Airwindows

HermeTrim

TL;DW: Very Fine Adjustments.

If you’ve seen EveryTrim, you know how this works: it’s the all-possible-trims trim. +- 12dB of left, right, mid, side, and master volume. By request, and a handy little tool for all manner of stereo tweaking. It’s very nearly as clear and accurate as PurestGain, which itself is very nearly as accurate as BitShiftGain (and most people will find any of these more than acceptable, because this is uber-pickiness land and none of you are likely to be able to tell these from your standard utility gain plugin from your DAW, ten out of ten. I just know I’ve implemented mine with extra rigorousness)

Thing is, the person who’d requested this is the same one who requested Hermepass… and in this case, I fumbled it a bit. On many DAWs, and all my Mac Audio Unit stuff, you can hold option to get tiny fine adjustments. But my user with the enlightening (and accessible) requests isn’t using a host that can do that… and needed to have much, much finer adjustments on tap.

So, now Hermepass has a companion, HermeTrim. This is exactly the same as EveryTrim, only it’s 1.5 dB plus and minus. It’s more a mastering tool: make tiny little tweaks to get the master just right. EveryTrim will sound just as good, but this one’s geared towards non-mixing purposes. Hope you like it.

Also, it’s a chance to test out a different view of Airwindows for an interesting reason: I am gearing up to do a music-making stream where I dig into some of my inspirations, and try to come up with a new sound for things. When I say inspirations, I mean ‘analog gear’, and I’ve built up a studio setup that might shed some light on why I do plugins the way I do. If my plugins enter into this, it’ll be hosted in Renoise most likely: it’s been months and years getting all this up and working, and the studio mix runs through the Magneto-Dynamic Infundibulator before being sent to Twitch… where I will be live (at some point), at
https://www.twitch.tv/jinxtigr/

I will not be offended at giving live support for Airwindows stuff on such occasions, though I might be preoccupied with trying to get twin Bastl Kastles to patch into strange places on twin Xoxboxes. I did say that I was into the analog thing, and I think this preoccupation will lead to some cool-sounding techno-prog weird music. Might even play an instrument or two :)

Date November 19, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

NC-17

TL;DW: Dirty loud!

NC-17

This one needs little introduction, but it’s been a Mac-only secret so I will introduce it anyhow :)

NC-17 was designed as the loudenator-killer. It uses the same technology as ADClip’s energy redistribution stuff, but on a soft-clipper, and instead of just feeding the energy back in, it uses it to modulate a Chebyshev filter: sort of complicated, but it’s definitely one of those Airwindows things. First to use such a soft clipper as the primary loudness maximizer, and secondly to use such a weird technology after it. Why a Chebyshev? To produce second harmonic. Why do that? To feed deep bass back in despite the loudenating. Okay, so the whole idea is pretty strange.

What happens?

Firstly, the whole tone changes, whether you’re pushing loudness or not. Check that first. You might immediately dislike the result, or if you seek ‘glue’ maybe you’ll like it, or use it to replace some other ‘glue’ effect. If you’re still with NC-17 after checking that, proceed to turn it up (or mix hotter into it). You’ll find no specific ‘break point’: instead, it just gets dirtier and dirtier the harder you push. The whole texture of loudness dynamics is altered, so you get the loudness cues of distortion but with a bass foundation mere distortion won’t permit, and a continuous spectrum between ‘more or less clean’ and ‘impossibly too loud’.

This one will also handle cleaner synthesizer tones, EDM, the kinds of sounds that reveal the artifacts of other loudenators ruthlessly. With NC-17, instead you get a slight ‘grungening’ but then it refuses to break up in the normal sense, just stretches to fit. (this one might be the one you want on drum submixes, too)

There’s nothing quite like it, and now it’s Mac and PC VST, and free.

By free, I mean that it’s supported by Patreon. I’m happy to say that this month we got back up above $700 (it might not look like it but that’s what they sent me, so it counts) so there will be an extra plugin from the list (with total sales under $700). Next week we’ll have the ‘1.5 dB’ version of EveryTrim (aka HermeTrim, for a supporter who asks for stuff I can do :) ) and then I’ll find something nice off the list to include.

The next goal after that is open source (I sincerely hope I can get the LinuxVST working by then) and I expect the Patreon to get there somewhere around the New Year. Help that happen by spreading the word in an informal sort of way, about all this! Keep it appropriate, but remember: I don’t advertise, spam, or bug people, so word of mouth is the only way this works. It doesn’t work nearly as well as bugging people, but it does work in its way, and that way is my way :)

Thanks for being there for me, and I hope you enjoy NC-17!

Date November 5, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 19 Comments

EveryTrim

TL;DW: Left/Right, Mid/Side, and Master in one plugin.

EveryTrim

This one’s by request: while I was getting NC-17 ready for its big day, I thought I’d bring out a nice little utility.

EveryTrim is like PurestGain only more so: it is very simply every basic stereo trim you can have (in loudness terms, anyhow!) You get left, right, mid/side, and a master level control. It works on stereo tracks only, as mid/side is meaningless without stereo.

It’s also efficiently coded, suppresses denormal numbers, and uses the same noise shaping to the floating point buss you get in PurestGain. If you need a nice basic gain trim that does all those things (and nothing fancy: Wider is much more sophisticated, and I’ve got an idea for a still more sophisticated stereo-widener plugin that is in the works) then EveryTrim will come in handy. Begone, dull pan-pots! EveryTrim will also be simpler than using EdIsDim and MidSide just to adjust mid/side balances: while you can do that with that pair of plugins, they’re really for doing processing between them using another plugin (any plugin, doesn’t have to be M/S). With EveryTrim, you can tweak mid and side levels directly, in a more obvious way.

If you like getting handy free plugins from me… or if you like the way my plugins support back to Win7 and earlier, and MacOS 10.6.8 and earlier (while still working on current platforms), you should support my Patreon. I’m operating outside the normal plugin market by doing this, but the better it does the more I’ll be capable of, and the more fancy plugins I’ll produce. If I can stay over $700 when next month begins, I’ll pick another plugin from the bottom of the big ‘Kagi Shareware List’ in addition to putting out NC-17. If I get over $800 I’ll begin open sourcing these plugins… and I’m still working on getting the Linux build to work. It’ll be an .so file, and when those become possible I will update every plugin I’ve made VST so far, to be also LinuxVST. (if anyone’s building LinuxVSTs, I’d love some pointers!)

Date October 29, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Ensemble

TL;DW: Weird flangey little modulation effect.

Ensemble

Here’s a further experiment along the lines of Chorus and ChorusEnsemble! This one is more in the ‘unique because it’s kind of lame’ category. I like being able to do this sort of thing, because in this 2017 plugin business, everything you do has to be the hippest trendiest most popular thing or you’re basically doomed to get squished like a bug.

But hey! I’m doing a Patreon, not a ‘business’ of selling ‘hit plugins’ that are ‘the best plugins’. And therefore, nothing’s stopping me from putting out something that’s not an emulation of some famous hardware manufacturer’s property (and putting them out of business, eventually). My stuff doesn’t have to be the target market for what people have learned to want the most over the years (often for good reason). Heck, my plugins don’t have to have a reason! And most importantly, my plugins don’t have to succeed. They can exist (and be updated, etc) even if only a few people out there like them… or even if unpopular people like them.

Kind of punk, or something (stay tuned for some major DIY Airwindows stuff coming down the pike along those lines).

So, here’s Ensemble. It’s a weird, unique little sound. It was meant to be a big pad thickener with great richness and depth. Well, you can throw on a bunch of bass, but it’s more like ‘cheesey string ensemble synthesizer from the 70s’, and that by accident, so it’s not even a specific (branded!) string ensemble synthesizer from the 70s. It’s kind of an annoying sound, I think.

It’s free, so if you think you might have use for that, have fun with it! I’m off to make something else :)

Date October 16, 2017
Author Chris
Comments 11 Comments

Chris

HermeTrim

NC-17

EveryTrim

Ensemble

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

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