Airwindows

Discontinuity

TL;DW: Discontinuity models air under intense loudness.

Discontinuity in Airwindows Consolidated(CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Discontinuity.zip(498k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This might be the most important subtle sound effect I’ve ever done.

Air isn’t linear. That’s why DAWs don’t sound like reality: they are literally too perfect, in that their transients, their sound combining, every aspect of their operation has no error at all. One would assume this would produce perfect sound, but some of us have never shut up about our grievances with it. (we just lost a titan of that grievance in Steve Albini, but he’s far from alone in that.)

If you have sounds in air, they sound real even while the air itself distorts them. Much like my recent work with capacitors modulating their values under voltage pressure (up to 80% in some cases!), air modulates the speed of sound under AIR pressure. This makes incredibly obvious and intense crackles on loud sounds like rocket takeoffs, but many of us have heard this crackle at things like rock concerts, especially in a really live room like a hockey rink.

Discontinuity simply adds THAT distortion. At loudnesses from 70 dB to 140 dB. That’s all it does, and at loudnesses below 110 dB or so it’s quite subtle… but I’ve found use for it as quiet as 71dB (the voice tracks on my last two videos!)

I won’t say it’s correct and accurate at 140dB: I include that because people will enjoy it so much, but I’m not using that much. I just have to… because people will enjoy it, and because it’s impossible not to hear when cranked that high.

How to use Discontinuity? At any point in the mix where there’s a sound, apply it so that the loudest possible sound (typically 0dB, or clipping) matches the loudness you need. If your sound peaks at 10 dB quieter than clipping, and the sound needs to seem like it’s 102 dB, set Discontinuity to 112 dB. And listen! There will be an obvious sweet spot where it starts to seem exactly right, and you can dial in the apparent loudness as if it was a tone or EQ move.

Discontinuity does its frequency modulation using sample buffers. For that reason, it permanently has a bit of latency and it’s never quite the same latency because it’s frequency modulated by the track it’s on. For that reason, you could put it on every track and drum mic as long as you give up the idea of phase coherence. It’s better on minimally miked things or possibly submixes, and on distinct sounds that don’t need to keep perfect phase alignment with each other.

Depending on who you are and what you’ve dreamed of being able to make sound do, you might immediately not care about any of that, and immediately start using it on everything and never stop. That’s me. It’s like when I invented Console, only more so. The interesting thing is how useful I find the quiet, subtle settings when getting a mix to gel and come alive like it’s a real sonic event happening. I can set very delicate and quiet, against super loud, and have them all just work.

Discontinuity is a fundamental part of ConsoleX, which I’m still working on. I hope you like getting a little piece of the mixing revolution early, so you can learn about it :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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 May 12, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

Airwindows Consolidated

TL;DW: Welcome to the Airwindows plugin for everybody else :)

Airwindows Consolidated Manual
Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module

For many years, I’ve built up a library of DSP effects, executed in a stripped-down, retro-friendly format that is impossibly light and efficient compared to how plugins usually are. It’s also completely overwhelming at nearly 400 plugins all with their own names (or iterations like Channel6, Channel7, Console8, Console9 and so on) and stuck on older formats like VST2, because for years I insisted that Steinberg might try to take away the legal right to put out VST2 plugins and I wasn’t going to risk that, being committed to supporting all possible machines.

Airwindows Consolidated fixes all those things, at a stroke. It’s just become the one true way for a lot of people to use the Airwindows plugin ecosystem, and it will be fully supported going forward as a format for all new plugins (at least, all new plugins that aren’t themselves a giant leap forward, more on that later). What do you get?

Airwindows Consolidated is CLAP native, and gives you all the things special to that format (as seen in the Manual, running as a CLAP plugin in Bitwig!) A lot of us feel this is the format of the future. Now it’s got all of Airwindows, native, and will continue to have the new plugins added.

Airwindows Consolidated is also VST3 native, so this is for the Cubase users and other folks who can’t get on with VST2 for whatever reason. It’s also for folks who can’t handle the ‘slider only’ minimalist look: there’s knobs! (the Rack version has knobs, jacks, and attentuators, because it’s a Rack module!). It’s also AU. It’s also LV2. Lots of native formats!

There’s also theming: it reads dark mode or light mode off your system setting, AND you can override that if you want. No more bright gray rectangles if you don’t like them. At a stroke, a lot of known issues are just gone. You can type in values in a text box (heck, I can’t even do that with my own VST2s in Reaper, only with the AUs).

Doesn’t stop there: Airwindows Consolidated has screen reader support. Why, I ask you, shouldn’t visually impaired musicians make AUDIO music? Airwindows Consolidated works with screen readers to properly read out all the text. So what’s this ‘all the text’, how hard could that be?

Airwindows Consolidated contains the entire Airwindopedia. Every plugin shows the entire Chris explanation given on release, in a sidebar. That’s close to a hundred and fifty thousand words, built in! And because you’re not going to read a hundred and fifty thousand words just to get started…

Airwindows Consolidated contains a whole menu system, which defaults to ‘Recommended’. That shows basically Airwindows’ Greatest Hits, the ones you’ll want to look at first. It’s a much smaller list, and isn’t always the most recent plugin in a series. For instance, Galactic2 is more specialized than the Recommended original Galactic. There’s also ‘Basic’, which is a set of plugins that are easily understood and used when you’re just getting started with mixing and music making, and ‘Recent’, which is just the newest stuff. And when you’re ready, there’s ‘All Plugins’, which opens up the menus to everything. (If you save a mix and then change the menus, it won’t take away your plugin just because the new menu setting isn’t listing it: you’re safe there)

This is all you need. It might be the only Airwindows plugin you ever download, because there’ll be a new build of it every week every time a new Airwindows plugin drops. Just re-download it and re-install. It has installers to make it easy for you to do that, and it’s an open source project so it’s hosted by Microsoft at their expense, not me and Paul. Downloading it costs us nothing, so go give it a try.

And who do you have to thank for this? Well, yes, it’s all nearly-400 Airwindows plugins. If those didn’t exist, neither would Airwindows Consolidated. But I wouldn’t have been able to do this on my own, even as an open source developer. So this is thanks to the inspired work of Baconpaul, of the Surge XT synthesizer project, who also made my VCV Rack module be a thing (and it is essentially the same as this: it should have all the same features and all the new plugins, each week). The whole Surge XT project deserves your attention and support, and there’s more than just Paul involved: for instance, EvilDragon has had lots of influence on the menu system, actively helped develop the categories, and at his request the entire Airwindows website now uses those same categories to help find stuff.

Airwindows Consolidated is out, and it’s gonna be at the top of my list of ways to download my plugins. This is a big deal. I hope you like how much easier this has made the whole world of Airwindows :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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 May 6, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 32 Comments

Pear2

TL;DW: Pear2 is my Pear filter plus nonlinearity.

Pear2.zip(499k)

Turns out I got more use out of Pear than anybody else… until now.

Pear (as a plugin) is real experimental. It’s got fixed cutoff points based on bit shifting, to see what that was like and whether it would maximize tone purity. Maybe it did (you’ve got it already so you’re free to check it out). It’s got a Poles control, but it’s not meant to be a sweepy synth filter, it was purely an experiment on things I could do with the Holt algorithm.

Turns out you can have a lot more fun with it when you turn it loose.

Pear2 doesn’t restrict the frequencies. In fact it smooths the control, specifically so you can sweep it. You can sweep everything except Poles: there’s a switch on that, but you get to add WAY more poles than before.

And then there’s the Nonlin control… and now it’s time to get gnarly.

This doesn’t have a distortion circuit! As filthy as it can get, none of that is from distortion or saturation. It’s purely from the same nonlinearity calculation present in Capacitor2, in BiquadNonlin, and so on. That is applied here to a completely different algorithm based on Holt, and the more poles you add to the gnarly brew, the weirder it gets. You can use this for a really vibey analog-style EQ (high or low shelf: I’ll be using it as a crossover) or you can push it until it’s making a sound that has not been heard before.

So if you liked weirdness like the Y series filters, this is your new toy. Back next week with…

…more.

Yeah, let’s just call it ‘more’ ;)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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.
VCV Rack module

Date April 28, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 10 Comments

ContentHideD

TL;DW: ContentHideD mutes audio except for brief glimpses.

ContentHideD.zip(482k)

This is a utility plugin meant for use with YouTube… by me. I’m not sure it’ll be useful to anyone else, but who knows?

ContentHideD simply mutes audio, almost all the time. It’ll wait a few seconds, not so long that you get bored waiting but not super-quick or regular, and then it’ll let through a blip of audio less than a second in length. To the best of my knowledge, you could play highly protected audio through this all day long and ContentID will not engage. I’ve heard that you can go as long as five seconds of audio, but remember that legally you get ZERO seconds of grace: if the sound can be identified, copyright can be claimed.

So this is not for getting rights to audio. It’s for being able to play brief glimpses of audio that is otherwise highly contentious and not allowed for plain old listening. You wouldn’t use ContentHideD if you wanted to enjoy the music, as you effectively won’t get the music. But, I have a need for playing clips of audio to illustrate points I’m making regarding the metering and measurement of such audio.

And in situations where I know I can’t put the audio on and show the metering to use the audio for educational purposes in teaching people what to do with peak energy and headroom… ContentHideD ought to let me expose brief snippets of what’s being shown on a meter, even if it’s the Beatles. After all, it’s not the song you’re getting: it’s rendered useless for that purpose, but you’ll still get glimpses of the overall sound of the track, and that’s the point.

My demo video tests this theory: I play all of Back In Black, by AC/DC, to show how it registers on my meter (predictably, it does incredibly well from start to finish) and you barely hear the song, but you get many glimpses of what various tones sound like coming from the original vinyl record, uncompressed and unlimited. I’ll follow up if my video gets claimed, as the point of this plugin is to stop you getting claimed, but I suspect it deletes SO much audio in a slightly randomized way that ContentID will not kick in. It really shouldn’t as it’s said you can play several seconds of audio, but I wanted to make this plugin unequivocally just for exposing bits of TONE and revealing no actual music.

If that works, I ought to be able to follow up with other tracks where I can play the whole song unmuted because react channels are allowed to play ’em and the record company simply claims the revenue. On that note if anyone has thoughts about what they’d like to see and hear, I’m taking requests. No limits, because now I can do a whole Evergreens video and then toss this plugin on that part of the video and export again, giving me an immediate replacement if it turns out the song’s owner does not want the song heard as a song…

Meanwhile, I’ll get back to work on the next batch of plugins, things are going to start to get lively again pretty soon :)

download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
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.
VCV Rack module

Date April 21, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Chris

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