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Chris

Hi! I've got a new plugin you can have! These plugins come in Mac AU, and Mac, Windows and Linux VST. They are state of the art sound, have no DRM, and have totally minimal generic interface so you focus on your sounds.

TUBE

TL;DW: Tube is a tube style SoundBetterIzer using a new algorithm for analog modeling!

Tube.zip(579k)

Introducing… Airwindows TUBE.

This is your new go-to soundbetterizer! It will make anything you put it on HUGE, and is a new algorithm that’s going to inform everything I do going forward, as well as building on everything I’ve learned to date!

Just try it. Either keep it restrained, or boost it a little, or CRANK it all the way, and then TURN IT ON. No matter what your audio is, this should blow your mind :D

Go try! If you want the full soundbetterizer experience go now and use it! It will never let you down! :D :D ;D

:)

Okay, good. Who’s still here? For those of you who’re still reading, and those who like to know how things work, let me nerd out a little and explain (a) why all that is true, and (b) exactly how it’s done. Tube is a combination of things. It’s the fruit of some work I’m doing on dialing in distortion types, based on stuff I made for Mackity etc. and it lets you dial in the same clip style I used for Mackity, but scale it up and down, make it simpler or more and more complex and linear. The maximum linearity it can do is when it’s set to zero: then it’s a soft-clip with a nice clean center region. The minimum linearity it can do is at full crank, and then it’s inputSample – inputSample*fabs(inputSample), scaled just right… and then gain-adjusted right back up again.

And that’s the whole secret. It’s a distortion… a very simple distortion with the fewest possible calculations, even simpler than using sin() to distort… and at full crank it distorts a LOT and then applies makeup gain. Most of what you’re hearing is marketing volume. Not only that, since it’s a distortion, there’s a carefully calculated pre-boost in there too, and it’s set up so that at full crank, it takes the RMS loudness of a triangle wave (not unlike music content) and boosts it EXACTLY to where it’s now the RMS loudness of a sine wave. Everything else is just applying these things with the Airwindows house sound… in fact it’s a new high-water mark for the Airwindows house sound, nothing short of BitShiftGain is quite as good as far as ‘minimal processing to get the result, and insane overkill for word length and linearity’.

It goes even beyond that. Unlike my normal ‘mimic the sound of hardware’ plugins, which use (more complicated) biquad filters to get exact voicings of tone, Tube is designed to be dropped in literally anywhere. So, instead of the usual approach, I’ve got a radical approach to aliasing suppression: since it’s already so soft, at 88.2k and up we just do a single averaging of adjacent samples before the clipping, and then a single averaging after the clipping. Period. That’s all. This is shall we say not as effective as brickwall filters and Ultrasonic… but it’s applying a linearizing effect, twice, that applies to all the audible frequencies and does basically nothing else. It’s not the ideal thing for handling problem aliasing cases, but for your tubey midrange lushness there is NO other possible approach that performs as well. And, again, the most aggressively minimal approach you could have. That’s key to how I get plugins to sound right.

So, there you have it… and you do, I hope you enjoy Tube. I’ll be using the algorithms a lot, and using it to dial in more sophisticated plugins. And some folks will lose their minds and believe the magic… and some will get cross I didn’t set it up for proper A/Bing, which kind of defeats the purpose for the first crew… and in the final analysis, what TUBE gives you is this: some of the most extremely Airwindows tone you could possibly have, free and easy to drop into any track, mix, or mastering that you just want… bigger.

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.

ZNotch

TL;DW: ZNotch is a lowpass made to sound and act like the Emu e6400 Ultra Phaser filters.

ZNotch.zip(620k)

And finally, the fourth filter type (I’m doing basic filters, not trying to compete with real Z-Plane releases), ZNotch!

This is made to sound like the Emu Phaser, which has notchlike qualities. At heart it’s an extension of the Airwindows Z series, not anything specifically Emu Z-Plane: I didn’t find a notch specifically in the Emu e6400 Ultra, but I thought the Phaser options were very notchlike, so I went for a take on those. You’ll get constant highs, the ability to notch out quite deep into the bass, and that overdrive that’s on tap in all the Airwindows Z plugins, plus the ability to do all that and then add that color, subtly, to the dry signal (do this by getting your distorted and notched tone just right, setting Poles to zero, turning the output up all the way and then bringing in just enough of the color that you can hear what it’s doing. Adjust to taste)

This concludes the DnB-inspired sampler emulation EQs. Hopefully this bank of four Z-plugins will be handy to reach for, in the box, to get those vivid tones and grinds… I suspect I’ll find ’em useful in the place of more ‘normal’ EQs simply because the character of the distortion will be so handy. You don’t have to distort them, but since they take a little overdrive so nicely they’ll serve a purpose in all kinds of slight overdrive, or character adding, situations. And since they’re the Z series, you’ll know where to find them even if you’ve installed ALL the Airwindows plugins (and you can do that… if you dare!)

I’m going to relax for a bit and code some building-block plugins that will help future ’emulation’ efforts. I’m not sure what to call these, when they are not using the code or the circuitry of the ‘source’, just using my own techniques to try and nail the tone and control behavior of something out there that’s a coveted secret weapon. On that note if anybody would like to buy my e6400 for what I paid for it, I’ll put the money directly toward the next goal… the Emu SP1200. Dun dun DUNNN :)

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.

ZLowpass

TL;DW: ZLowpass is a lowpass made to sound and act like the Emu e6400 Ultra lowpass.

ZLowpass.zip(621k)

Onward! Today we have ZLowpass. I think this one might be the closest to the hardware yet! It works like my previous Z series filters, except it’s the lowpass this time.

You might notice my video looks a bit different: that’s because my Blackmagic ATEM Mini finally and permanently blew up. I’m pretty sure I know why: there were times I ran it for long periods, I’ve often run many inputs into it or had it working hard doing things like chromakeying/lumakeying stuff at higher resolution and downscaling the result to HD, or running my laptop’s HDMI feed into it and having it upscale THAT to the higher native resolution, overlay the main camera and then downscale again to HD. On top of that, I’ve had it sitting on top of my Lavry DAC, and we’ve had some heat waves this summer.

So, it melted. For a while it just had its input to the computer die (I found a Razer capture card to be more reliable) and then in some livestreams it’s been flaking out, and tonight it blew up for good and couldn’t even run a single camera. Anyone out there, be careful with these things. They’re just $300 or so, but you cannot push them too hard in warm conditions or they will melt. Or maybe the fan blew up. I know I can’t return it under warranty because, being me, I took it apart to see if I could make the cooling work better. Too little too late. Be warned and don’t run these little buggers hard, or do lots of up and downscaling, while sitting them on a warm thing. No more ATEM Mini.

Until I get another, that is, and this time will NOT touch a thing about it, will fill in any warranty card it has, and will probably get a little laptop cooler pad or something. Whatever it takes, because my setup ended up pretty sweet if it wasn’t for the thing melting under the strain. (Replacement of the ATEM will NOT be out of what I’m saving up for getting a bigger and more classic sampler. Never fear, that journey will progress unhindered.)

Anyway, here’s ZLowpass :D

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.

ZBandpass

TL;DW: ZBandpass is a bandpass made to sound and act like the Emu e6400 Ultra bandpass.

ZBandpass.zip(620k)

On we go! If you’re following this project, well, this is the Bandpass version. This and ZHighpass have been adjusted to allow for more output gain (so you can work with less distorted things and balance them better with dry signal, using the left half of the Poles control to do it).

Hope you like it! Monday, we livestream the Lowpass version! That should be fun :D

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.

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