Tags

things about the many Airwindows plugins

For your reference, Airwindows has tags assigned to the plugins, that describe things about them. If you’ve got questions like ‘does this plugin have ultrasonic filtering for use with the full Console system’ or ‘does this plugin generate aliasing’, the answer’s probably in how the plugin is tagged. I’ve done my best to tag all the plugins accurately.

Nonlinear

These plugins add nonlinearities to the signal, which matters if you’re trying to avoid aliasing or filter out ultrasonic sounds that could cause aliasing. This doesn’t mean aliasing will always be obvious: if you have a lower frequency, and a soft saturation, it’ll produce harmonics one at a time, not all at once: those only cause aliasing when the harmonic it makes is actually above the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate) and bauncing back down again.

Ultrasonic Filtering

This means plugins that specifically do Airwindows ultrasonic filtering for use at high sample rates: they apply a simple biquad filter at 20K, higher, or even lower to taste. This is to suppress aliasing and intermodulation distortion across the whole mix, but do it gently. The Airwindows idea on this is that you should apply the filtering in many stages, just as nonlinearity builds up across many stages, and that’s how you get convincingly analog-like sounds.

Undersampling

These plugins handle higher sample rates by running their heavy processing only every few samples as needed, and sort of connect the dots between those points. That makes them easier to run at high sample rates, and lets them deliver a smoother, more consistent tone.

Zero Latency

These plugins declare exactly ZERO samples of latency. If you build mixes and track into them, you might want to be sure your plugins aren’t adding any latency to your DAW, and these are all absolutely ‘live’, sample for sample, no delay to compensate.

GetSampleRate

These plugins adjust themselves in some way to the DAW’s sample rate. There are some kinds of plugins that don’t have to, and some of the older plugins aren’t designed to: the ones with this tag are most likely making the effort. This does not mean they will sound exactly the same at 96k as they would at 44.1k: use your judgement. But if GetSampleRate is there, it’s more likely that the plugin is trying to sound the same at all sample rates.