussy about analog-style sounds. I’ve been doing a fine job of keeping the audio busses cranked wide open to ultimate resolution for years, and the whole Airwindows library is like that.

But if my suspicions are correct, we can have that as backup and then also have the whole Airwindows library running WAY faster.

And then when we move on to the new format CLAP, and begin to bring out select plugins with GUI and interfaces and metering, they can also run their audio stuff at that nice happy medium between high efficiency and no-compromise audio buss.

It’s gonna be an interesting 2022 :)

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 February 6, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Chris

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