PurestGain
TL;DW: High-res noise shaped gain, with smoothed fader.
Marking the 200th plugin in Airwindows’ ‘AU’ category (not perfectly accurate, but yay anyhow) is PurestGain, in VST-enabled form!
What’s to explain? It’s a gain utility. :D
No, seriously, that’s what it is. Here’s why some folks are a fan of this plugin anyway, even though every DAW has this as a utility plugin, plus the DAW faders built in.
Firstly, gain is processing. When you apply even a simple gain change, it expands the word length of your digital audio out to arbitrary size. PurestGain comes from a set of plugins I did to experiment with the extremes of digital audio accuracy. You might think digital audio is automatically accurate, but that’s far from the truth. We hear degradation in the resolution domain as flatness, cardboardy-ness, and it’s cumulative. I don’t think anybody can hear the difference between PurestGain and a DAW utility gain plugin, when just a single plugin is in the signal path… but it’s cumulative.
Also, you can’t be sure that a gain plugin is truly minimalist. If a plugin takes in floating-point audio of great quietness, and multiplies it by 1.0… that’s a math operation that can force the result into the same floating-point ‘level of resolution’ as the 1.0. Floating-point is treacherous, and the damage done is still very subtle but again is cumulative.
PurestGain takes the input audio and does the gain processing at ‘long double’ resolution. It then noise shapes the result back into the DAW audio buss, whether that’s a 32 bit buss for normal VST and AU, or a double-precision 64 bit VST buss, if available. The result is an ultra-high-precision gain plugin that refuses to lose any audio quality. It’s the plugin equivalent of using switched attenuators with precision resistors in a mastering console, rather than potentiometers.
There’s one more trick PurestGain has up its sleeve: a second control especially for fades. The trouble with DAW faders is that they must serve two masters: they’ve got to adjust smoothly and avoid zipper noise (crackling while you move the control, most clearly audible if you get a low-frequency sine wave going and then manipulate the control) but they’ve also got to snap instantly to a position if asked. The second slider in PurestGain runs in series with the dB gain control, but it functions very differently. One way to resist zipper noise is to have the gain smoothly ramp between volume settings, and that second control is designed for human-performed gain rides. Map the fader on a control surface to it, do your active mixing, and PurestGain will smooth every fader motion until it’s as fluid as any real-world analog console: try it with sinewaves and see how flawless the result can be.
That’s a surprising amount to say about a gain plugin, but that’s Airwindows for you :)
PurestGain is free. The way I get compensated for these plugins, after a decade of commercial work, is through Patreon. Why? Because it’s that important to me to put working, useful, high-quality plugins in the hands of musicians and producers. Back in the day when I got started, people were getting paid and were able to pass that along to software and hardware makers. I think people should keep getting good tools whether or not the industry’s really thriving well enough to support it, so Patreon is my choice: when enough people hear about it, the cost of me doing this work can be spread out among so many people that it’s not a burden. Also, it’s steadier than the boom-and-bust economics of releasing individual plugins for $50, which tends to force you to only release really mass-market types of plugins, and pander to only what’s most popular.
I love how You explaine these complicatet things, and I learn so much!
Wanted to mention that this is another great utility. It’s a lot easier to use than another 64bit precision fader I have been using. It may not have the same resolution, but it gets the same enough result faster. Big thanks.
Hello !
This is so Greet !
Will you make an équivalent one Day for pro Tools ?
Thank you
no install file,,, download and delete
That’s great! So far the only Gain plugin I found which doesn’t produce artifacts when using gain automation.
[…] https://www.airwindows.com/purestgain-vst/ […]
This is very useful because if you automate the faders in daw, you can’t not tune them manually anymore. I always use a bunch of gains and faders from gvst.co.uk
The design is wrong.. wither make it a fader or a gain module that is round.. of the correct size..
It would be useful if at the lowest setting the sound would be completely muted !
please add <3
Ah, thanks so much for this plugin! In reaper the Volume Envelope was so smooth for fade outs, but I moved to Studio One and the Volume Envelope was really displeasing in terms of the scale which it worked on. This plugin’s Slow Fade control acts exactly like Reaper’s so I’m back to my comfort zone!
[…] Airwindows – Purest Gain […]
Chris, is there any way you could release a -18 to +18 or similar version of this plugin? I’m trying to map this to a control surface for top of channel gainstaging and the 40 dB resolution is a bit too large.
Like to compile it for native apple silicojn please ? Or is it already ?
Another vote for a native Apple silicon version. Purest Gain is one of my most used plugins (but I recently got a new Macbook with an M1 processor).
Thank you!
Take it from the collection in https://www.airwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/SignedMacAUs.dmg or https://www.airwindows.com/wp-content/uploads/SignedMacVSTs.dmg or the collections on the MediaFire. It is native Apple Silicon, everything is. The old webpages haven’t all been updated with the new versions because there are hundreds of them, the downloads for the whole library for signed Apple Silicon will get you that and everything else :)
Chris,
Thank you so much! You made my month.
Hey I noticed you have a Patreon site. I just joined up because THANK YOU!
Dear Chris,
Hope you are well.
Cheers,
Alper
Thank you, Chris!
Only VST3 supported on Cubase 12 running on Apple Silicon mode and all Signed bundle is vst2.
Are you planning to switch them sometimes soon?
Why does PurestGain use so much CPU? More than ValhallaRoom and almost as much as SDRR2. For direct comparison, Reaper’s similar Volume Range Trim JS script uses about 1/10 to 1/20 of the CPU that PurestGain does.
If the PurestGain silder is moved from zero position to any other position to process some audio, and if then the slider is returned to zero position again, the PurestGain plugin continues to process audio (it does not change the gain but it apparently does something as I can see that it creates a workload on the CPU and the Schwa Bitter bitrate analyzer plugin demonstrates that the PurestGain plugin changes the bitrate of passing audio from 16 bits to 32 bits in the host.
Correct. PurestGain applies floating point dither which will expand the word length to the maximum available to the buss. If you do that to a previously truncated low-bit signal it’ll stop having nothing in the low bits, because it assumes it still has to apply a higher bit gain trim. For leaving such a signal untouched with 0dB gain, you want something like ClipOnly2 operated short of clipping, that’s set up to pass most values through untouched.