Airwindows

Hypersonic

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

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

Console7Crunch

TL;DW: Console7Crunch shows you Cascade but with its EQ weighted for more edge and grit.

Console7Crunch.zip(613k)

Hi! I’m sorry I haven’t been continuing to put out an amazing plugin for Mac, PC and Linux literally every week: I’ve recently missed a week (gasp!) for what I said was catastrophic internet issues. Which, TECHNICALLY, was more or less true, as far as that went… which is pretty far really… but that would be telling.

Well, now it can be told… but first, the plugin!

Console7Crunch is a variation on Console7Cascade, to experiment with something. Cascade stacked up distortion algorithms inside an instance of Ultrasonic, basically. For that reason, it distorted the super-highs very early on, and compensated for this in later stages, rolling off brightness and smoothing the distortion out. Well, with experiments like UltrasonX, and some upcoming even-more-intense filtering of that nature, I wanted to do a variation on Console7Cascade where the ONLY thing I changed was the order of the filtering. They’re supposed to combine to a perfectly flat multistage filter, and they do… but the way it hits nonlinearities and clipping is a whole other story.

The result is a Console7Cascade that’s more crunchy, with more obvious clipping and an additional ability to deliver distorted punch in the extreme highs: Console7Crunch. It’s not wildly different (all this is meant to be ultrasonic! But of course it affects everything anyhow) but it’s a noticeably different color for when you’re looking for higher gain in the Console7 system. I hope you like it, and I found the experiment interesting.

There are many more experiments to come: this year I’ve committed to many things and among them is the upcoming plugin format, CLAP. It looks very much like my job will be to stop derping around just adding to the huge Airwindows open source library, and reboot into a new plugin format from which, perhaps, other formats can be generated… and which might finally support the GUIs and visual feedback elements people have clamored for. I know people who are doing it, and my emphasis on supporting retro systems has been kinda dwindling to where some of the things that take plenty of my energy and effort are maybe a tenth of what modern stuff is doing, out there in the world. Plus, I’m very enthusiastic about Apple Silicon and might be able to move forward into an era of Airwindows where I can do just as innovative things in plugin experience as I’ve done over the years in sonics. I’ve got a lot of experiments underway and will try to keep things moving at the rate people have come to expect.

On a more personal note, I’m doing this at a challenging time for me. The internet difficulties I mentioned? Turns out it’s not as easy to get upload bandwidth… in Canada, about halfway to the north pole. That’s right, I was WAY out of my comfort zone, for some mighty good reasons. There’s a prospective Mrs. Airwindows. She’s pretty damn amazing, smarter than me, with similar attitudes and motivations in life (not as good at audio, but very likely smarter at business). This has a lot to do with how I started livestreaming so much lately: inspiration, confidence, the right sort of encouragement. She’s already visited me in Vermont. I think you folks will like how I am with her around. I’ll smile more, and be more inspired and positive.

The reason I was up in Canada is, there’s challenges. She’s extricating herself from some rather scary domestic trouble and ensuring the safety of her kids. She’s got to get her house fit to sell, and move out of there. She’s got some health concerns that deserve better support than she’s had with ’em. And in part due to that domestic trouble, right now she is contending with having a scary ex, a recurrence of cancer, and a dose of covid ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

I am shall we say a little distracted.

Before I get up there again to help I have to have Airwindows more mobile, something I’m working on very hard right now, not knowing if I’ll have to scramble to get back up there in a big hurry. I also have to arrange for my home in Vermont to be secure: I did that pretty well but I’m going to have to be more thorough and not leave stuff here unattended, so when I do travel I’ll have my valuable stuff either with me or in storage away from home. And of course this will drive me to have the mobile rig more heavily weighted in favor of virtual stuff, the Airwindows Free Studio, so what I use when streaming from Canada will be more like stuff you can just download and use for free: that part, I think, is very much a Right Thing to be doing.

When I get livestreams going again you can ask me anything, and I’ll be working like mad for the next few months to prepare for another trip into the Great White North where it is typically 30 or 40 degrees below zero. It’s wild. Next time you can come along with me and I’ll be vlogging it and music streaming and developing plugins on the road: we’ve got plans to solve the internet issues, and I’ll make it work somehow. I did post a plugin from Canada, but there was no hope of uploading a video until I got back. We’ll fix that for next time.

That’s assuming any of you are interested in hearing about Chris from Airwindows in love and journeying into the land of polar bears (well, bears anyways) to develop his plugins alongside the woman he loves. I can’t show everything of course, but if we get our situation sorted out up there, and get out of there safely, it’ll be the beginning of a new chapter in an amazing story, and I will stay as accessible as I can once I’ve got my home base secured and clear of too many goodies. (nobody wants to steal a replacement hot water heater even if it’s amazing, but it’s bad form to leave the portable Eurorack rig around, so that comes with me ;) )

More will be revealed. I hope you enjoy Console7Crunch. Apologies for not having the video system up to par yet but the entire thing was packed away and had to be set up from scratch: I’m still adapting to this new world I’m suddenly in. Wish me luck, and I believe I’ll be able to keep the plugins coming right up to when they take on an entirely new, fancier form and format…

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 January 30, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 19 Comments

Monitoring2

TL;DW: Monitoring2 is Monitoring, but with Airwindows Dark instead of NJAD.

Monitoring2.zip(661k)

Here’s a little update for users of Monitoring! Monitoring is the end-of-2-buss plugin that allows you to check your mix in lots of different ways. You can get 24 or 16 bit output out of it (as in, direct to CD format for saving as 16 bit), lots of reference sounds like SubsOnly, SlewOnly, PeaksOnly that will let you hear your mix in a very different way (if it’s way out of balance when you can only hear the deepest subs, or the brightest highs, you can re-adjust things.) PeaksOnly shows you a fake and unnatural sound that will enhance the inaudible peak energy and highlight anything that might be too loud because it’s heavy on peak energy. You’ve got four variations on Cans for headphone mixing (which gives you crossfeed in the form of allpassed, blurred audio a bit like what PeaksOnly does), you’ve got mono and side checks, narrowed-bandwidth checks like Aurat (including one-side mono versions to more closely resemble use of a real mono mix-check speaker) and even utilities like VoiceTrick, which gives you mono with one speaker out of phase: position a mic exactly between the speakers and you can lay vocal tracks without headphones if you need to (not perfect, but it should work).

In short, Monitoring, but with one little change. Everything is the same, but now Monitoring2 uses Airwindows Dark for the wordlength reducer. This is different from the original Not Just Another Dither, in that it will give you deeper blacks in your silences and darker, warmer tones than the original NJAD would do. Dark is not really a dither: it makes its choices (for wordlength reducing) based only on what will create less hiss, noise and highs in the final output. This won’t be right for everybody, and is subtle no matter who you are, but it might be just the thing if you have a retro aesthetic, are into the whole cassette-release scene, or just want to produce music that sounds as unlike the modern DAW scene as you can get.

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 January 17, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

UltrasonX

TL;DW: UltrasonX is a method for rolling your own Console-type systems with total control over your ultrasonic filtering.

UltrasonX.zip(588k)

A little while back, I made a simpler ‘Ultrasonic’ filter, with the intention of making a lighter-weight utility that could be used where Ultrasonic might go. The idea was, Ultrasonic (which is already available) was too heavy: it uses five stages of biquad filtering and I thought doing the same thing with just one or two stages would be better.

Turns out you can do that, but if you stack them up you start losing the super-highs. The one or two-stage versions weren’t steep enough: didn’t bring out the super highs close enough to the ultrasonic zone. But, the five stage version is still just too much processing to put all over the mix. What do?

UltrasonX solves this problem (that maybe nobody but me had :) ).

This is a plugin that does any one of the five stages in Ultrasonic, one at a time. It’s got settings for A, B, C, D and E stages. Each of these are a carefully calibrated resonance value, that add up to nice and flat and clear all the way up to the supersonic region.

Console7Cascade does something like this, internally, and gets a particular tone because its ‘more resonant A stage filter) is before distortion, and the softer unresonant filters that compensate for this are after the distortions.

But here’s the thing: if you want to make a Console topology where the channels aren’t overly brightening, but you’re feeding a submix buss that is more crunchy and shouldn’t be hit too hard, you can do that too. This is likely going to end up my problem but now you can experiment!

To do that, construct a Console system, using an earlier Console or PurestConsole (the original) and see to it that there are exactly five instances of UltrasonX in each signal path. Maybe two on each channel, two on the submix, one on the 2-buss! Or, one on each channel before hitting the PurestConsoleChannel, one on the 2-buss before the PurestConsoleBuss, and then three more sprinkled between your 2-buss processing. And any of these can be the ‘pre-brightening’ or ‘complementary darkening’ ones, meaning you could have the brightness boost after summing for a bit of air in between your instruments, or early on for softening saturation and adding glue.

Or, you could use it anywhere, or on one single channel (that didn’t have ultrasonic filtering) as long as you’ve got room to fit five individual filter plugins. Bottom line is, if your audio goes through ABCDE and comes out the other end, it should be correct. The rest is up to you :)

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 January 9, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

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