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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.

Dubly3

TL;DW: Dubly3 refines and transforms the Dubly sound.

Dubly3 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Effects’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Dubly3.zip(506k) standalone(AU, VST2)

So here’s where the Dubly stuff suddenly gets more useful for a lot of people.

This whole time, Dubly’s been using a transfer function called uLaw encoding to take the place of ‘compression’, because it gets to roughly the same 2:1 ratio that the famous noise reduction system liked to use. And this is all well and good… but transfer function modifications without time constants aren’t compression. They’re distortion. And so all the versions of Dubly have used brightened but distorted audio to encode and decode with. And this is fine for a number of reasons (one of them being, Dubly is a Spinal Tap joke and not an attempt to pirate still very defended IP) up until ToTape7 came out, and people started trying to use it for all manner of things.

Dubly and Dubly2 are the right basic sort of thing, but gritty and alias-y, and I vowed I’d work on it in order to develop a ToTape8 that performed better, ideally with a heck of a lot less aliasing but still zero latency and with the immediacy Airwindows ToTape has been known for. And so, towards that goal, Dubly3 is here.

What’s changed? A bunch of things. Notably, Dubly3 uses real compression: but not in any sense a clone of other gear. Instead, it’s a new trick I might look into further: it’s applying a compression based not on the input signal, but the uLaw version of the input signal, so the ‘DNA’ of original Dubly is very much still in there. But the time constants totally alter the texture of how Dubly3 behaves. It acts a lot more like a real compressor, as in a sense it is one, just one that’s following an unusual form of signal (much like having the compression try to follow a tube-drive style control signal).

That applies to both encode and decode. On top of that, Dubly3 does adopt the classic trick of clipping the compressed highs slightly, which also helps it sound authentic. But beyond that, Dubly3 reinvents the controls in a way that I think will be very helpful, and in a way that lets the upcoming ToTape8 add some asked-for features.

Instead of direct control over amounts of encode, decode, and their crossover frequencies, Dubly3 boils it down to input and output gains (labeled as such, not ‘tape drive’) and tilt and shape controls, and that’s how you dial it in. What’s tilt? At 0.5 tilt is ‘neutral’, but as you boost it, you’re adding encode and cutting decode. The similarity to a tilt EQ is obvious. More tilt means more bright, and if you cut it below 0.5 you’re leaving decode fully engaged but reducing encode, causing it still to be the Dubly sound, but darker.

Shape is even more interesting. Where Tilt balances the encode and decode levels against each other, Shape balances the crossover frequencies against each other… and lets you push them to unreasonable extremes, in case it gives you usefully weird sounds to play with. For real sounds you’ll be keeping it a lot nearer 0.5 where it defaults to. What happens is this: if you increase Shape, you’re encoding at lower frequencies, but decoding at higher. That means the brightness factor stays roughly the same, but the mids get more intense, more compressed, more lively. You’ll hear it in the chug of guitars and in the energy of percussion, but it’s not purely a treble hype: it’s reshaping the whole midrange where Dubly crosses it over to treble. Then, when you cut Shape, you’re encoding at higher frequencies but decoding more in lower frequencies… and since decoding is more subtractive, and since Dubly3 is a compressy thing, you’re darkening and expanding the mids instead.

Using these controls, you can use Dubly3 to start dialing in a number of classic record sounds, particular albums where perhaps the hardware noise reduction of the day had drifted and produced a distinctive sound. And then, once ToTape8 is done, you can apply it to the additional controls of ToTape, adding refinements in bias and using the classic ToTape algorithm to make a plugin you can hit like it was a real tape machine.

Which real tape machine? ANY real tape machine, pretty much. If you can identify the sound (things like where the head bump sits, how overbiased or underbiased the sound is, whether it’s a brighter or darker sound, more saturated and hyped in the mids or cleaner and more dark and studio-y… at that point it ought to be possible to decode the classic sounds and either mimic them, or learn from them and use the plugin to make the choices that work for YOUR mix and your sound.

It starts with Dubly3, and once I’ve got ToTape8 done, you’ll have everything ToTape7 has, except with this Dubly instead of the previous, and thanks to the use of two fewer tone controls, ToTape8 will also have an Input control at the top and an Output control at the bottom, to make the gain staging simpler for people to deal with. And it will still fit in Airwindows Consolidated. But for now, play with Dubly3 and see if that works better for ya than Dubly2 did. And Dubly2 is still supported and available because it’s an entirely different sound and you should still have it in case you can use it.

Next, a ToTape8, but in weeks rather than another couple years. And then… more work on ConsoleX :)

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.

Console9

TL;DW: Console9 is just the summing from ConsoleX.

Console9 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Consoles’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Console9.zip(993k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Here we have the first part of ConsoleX that can come out and be put into use, just as it will be used in ConsoleX.

You see, the upcoming Console system is the big one with all the EQs and multiple dynamics paths and StoneFire built in, and it’s got so much going on it requires the development of an elaborate GUI (for which a lot of work has already been done). But the guts of the system remains Airwindows Console and that gets its own development. Console is the system by which all the sound sources get pre-distorted and then un-distorted on the buss after summing, for a sound that (in theory) doesn’t touch the tones of any individual mix element, but alters the spaces between the sounds.

So when using Console (or any version like Console9 that’s strict about this) you should expect to hear exactly the same sounds you originally had, but they’ll sit differently. They’ll make up a more convincing space, in a subtle way that shouldn’t mess with your sounds, that will just make it easier to make those sounds gel into a mix that feels good.

The algorithms for Console9 (as used in ConsoleX) are new, but they came about through work I did revising Console6. It turns out there’s a resource called ‘Herbie’ that helps you re-hack algorithms to work better in floating point. That’s immediately of interest to me, as I’m fascinated by the ways our simple digital math erodes and harms the tone of our sounds… I’ve already done a lot of work on word length and dithering, and I already advocate double precision processing over the use of simple floats. But it turns out algorithms that don’t play right by Herbie can have special (bad) qualities, and the original Console6 plugins were guilty of this.

What would happen is there’d be a big spike of inaccuracy as the calculations swept by zero. And that’s as may be, but we’re dealing with audio: especially with low frequencies, the sound is constantly sweeping through zero! It’s digital math reinventing how to make crossover distortion as found in class AB amplifiers. Herbie exists to re-design such algorithms so they sweep through zero (or wherever else there’s an issue) perfectly. It’ll also estimate how much extra CPU it’ll take: sometimes it’ll do a silly approximation and say ‘oh hey, if you just replace all the outputs with 0 you still have X much accuracy but the code runs much quicker!’

There were optimizations for Console6, and the version in Consolidated (and in the downloadable plugin collections) is the new version. The download from when Console6 first came out, remains the same for historical purposes and so you can get a hold of exactly how it was when it came out (this is true for pretty much all Airwindows plugins: use the collections or Consolidated to have the recentest versions).

But it turned out there was also a set of distort/undistort curves available from using the same type of math as in Console6, the Herbie-optimized sort, except scaling things by the golden ratio (of course it had to be the golden ratio, that thing pops up all over the place) and this produced a new sound for Console. It’s got more headroom than any previous Console system, while also having some of the raw intensity of Console6 (which, even fixed, might be a little too raucous and garagey for most purposes). It’s got a real good sense of transparency but it strongly brings that Console vibe to the spaces between the notes. And it’s the summing buss that is going into ConsoleX.

The reason I say it’s also the part that will be used IN ConsoleX, is because I’m adopting some Chris Lord-Alge-isms in ConsoleX. My take on how sends and verbs and things should be handled in ConsoleX is to use them kind of like Console8 uses submixes: you’ll be sending stuff from channels to other channels that have the verbs on them.

The difference is, when you do that you put Console9Buss at the top of the sent-to channel… put in your verb or whatever, all wet… and then run the result through ANOTHER instance of ConsoleXChannel, and sum that. So, the idea is ‘decode and then recode, except you get literally all the processing from any ConsoleXChannel, all over again, on the verb or delay returns’. And then you adjust those the same way you’d adjust any other channel: they just come in on even more channels, and all the same features apply. And so, Console9Buss is your ‘decode’ for making further verb stuff happen, because you don’t need to run the full ConsoleXBuss to do that.

There’s still loads of work to get ConsoleX done, plus I’m having another crack at ToTape to address the eager aliasing that came out of Dubly2. Unlike that weird beast, Console9 is very clean and simple so you can oversample it to the moon if you wanted to: I will not be doing that, I’ll be running it at 96k and it will be fine. There is a reason people got an ‘analog immediacy’ hit off ToTape7: aliasing suppression is a tradeoff between artifact minimization and overprocessing tone-flattening, and in ToTape you’re hearing one extreme. I’m still going to see whether I can have best of both worlds but I’m not taking away the ToTape7 people enjoyed. And when ConsoleX comes out, there’ll be a dedicated ‘only the tone controls’ plugin (for use pre-EQing stuff to a channel instance of ToTape, which is a black art of its own) and so you’d be able to run the EQs and then oversample the summing buss to the moon if that pleases you, using Console9 to stand in for the built-in versions that are part of ConsoleX.

For now, I will continue to get over my recent bout of COVID (I’m testing negative, have just lost a lot of energy so be patient), will continue working through the backlog of plugins that can come out, and I’ll talk to ya later :)

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.

Isolator3

TL;DW: Isolator3 is Isolator2, but on one slider, with a band-narrower control.

Isolator3 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Filter’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Isolator3.zip(576k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Isolator3 is basically a request. I got asked for an isolator filter ‘on one knob’, which I’ve seen around but I’ve not used myself. Basically it means middle is full-range, to the left you’re lowpassing and to the right you’re highpassing.

Turns out you need to run it as two filters because it’s impossible to ‘switch’ the biquads inside it, from one role to the other. So you constantly run two filters one of which you can’t hear the effect of.

Except then there’s the Q control, which does not actually control the Q of the filters. They’re still steep, stacked-up filters without special resonances of their own. But when you turn up the Q slider, the cutoffs approach each other, turn into something like a bandpass on the fly. Full up, it should act a little like a resonance. To go back to full range, turn Q back down to zero and Iso to 0.5 (the middle).

Lastly, this is lots and lots of filter stages all of which are smoothed for better modulation… but it’s made of biquad filters, which don’t like being modulated, and then it’s two types of filter run into each other. I’ve put in safety clipping because it turns out that if you yank the control around real crazy, it’s easy to get Isolator to glitch out. The glitches aren’t always useful sounding but now and then it emits really weird synthetic burps and frills and so I’ve just made sure it can’t blow up the output too bad, and then left it to its own devices. So, use Isolator3 with smooth intentional motions for traditional effects, yank it around madly if you want it to spit digits and sparks at you, have fun is the most important instruction.

Hope it works as I got COVID returning from my vacation and it is heavily still with me so I’ve lost a bunch of steps. Not ideas, it’s just that this is a good time for me to work through the backlog a bit. May or may not livestream in the upcoming week and if I do I won’t be talking for eight hours at a stretch: probably won’t need to go to the hospital but will check with a doctor. I’m in my space, Chris’s ‘hunting for ideas mountaintop’ and it’s no biggie for me to hole up for a few weeks. See ya again next week with something else from the backlog! :)

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.

ToTape7

TL;DW: ToTape7 is Airwindows tape emulation with Bias and Dubly.

ToTape7 in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Tape’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
ToTape7.zip(568k)

So about that simplification of ToTape? Nah. But… set everything to the middle and you can ignore all the many controls.

ToTape7 not only upgrades pretty much every single thing about ToTape, but it brings new functionality beyond any previous version (even when they’re good) and it lets you go completely bonkers tailoring signature new sounds however you like them. This is the ToTape for people who wanted all the controls, and more. It’s the ToTape for salvaging any sort of audio no matter how DAW-like it is… and it’s the ToTape that can be stripped right down to serve as its own FromTape, anytime you like, or if you’re trying to run lots of channels of it because you want to tape all the things and then mix them down also to tape. Which it’s great at, by the way, as it soaks up loudness super well and even has a ClipOnly2 built in so it can serve, standalone, as your ultimate loudness clipper.

ToTape7 has exactly as many controls as you can fit in Airwindows Consolidated, which means it’ll also run in VCV Rack. That means there are some possible controls it skips, and exactly one control that’s dual-ganged with two things riding on one single knob. It’s just a different knob this time: used to be dual-ganged on the knob marked Soften. The controls from top to bottom operate Dubly Encode, Drive, Flutter, Bias, Head Bump, and Dubly Decode. Again, set everything to the middle for ‘normal’, but you can go way past normal if you want.

Dubly Encode (not the same thing but the same concept as a famous noise reduction system) applies a brightened and compressed boost to the audio pre-tape, with the amount governed by Amt and the highs cutoff by Freq. (Dubly Decode is exactly the same, except it simply subtracts the effect it makes: this is the secret Seventies tape sound, especially when you tune the Dublies to produce effects). Match them to get mostly ‘normal’ sound, mismatch them for effect: mind that you don’t boost Decode Amt too much or it will produce sort of anti-crunch sound, going past ‘cancellation’ to obvious distortion. (or do it if you feel like it, I’m not your boss)

Tape Drive is your boost (or pad). 0.5 is unity gain. Boost if you want lots of tape drive, or to loudenate. You should have a good ability to do this and make it sound the way you want. Since Dubly was added, it’s even better at allowing for clean gain here, as Dubly tends to suppress harmonics from distortion.

Flutter is like Flutter2, but is NOT exactly the same. It’s updated, even since Flutter2, for the purpose of letting the ‘3D tape’ emulation (letting tape bend laterally as well as stretch) be more accurate. It’s also toned down a bit so 0.5 gives you a reasonable, real-world flutter effect. The two channels will use their randomness to try and chase each other a little, much like how TPDFWide does the same thing to be LESS correlated. Turns out with default settings this is really, really good at getting a spacious tape realism without letting the imaging go too weird. You can also bypass the whole thing by setting Flutter to zero: if you’re running at low sample rate, consider doing that if you’re running lots of ToTape and losing the extreme highs. I might not run Flutter on multitracks, just the buss.

Bias is usually set to slight overbiasing. It’s like GoldenSlew, but it’s simplified and it’s being run between Dubly encode and decode, so it’s acting differently from the standalone GoldenSlew. Underbiasing also works but is a different algorithm that’s probably not going to be people’s first choice, but you can do it. Slight overbiasing is your best weapon against unpleasant tizzy highs.

Head Bump is like DubSub2, but it too is updated even more to get more out of ToTape7. There’s a highpass built in at 0.5 setting that balances the bump against the rest of the audio, making it so if you stack up the plugin it doesn’t get too messy, modeled after references of real tape machines doing multiple generations. Anywhere you set the head bump frequency should get reasonable results with Head Bump at 0.5. If you pull it back OR boost it, you begin to drop the highpass as you do that, meaning it will either crossfade over to the original digital bass (with extended subs) as you reduce the bump, or it’ll start adding even more exaggerated bump to the original bass as you crank. So, it’s a special voicing for doing all of the things, with 0.5 as the ‘peak realism’ and most restrictive setting. Ouside that, just pick whether you want less ‘tape bass’, or ‘mega bass’ by combining the source and the bump.

Said bump still does the thing from DubSub2 where it’s also giving a mild notch at double the frequency, which is characteristic of pretty much all real tape machines. You get to pick the frequency, because why would you be tied to a given machine when they’re all different frequencies already, and when the heart of the effect is not getting the frequency right, but the unusual Airwindows head bump algorithm that’ll work just fine however you voice it?

And Dubly Decode helps you get even smoother, more compressed sound out of the tape saturation, and lets you dial it in by both amount and frequency. Be aware that it’s a really gentle treble-slope, so making subtle changes to frequency will have an effect on the character of the sound but won’t produce wild effects. Basically, if Dubly mostly balances but Enc is crossing over lower than Dec, there will be a sort of lower midrange hype that comes through: if Dec is lower than Enc, it’s going to be drying up that energy and making it a bit tighter. They’re supposed to cancel out, but half the reason classic records all sound different from each other is that this system in real life required a lot of fussy tuning, and some people set it up by ear and ended up with distinct tone qualities for their studios when they did. It’s not so much ‘EQ’ qualities as texture. Experiment with it to see if you have preferences.

And that’s ToTape7! Ought to hold people for a while, and be a decent upgrade from ToTape6, even though people really like that one (and it’s still there so you can still have it anytime you want).

I’m taking a couple weeks to just rest up, during which there won’t be plugins or livestreams, but I’ll be back early in September, to resume work on ConsoleX. That’s the next thing I’ll be working toward, and I think it’s going to be exciting. Enjoy ToTape7 and see ya in September :)

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.

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