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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.

PurestConsole2

TL;DW: PurestConsole2 is the anti-aliasing version of PurestConsole, with special brightness and clarity!

PurestConsole2.zip(709k)

Hi! My video is showing off the plugin I’ve been coding on Monday livestreams, but it’s not the new plugin for the week! It’s for next week.

What’s this week is… firstly a hell of a lot of studio upgrades, new music, better video support thanks to a Razer HDMI capture box and a new custom LUT just for the Blackmagic Pocket Cinema 4k cameras, did I mention new music? I was composing and tracking it all day or at least since 3. Actually kind of a lot to get done in six hours.

But it was all because I needed to show off the new plugin… or plugins. Meet PurestConsole2.

This serves a special purpose in modern Airwindows Console mixes. I’ve got Console7, which gives you all the glue you could want, creates solidity and the sense of an analog mixing desk (all the more if you use Console7Cascade, which I’m avoiding for this track and this video). But Console7 does its aliasing prevention by rolling off right at 20k, which helps the sense of glue but steps on some of the super-sparkly treble you sometimes get in modern mixes. It’s set up to do it really gracefully, but some have noticed a diminishing of super-glittery highs.

PurestConsole was always the ‘colorless, transparent’ take on any Console system, but with PurestConsole2 we’re stepping just a bit away from that, to serve as a complement to Console7. PurestConsole2 does the same ‘filter the super-highs to prevent aliasing’ thing that Console7 does. BUT, not quite the same. It starts higher (run it at 44 or 48k and it won’t even attempt to filter) to extend to 30k before filtering. But then it filters SHARPER… to roll off quicker. And in doing that, it gives you a presence peak beyond hearing. Not a huge one, but it’s there: it’s also on the end of the system, not (like Console7) going into the system. So PurestConsole2 gives you a sprinkling of treble glitter even while it rolls off the aliasing-prone frequencies more effectively.

The end result is the same kind of analog warmth… except it’s a cool, airy clarity that resolves absolutely EVERYTHING. If you’re shooting for super-clear this is the one you want. And since Console mixes can drive submixes which then use another Console system to sum the stems to the 2-buss… you can sneak it in on your harmony vocal beds, or orchestral stems, or you could use Console7 for everything and then sum only the stems to the 2-buss using PurestConsole2. Instead of mixing and matching within the summing busses, design your mix structure by figuring out where you want analog fatness and slam, and where you want clarity and resolution.

All this is supported by Patreon. I’m given to understand the guy I revisited Srsly for is happy, and I bet people are going to like next week’s reverb, and here’s a different style of super-good-sounding digital mix buss this week. I admit I have porting to the new M1 Macs to do, and now that I’ve cleared a bunch of this workload hopefully I can get on that as well. Remember it’s just me here, and I also have to shovel my own snow and carry my own firewood :) but, these days I can afford the firewood, and indeed the M1 Macbook Pro, and things are looking good. Hope you like PurestConsole2, those of you who’re Airwindows Console fans.

Srsly2

TL;DW: Srsly2 is a revisit of Srsly, to make the stereo widening more extreme.

Srsly2.zip(376k)

“You call that a wide? Now THIS is a wide!”

A little while ago, I put out a plugin that reverse engineered the famous Hughes SRS stereo widener, from pictures in an old Popular Mechanics article. By applying a set of narrow little EQ boosts and cuts to stereo, mid and side channels, you could make a sort of holographic effect. Srsly still exists, just as it was, for use tweaking out more natural stereo imagery.

But the rabbit hole goes a bit deeper than just that…

Srsly was by request of my friend Chad whose Hughes SRS wasn’t working properly, and who wanted a plugin version that didn’t hum. I didn’t have one of my own, so it was largely guesswork. Thing is, somewhere in there I got my hands on one (thanks Patreon! Between that and getting a real Mackie 1202 to play with, it turns out it’s useful for me to get actual gear relevant to my plugin interests, especially when I’m not getting the plugin right at first)

And before I used it myself, I didn’t really ‘get it’, but then I started putting it on reverb returns, and quickly got very fond of a certain ultra-wide reverb field.

And then I got more heavily into mixing in the box (and not with my hardware stuff) after Console7 came out… and discovered that my ITB reverbs did NOT do that kind of wide, and tried out my original Srsly… and had the same problem Chad ran into. It just didn’t do what the hardware box did. But I wasn’t done… so I started running stuff into the real hardware box, and just fooling around with the specific audio I’d begun to use, and rapidly worked out what was happening. My original Srsly left out a lot. It was more ‘audiophile’, more subtle, would fit in with more accurate recordings, but the real deal hardware device could be pushed WAY farther.

…in a way that I could interpret. And coding ensued…

Meet Srsly2. I’ve intentionally not tried super hard to exactly duplicate what is, after all, an unobtainable original hardware box by Howard Hughes’ company. Variations of this are still being licensed for use in car stereos and things, and I intentionally make no claim that I’m duplicating someone else’s property.

But. But. BUT. What I was asked for, was to accomplish a particular effect, where the stereo wideness could be made crazy exaggerated. And I was able to interpret what a real hardware box (not original, though) was doing. And I continued to modify Srsly until, with Srsly2, you can now dial it in to do very similar crazy and unreasonable things… and that’s probably close enough for a free and open source plugin modeling an ancient hardware device that can’t really be found anymore. You’ll find the controls ought to work as you’d expect them to, and you may find as I did that leaving the Center control alone and cranking up the Space control just right, can get you into a wild and somewhat boosted and hyped zone that makes the most of your spectacular stereo content, in much the same way the original, obscure, Hughes box did.

That’s my hope, anyhow. Hope you like it! I know I’ll be using it on stuff.

Density2

TL;DW: Density2 is a different color for Density, some old code I had that people wanted.

Density2.zip(355k)

So in the absence of somebody coming forth and saying ‘this is on my quadrillion selling hit record’… weirder things have happened, occasionally to me… you should consider this as an alternate tone for Density. It’s been around for a while, but people wanted to see it again: specifically, to see it run on modern machines and in VST and so on. How could I say no? I’ve altered it as little as possible: there were always some weird things about it, but I refactored it to retain EVERYTHING unintentional or unusual. I gave it modern Airwindows handling of denormalized numbers, and it dithers to floating point instead of using the noise shaping to floating point that I used back then. Everything else is just as it was: no ‘fixing’ or making it do what I ‘meant to do’.

The old AU version is downloadable from the link at the earlier Density2 listing: both use the same ID so you’d have to swap them out if you want to compare. I think you’ll find the sound is the same, maybe a tiny bit less plastic and fake with the new one (the noise shaping to floating point I did back then, didn’t work either), and more of the tone people were looking for out of it. One never wants to change anything people were fond of, so I haven’t.

Next step is getting all of these to compile on a M1 Mac computer, and putting out an alternate AU version for a new generation. Doing that will NOT fix the issue with Logic not working the sliders correctly: turns out that’s a Logic bug and I can’t fix it directly. But if I begin putting out my entire 200+ plugin library on M1, much like I recoded everything for 64-bit support for Apple back in the day, then maybe the Logic team will fix their bugs.

If not, it will all run natively on Reaper without any problems at all, while waiting for the Logic bugs to get fixed. Which will probably happen, if people ask them to fix it :) the real question is, how fast, and can I have M1 builds of all the plugins made before Apple makes them usable in current Logic? Place your bets!

Brought to you by the Airwindows Patreon, which will unlock Hardware Synth Building DIY when I hit $2000 a month, at which point I start sending people electronic parts free so long as I’m above the threshold :)

LRFlipTimer

TL;DW: LRFlipTimer is a utility that swaps Left with Right every few (1-10) minutes.

LRFlipTimer.zip(327k)

While I’m working on the Big Sur issues and getting my studio back together for streaming… and measuring the Mackie 1202 I got, and putting another De Lisle Pentatone in another guitar and making a plugin of it and etc etc etc… hey why not, here’s a utility plugin.

I don’t know how useful this’ll be for you: a person asked me for it, and I was able to do it. This just does one thing.

Every few minutes (as in, one minute to ten minutes) it swaps the L and R channels. It sweeps them across in about a tenth of a second, to prevent any sort of pop or anything. When it’s in LR or RL mode, it is 100% direct pass-through of the audio data word, so this is as clean as stuff like LeftToMono: it’s one of those ones that just copies the data over, not even touching it. That said, this doesn’t belong in your mix: the idea is that if you’re mixing and you do stuff asymmetrically, it’s like visual arts: you might need to flip the canvas left-to-right to see if things are off balance. That’s all this plugin does. You set how many minutes will elapse before it flips or re-flips.

Again, I don’t know if this is gonna set your world on fire, but somebody asked. And it’s a nice break from all the intense struggling with setting up a machine to run Big Sur and all. I’ll let you know when that develops further. See some of you folks on Monday for my coding stream! And I’m actively working on being able to resume the music-making streams in a way that’s comfortable to do, and will give me novel music to use for each plugin posting. It seems like that ought to be possible, I just overcomplicate everything. More later :)

Brought to you by the Airwindows Patreon, which will unlock Hardware Synth Building DIY when I hit $2000 a month, at which point I start sending people electronic parts free so long as I’m above the threshold :)

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