Airwindows

CrunchCoat

TL;DW: CrunchCoat is a cursed retro digital reverb!

CrunchCoat in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
CrunchCoat.zip(561k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Such was the reaction of my livestream as this one came to life. Cursed retro digital is such an evocative term, isn’t it? Gives you an idea of what you’re in store for.

This is no simple bitcrusher. What it’s doing, is taking the existing ClearCoat reverb, a bright-ambiences reverb, into unknown territory through relentless abuse of undersampling. This is a first for me: rather than use undersampling to cleanly deliver appropriate reverb sounds whether at 2x or 4x sample rates, this time we’re just running with that functionality and allowing you to crunch the sample rate down to about 40 hertz, if you like.

What happens to the waveform when you only get a ‘sample’ every now and then? In this case, the plugin interpolates so it’s not all square-wavey. Good news and/or bad news: it’s not doing a clever interpolation. It’s basically drawing straight lines between the points. So, depending on what the reverb’s doing, you can get fairly soft waves… or pointy spikey nastiness. This, combined with the primitive input not-filtering, means you get a LOT of color and texture, but not the texture it was when it started. Instead… well, ‘cursed retro digital’ sums it up. Also, you can wildly pitch-swoop the entire reverb and crank up the regeneration to infinite sustain (or cut it out completely, even more than ClearCoat), which I’m sure nobody is going to use for evil at all.

This will lead to great new things for all my reverbs going forward. But this specific reverb is for only certain people, and you know who you are. Have fun!

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 26, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Distance3

TL;DW: Distance3 combines the best parts of Distance and Discontinuity.

Distance3 in Airwindows Consolidated(CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
Distance3.zip(509k) standalone(AU, VST2)

By request from my livestreams, let’s jump right back into the Discontinuity thing, but this time combined with a much older plugin: the original Distance!

This is a kind of plugin meant to darken the sound and make stuff sound really far away. Originally, I was thinking something that could take all the highs out and accentuate rumble, like turning a sound into the thunder version of itself. And so the first Distance worked basically as an EQ: three stacked stages of processing that combined to make stuff huge, kind of like my monitoring plugin SubsOnly.

Thing is, that doesn’t have any nonlinearities to speak of in it, not the kind that happen in the real world over that much air. And at the time I was working on a Console version called Atmosphere, and thought I had a handle on bringing in that kind of nonlinearity. And so the next one was Distance2… but it lost some of the purity and depth of Distance, but didn’t sound quite the way I wanted. It was the best I could do at the time, and is still there if you’re interested in different sorts of darken/distort.

And then I brought in Discontinuity and was working on it in livestreams and someone mentioned, what if it was part of Distance? And the interesting thing is that Discontinuity also gets its sound from… three stages of processing, stacked. (as in, not side-by-side but in series, one after the other.)

Anytime you look at a situation like that, you can think to yourself: well, I could run these two plugins on after the other, but what if I interleaved the stages? One of Distance, one of Discontinuity, another Distance, another Discontinuity, and so on? Surely that would combine the effects in a more interesting way, merge them into a new distinct thing as they work on each other in turn?

And so here is Distance3. It goes right back to the tone quality of Distance, but it has all of the ‘loud vibe’ from Discontinuity, and outperforms either of them if you need the synthesis of both. There’s probably lots of uses for this and my hope is that it’ll be very easy to find those uses: if a thing has to be convincingly far away and you’ve already got reverb and ambience taken care of, Distance3 should immediately get you there in the best possible way.

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 19, 2024
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

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 34 Comments

Chris

CrunchCoat

Distance3

Discontinuity

Airwindows Consolidated

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