Airwindows

TPDFWide

TL;DW: TPDFWide is still TPDF dither but better and wider. With 16/24 bit output and a DeRez control.

Before we finish up the Y filters and move on to the smoothed next generation of the Z filters, a brief digression into dither!

TPDF is Triangular Probability Density Function. It’s about using two random sources of EXACTLY the right amplitude (one Least Significant Bit each) to render anything else, including the noise floor, free of quantization distortion so you can hear deeply INTO the noise floor and have it sound musical. Dither is important, and TPDF is the industry standard.

Me being Chris from Airwindows, I always manage to find a way to tweak things just a bit, and in my TPDF dither the randomness contrives to be added to the audio in such a way that it ‘leans’ a bit to one side of the waveform, while still being purely random noise sources of exactly the right amplitude. This causes the ultimate noise floor to be distributed over slightly more values than you’d get if it was perfectly lined up, at the expense of a teeny-tiny DC offset down about 12 db under the noise floor.

Turns out there’s more that can be done. If you have purely random sources, then your stereo channels will sometimes end up at the same random values. This is similar to the dither being in mono, which is known to narrow soundstage and hurt the sensation of wideness. But what if you could avoid that?

TPDFWide is purely random-source Triangular Probability Density Function dither, but once it’s rolled up its random numbers, it checks to see if the two channels came out the same (or close to the same). If they are… it rerolls a channel. If they still are… it rerolls the other channel. If they still are, it rerolls the first channel again, and then gives up so as not to hurt itself. In every case these are still random numbers: we’re just rejecting ones where they’re too mono.

And that gives us a ‘regulation’ TPDF dither that sounds better AND wider than generic, ordinary TPDF dithers. Firstly it covers just a slightly larger range at the noise floor, without actually being any louder. And secondly, it resists ‘mono dither’ which causes it to sound wider and more spatial than ordinary TPDF dithers. And yet it’s still a TPDF dither, at heart. If you would like something a little special, but don’t like my more unusual wordlength reduction techniques like NJAD or Spatialize or Dark or Beam etc. then you might enjoy TPDFWide. It has a ‘DeRez’ control that lets you go to low-bit realms and hear what the noise floor really sounds like, and it’s got 24 and 16 bit modes when you have DeRez set to 0 (which you should, for normal operation). You can use it as a 24 bit dither for monitoring and file-making, and as a 16 bit dither when you need to export to 16 bit. 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 November 14, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

YBandpass

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

YBandpass.zip(612k)

Much like YLowpass and YHighpass except it’s a bandpass :) bear with me as I work through the backlog. I’ve basically finished the album mixing project I had going on! More on that when I have more to report.

YBandpass has various uses. One I was trying out in the video, was setting it up as a ‘walkie-talkie’ sort of tone on my voice, and then turning up ResEdge to really trash the hell out of the audio in a characteristic way that’s not easily found anywhere else. In some ways I think bandpassing is the ideal way to use ResEdge (but we’ll see: haven’t tried it on a Notch filter yet)

One day I’ll tell you all about all the things that have been going on behind the scenes here. For now, accept my next Y series filter, and I hope you enjoy it. I feel like the Z2 series (I’m leaving the original Z filters as they are because there’s uses for that too and they’re lower CPU, but will be doing V2 versions with the good coefficient interpolation for folks who craved absence of zipper noise) will be what folks are really excited about, but I do think these Y filters will have their place. They all give you the same characteristics with ResEdge, plus they all give you that slightly warm, unusual texture when you put ResEdge to 0 (a setting of 0.1 is what will give you closest to a traditional biquad, while still not quite being one)

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 7, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

ClipOnly2

TL;DW: ClipOnly2 suppresses the brightness of digital clipping without affecting unclipped samples, at any sample rate.

ClipOnly2,zip(574k)

Demonstrated back in Logic, the better to show the no interface! :D

ClipOnly is the heart of my mastering-grade clipping algorithm. Instead of trying to define the cleanest possible nasty sharp edge, or doing a soft-clip thing, ClipOnly passes through ALL nonclipped samples totally untouched… but when you get a clipped sample, what ClipOnly does is it takes the sample entering clipping, and the sample exiting clipping, and it interpolates between the last unclipped sample and the clipped stuff. So, it is synthesizing a soft entry and exit from what is otherwise total hard clipping, and if only the one sample clipped? That very bright clip simply goes away, turned right down.

This produces a hard-clip suitable for safety clipper purposes, which is purely ‘bypass’ (plus a one sample delay to allow for the processing), with softer highs than you’d get from any pure hard-clip, no matter how oversampled. It’s an alternate technique, and is also pretty CPU-efficient.

ClipOnly2 takes this principle and changes the ‘one sample’ to ‘the space of one sample at 44.1k’. Same tone, same ear-friendly approach to clipping extreme highs, except that now it’s effective at high sample rates. I’m demonstrating it and its predecessor at 96k, but ClipOnly2 is designed to work up to 700k or so, in case people get giddy with their newfound power :)

The video works a little oddly as I’m demonstrating it ‘inside’ Console7, on an aux, which is slightly unusual: normally you’d put it in front of the final dither, not gain-staged by BitShiftGain so you can hear it distort hugely. And you can see for yourself that there are no controls: it clips to 0.9549925859 or -0.9549925859 which is about -0.2 dB, and its operation stomps on Gibb Effect Nyquist reconstruction overshoots very heavily, as that’s the whole point of the thing. There’s nothing to adjust. Put it on your mix, and don’t push over -0.2dB and it’ll be pure bypass with no sound at all. If you do peak hotter than that, it’s a brightness-restricted hard clip without ever touching any of the unclipped samples. And now, it handles high sample rates without shifting its glare-restricting ‘voicing’.

All this is supported by my Patreon (linked below). There’s more to come. I would say I’d try to go faster, except I fear my computer would explode :)

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 October 31, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 10 Comments

Bespoke Live Drums (and Modular Kicks)

So I’ve just finished this today. It’s for my own use but you can have it too!

Bespoke Live Drums

I’ve put out a series of drumkits, back in the day, and when I started to get into Bespoke I was frustrated not to have as many drum samples. So I started to adapt all my old EXS drumkits to Bespoke format, which basically means ‘take all the instruments and put them in their own folders’. In Bespoke, you select a folder and then you can hit a randomize button and select something out of the folder: you can even trigger an event to continually randomize your groove. If they ever add the ability to pick from the folder based on velocity, the entire library is already ready to work that way.

The old samples are all 24/44.1k, not always super clean: some of ’em had some background noise. In some cases they were mic to mic pre (API) and directly to the converter chips inside an old 20-bit ADAT, ‘cos these date back quite a ways. As a result they can have a lot of impact but signal to noise isn’t ideal: these samples are as raw as I can get them, without processing.

The new ‘Electric’ samples are either Moog or Blue Lantern. DFAM sample sets are from my Moog DFAM, using a FM patch and listening to Osc 2. The Blue Lantern kicks come from three sources. One, an early and hot-rodded Asteroid BD (larger power supply and coupling caps). Two, a newer Asteroid Accented BD, also hot-rodded (new oscillator caps allow for much, much deeper notes). And third, a stock Asteroid Mini Synth, with two other Blue Lantern modules also driving it: the first Asteroid BD (a stock one would do as well) into the Lin input to add FM to the oscillator, and a red Mini Shimmery producing a hihat or click-like sound, that either goes into the Mix input to just be mixed in, or goes into a PCV input as yet another FM modulation. The combination of these Blue Lantern modules made the Electro kicks, with their super-aggressive attacks. There’s a youtube video documenting how I selected the Electro kicks from out of a thirty minute long sampling session, here. All the Electric kicks were picked out this way, but only the Electro ones got a livestream :)

Hope you like these samples!

Date October 25, 2021
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Chris

TPDFWide

YBandpass

ClipOnly2

Bespoke Live Drums (and Modular Kicks)

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club