Airwindows

ZHighpass2

TL;DW: ZHighpass2 acts more like the Emu e6400 Ultra highpass in motion, with coefficient interpolation.

By request, here’s the followup to ZHighpass!

ZHighpass2 is the followup that adds coefficient interpolation to my Z-Plane Filter emulation. Which of course is not to say that I had the code, or took apart the machine and cloned the schematic: no, these plugins are about running a reference sound into the real live Emu e6400 Ultra sampler, and smashing the crud out of it to get the most out of the filters and their distinct color and behavior, and then trying to mimic that in a plugin purely by ear.

The original Airwindows Z filters run more efficiently because they’re not asked to do as much: they have the same tone but aren’t trying to smooth zipper noise and interpolate, so if you need fixed filter settings don’t overlook those. However, half the fun of a real live sampler is to get funky with it, and so ZHighpass2 follows ZLowpass2 in adding the smoothing to everything, so you can automate whatever you like. Remember it’s set up to have lots of distortion and gain on tap, keep the input and output real low if you’re not just trying to melt the thing down (0.1 will give you basically unity gain, and the output will let you pad things a whole lot if you need to)

Note also that I found an uninitialized variable in the previous ZLowpass2: the smoothing of the Wet control wasn’t being started out correctly. It didn’t seem to do anything but all the same I’ve fixed it: redownload it if you’re concerned, or use the updated version that’s in the big plugin collections below.

Join me tomorrow on my YouTube channel for a coding livestream and some questions: for the streaming and hanging out, would anyone like to move over to Twitch? I feel like that might be a better place for that sort of thing. I wish you could see all that goes on behind the scenes, but one thing’s clear: I need to let people in on a little more of that, I think. There can be days of work that go into little glimpses of stuff, like my take on a new way to approach breakbeats in the Bespoke environment. Might as well take it all to a platform where ‘hanging out as I slowly work through stuff in audio production’ is what people expect to be doing :)

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 December 12, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

YNotch

TL;DW: YNotch is soft and smooth to nasty, edgy texture-varying filtering.

YNotch.zip(612k)

Let’s get through the December doldrums with a new plugin and some new sounds… because Y Not? (-ch)

YNotch is the final incarnation of the Y series plugins, done to give me more experience with smoothing plugin controls. It’s got a smoothed biquad filter with more than a little extra: the Y filters all have a ResEdge control. This defaults to 0.1 (like the gain control) but it can be lowered to 0 for a softer, somewhat more organic tone… or, turned up and up and up until the filter begins to distort and act weird in very unusual ways.

This is NOT like a sampler model. It’s a whole other algorithm, putting weird edges on the way the filter resonates when the Resonance is turned up. You can basically dial in the sharpness of the edge, like with the other Y filters. But unlike the other Y filters, the Resonance control goes a little further. Not in sharpness, but in dullness… you can drop resonance down to where it’s basically an ultra-shallow slope cut, put the frequency to either extreme, and use the very first hints of the Resonance control to dial in an extreme low or high cut.

And then either soften or sharpen the hell out of the edge, to get tones that don’t really exist anywhere else. Demoed with a Moog Sub Phatty using a M32 as a spare oscillator with a different portamento speed, filter wide open so the YNotch can do all the filtering and produce a mad hybrid bass grind sound.

I can’t give you the Sub Phatty, but YNotch is free and open source and the whole thing is supported by my Patreon. I might not be able to model big expensive mixing consoles (because I can’t get them on a free plugin-maker’s income) but I’ve got a number of cool things in the pipeline, and 2022 ought to bring some pretty amazing stuff to light. :)

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 December 5, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

ZLowpass2

TL;DW: ZLowpass2 acts more like the Emu e6400 Ultra lowpass in motion, with coefficient interpolation.

ZLowpass2.zip(621k)

Need I even say more?

My Z series filters were hotly sought after by a specific crew of localized Airwindows fans :D but they paid for their relatively high CPU efficiency with a dose of zipper noise, and that’s not really a ‘close emulation of the classic Emu e6400 Z-Plane filters’. At the time I hadn’t worked out the tech involved.

A bunch of plugins and a set of Y series filters (which have their own interesting qualities, in their own right) later… and the Y plugins were the ones I chose to learn the ways of filter coefficient interpolation, and all of it implemented with the Airwindows sound… we have… ZLowpass2!

Oh, and I think some changes I had to make to alter the biquad distortion factors, actually got me CLOSER to the classic-sampler sound.

So this is a sampler filter, designed to give you a seamless blend through several options the real unit offered. It also gives you a HUGE amount of gain on tap, because the DnB folks liked to internally clip stuff in the sampler and then hit the filter with it. Even with the first ZLowpass, I got some special quirks of the sampler represented in the sound. This one’s even better, particularly if you’re sweeping the controls around to ‘play’ the sampler EQ. If you want a more glitchy effect for some neuro-sparkle, or if you just want more CPU free, ZLowpass (original) is still there for you. I think if I got ZLowpass2 sounding better for static, unchanging settings, it’s not by a lot: it’s mostly in motion that this one is meant to shine.

Hope you like it! I’ll be working through some of the not-posted yet plugins and will not be addressing the other Z2 filters just yet. I want to hear whether this one’s doing its job for you all, as this is probably the keeper (if you automate the controls, and why wouldn’t you).

Thank you for bearing with me! There will be more to come. My Patreon keeps me able to do this work :)

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 November 28, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

PaulWide

TL;DW: PaulWide is a highpassed TPDF wide dither. (quieter, airier AND wider)

PaulWide.zip(576k)

Return Of The Son Of Monster Dither :D

So if you tuned in last week for TPDFWide you probably thought that was all I had, in the dither tank, for now.

But guess what? Happy accidents occurred. I thought it might be fun to try this same principle not on TPDFDither, but on PaulDither.

PaulDither is of course a simple highpassed dither. It does the Airwindows-style very tiny offset to make the dither noisefloor sit across one extra possible value, and now PaulWide is the same thing except it rerolls the randomness if it’s going to seem too much like mono. It’s still TPDF, it’s still just random one bit noise sources, it’s still technically correct as far as dithering accurately (some might freak out at the offset, but it’s on purpose and WAY too quiet to hurt you, as it’s less than one significant bit), but now it’s also widened while remaining purely TPDF in nature.

So this is your ‘hot-rod’ industry-standard dither. If you need TPDF and fancy at the same time, here you go. It is silky in texture just like Paul Frindle’s preferred dithers because it’s the highpass dither, it’s slightly richer in texture because it’s offset a teeny amount like Airwindows TPDF, and then it’s widened through discarding random values that lead to ‘mono-like’ results: except it turns out, when you apply that to a highpassed dither, you get MUCH MORE wideness than you do with the regular highpass.

Enjoy the most boutique, decked-out, hot-rod ‘regular ordinary dither’ you’re ever likely to see. I’m not sure what else can be even done here without ceasing to be TPDF anymore.

We’ll get back to audio processors soon, but I hope you like PaulWide. And thank you, Paul Frindle, for the original idea! :)

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 November 21, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Chris

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