The pages explaining the Airwindows ITB mixing system have mostly centered themselves on the backbone plugins- Console, BussColors2 to extend it, and Desk2 for additional analog behavior, or as a warmer/saturator for other sample rates like 96K.

However, there are many other plugins- modules, you could say- covering a wide range of purposes. Here's a brief summary, that links to the original product pages written for each plugin, and explains what you might do with them. Take your time reading it, because there's an awful lot here. This is the grand overview of Airwindows-land that people have been asking for.

One of the most popular types of plugin out there has been the tape simulator, and Airwindows has done several variations on this theme and related themes. The most recent ones have been ToVinyl and ToTape2, both meant to work directly as part of the larger modular system. ToVinyl's specialized, handling the narrowing of stereo bass, and acceleration limiting. It's a stereo plugin that goes on the 2-buss. ToTape is my Studer 810 clone, that can be used on the 2-buss or on channels, or even in mastering- it's that accurate to the real hardware.

Older plugins in this genre include a perennial favorite that's sort of a 'greatest hit': Iron Oxide 2. The difference between this and ToTape2 is that Iron Oxide 2 goes a lot farther to blur and fatten the sound, to the point that it shouldn't go on the 2-buss (at least in my opinion). It's better restricted to elements that don't need to retain clarity, or have little but clarity to them- drums, beats, MIDI instruments. There's a delay that uses the same techniques, Tape Delay, which also lets you alter regeneration in other ways, making the feedback duller or brighter as it goes on.

There are two different 'vacuum tube' plugins, not counting the Tube setting in BussColors2, but they serve different purposes and were written years apart. Hard Vacuum came first, and works like an internal tube stage in a circuit- it applies a very soft saturation, but lets you alter that in unusual ways. A Warmth control makes the saturation asymmetrical (producing second harmonic) and an Aura control, intended to make the output of 'squarewave' signals act more trapezoidal, brings a striking and unusual tubey quality. Hard Vacuum is tonally subtle and shouldn't be considered a primary Airwindows module- it's for if you test out the 'warmth' and 'aura' controls and find specific things you need them on, much like one would buy a particular guitar stompbox to precondition a guitar sound just right before hitting the amp.

The other 'vacuum tube' plugin is called Single-Ended Triode and it does three things, each of which are one-trick-pony stunts. The single-ended triode section imposes a very soft and gentle asymmetrical distortion (quite unlike normal overdrives and saturations) that loads the signal up with second harmonic, with virtually no other artifacts. It'd make an interesting 'audiophile' plugin, that's how pure it is apart from the second harmonic. The other two controls apply Class AB and Class B distortion, respectively. Class B is pretty gritty- it's basically sharp breaks at the zero crossing, and will make sounds cold and clinical. Class AB is more interesting- still operating at the zero crossing, it has softer transitions. What that'll do is impart grit and grind to things- if you're not sure where that would fit, try distorted guitars, Hammond B3s, and so on, and you'll soon get the idea. It's a textural thing that can't really be produced with normal distortion, which is why it's a special module on its own.

Since we're talking about second harmonic, and unusual modules, this is a good time to bring up Pafnuty. This is none other than an elaborate Chebyshev harmonic generator- rather than directly distorting the signal, it uses Chebyshev equations to synthesize and apply harmonics. These aren't based on fixed frequency ranges, they're relative to what the input is, meaning that like FM synthesis they scale up and down depending on what note's being played, and how. There's a provision for reversing this extremely strange effect, so you can 'search for' negative qualities in the sound, and then 'subtract' what you found. It's a weird, weird module, but powerful- some of the Airwindows modules are like that, tough to explain. Pafnuty is truly a 'mad scientist tool', that could also have a place in presets or templates, where you have lots of time to finetune a detailed channel strip that'll be reused over and over.

There are five major Airwindows compressors- not counting some early or experimental ones, and not counting freebies. That's because each are meant for a specific purpose. Yes, it's still a large number of 'the same plugin', but compressors are unusually distinct in behavior. ButterComp is the 'gentle' compressor, and one of the most sophisticated. It operates interleaved compressors for both halves of the signal polarity, meaning that it holds onto 'uncompressed' sound the most determinedly. It's for bringing up the fullness of sounds while having no apparent compression happening, and is the go-to compressor for mastering or natural-sounding 2-buss use. By contrast, Pop is meant as the crazy, in-your-face compressor, designed for aggressive vocal compression, but usable on many other sources, even the 2-buss if you want it to act unnatural and obvious in an exciting way. The whole internal structures of these plugins operate totally differently, it's not just different presets on the same basic algorithm- all the algorithms are strikingly different in behavior. VariMu is still another algorithm, this one landing between the two previous in character, with behavior akin to the classic Fairchild 670 and very distinctive reactions as its 'sweet spot' is hit- and for the craziest algorithm prize, you'd have to go with Broadcast, designed to work like radio station broadcast processing, with a series of compressors and phase rotators to convert everything to high-gloss audio polish. It beats all the others for podcasting/radio duties, but can also gloss up tracks in mixes, and even offers a dry/wet control to blend compressed and phase rotated signal with the original signal- for unusual parallel compression effects with intentional phase anomalies. Lastly, there's Logical, an older but popular plugin, designed to mimic an SSL buss compressor- which is likely to eventually see a free revamp using the lessons learned in recenter years.

Mastering isn't simply about blasting stuff to unthinkable volumes- but my cats have to eat, and preferably not eat ME, so Airwindows has released more than one plugin dedicated to the cause of being louder than anything. The most notable plugin for that purpose is of course NC-17, your ticket to obscenely loud and dirty. The dirty part should be specified- this was a response to claims made by a rival product that did extensive audio processing to try and 'sneak in' sound energy anywhere possible, which broke up aggressively when overwhelmed. NC-17 was designed to be overwhelmed. The idea was, if you were already going to push things so hard that they'd distort, how could you rearrange the audio content so that the least energy was lost? It handles more pressure than anything, but it's not clean. For that, you'd want less gain, and you'd be looking at ADClip (and 3Dclip, the more modern-toned version). ADClip catches overs and clips them, but handles the onset and departure from clipping in a special way- unclipped data isn't 'soft clipped', but the stuff that does clip gets smoothed out. One result is that you don't get high-frequency glare from trebly content clipping, as you would with even analog methods, because glare comes from many peaks being clipped to exactly the same point, and ADClip breaks that up and causes the peaks to be more scattered, tricking the ear. Another significant mastering tool is boutique dither, and Ditherbox provides incredible options there- and lastly, two plugins address 'remove unwanted audio' issues at a mastering level. De-ess is, obviously, a de-esser, but it's unusually good at not triggering on any content other than the esses, and it's flexible about what to do with them. Soft Gate is designed to first roll off, then suppress hiss, and is intended for two purposes- batch processing of sampler instrument content (cleaning up decay tails) and muting background noise without obviously gating it. The combination of roll-off and attentuation lets a nice balance be struck between noise, and obvious gating.

Tone altering plugins are sometimes indispensable, but you wouldn't automatically put them on every track. There have been a few particularly significant ones to keep an eye on, listed here. Energy is an alternate form of equalization, in practice. It's fixed-band, for boosts, and works on a strange algorithm that causes its effects to be more like aural exciting than simple equalization- its bands are described in guitar terms, and it's well named, bringing a sense of energy beyond simple EQ. Some don't like this one because it's too different from 'correct' EQ, but for that very reason it's worth a look. DubSub has a set of features specifically for working with basses- it can shape a bass tone, redesign things like kicks, and generate subs and octave-divided effects. Then there's ResEQ, which is even more unusual. ResEQ uses a technique for emulating a tightly resonant but analog filter, in convolution form- times eight. You can combine the effect with dry, but the real purpose of it is to take a background part (your sixth heavy guitar, for instance) and boil it down to the fewest elements, musically. Placing all the resonant peaks in appropriate places gives a 'cartoon version' of the sound that has the same effect, but stays completely out of the way of adjacent tracks. It really works, though it's a black art getting the resonances assigned correctly. It's most useful for mixers looking at lots and lots of tracks- think of it as eight parked wahs with somewhat wider tuneability. Also on the guitar side of things is the utility plugin Cabs. Designed to improve the direct tone of Vox Amplugs, the current version is ideally suited to doctoring any guitar tone, letting you blend in your choice of six cabinet models with other controls for altering/breaking up highs and reinforcing lows. Then in a whole other genre, there's ESP, which might be better termed 'bit glitter'. Intended as an EMU-SP1200 clone, it turned out not so much a clone as a tool for accomplishing the same things. It throws on a softer, more vintage style of reduced bit depth and sampling rate, causing sounds to be shallower and more opaque. This moves them in the mix, opening up space where other elements can live- the ESP stuff is more easily heard past, so the rhythm and beats can be loud and move the body while the mind focusses on other elements. That's why it works as well as it does. Lastly, the plugin Cojones is hard to describe, because it looks for raggedness and irregularity in the sound (such as in a vocal) and highlights or minimizes that, bringing out or suppressing the raspy bluesy qualities. It's a strange little effect, but one that's not easily available, so if tweaking such qualities seems like it'd be relevant to your work it's worth auditioning.

There are specific Airwindows options for working with ambience and the space in the mix. The most obvious is AllSpace, which is Airwindows' latest algorithmic reverb. Allspace has a range of adjustment that boggles the mind, and it's loaded with tricks for maximizing reverb spatiality in a music mix. There's also Fireworks Reverbs, an AIFF convolution impulse library suited to sound design and post-production, or to fans of much darker spaces. FarSpace includes NearSpace and was the predecessor to AllSpace- where AllSpace is dual-mono, FarSpace and NearSpace are stereo, more like traditional digital reverbs. Then, to adjust other types of mix space, there's StereoFX which lets you hype side-channel information (best on ambience and reverb) and also offers an early form of ToVinyl's stereo-bass narrower (less effective, but in some ways a subtler effect) plus a technique called Center Squish. What this does is apply a good-sounding saturation to mid channel only, which has the effect of 'squeezing' down the center of the stereo field but allowing it to bloom to the sides. It's an alternative to hyping the sides that will be preferable for some sources, for instance drum room. StereoFX is a diehard Airwindows favorite, that still has a place even after the creation of ToVinyl, because it's for changing around the stereo image in more aggressive ways.

In the category of utility plugins, we have two convenience plugs and one special-order that's become a product. Golem is one of the convenience plugs, and its purpose in life is to take a stereo track that's made of two guitar cabinet mics, and sum them with timing adjustments. There's nothing here you can't do with sample delays and panpots, though you'd have to use a sample delay with subsample interpolation- which mine is- but Golem simply makes it easier and faster to get there. It's got a selector that lets you flip phase (which you'd also be able to do in the regular DAW) for another perspective on how things are summing and canceling. Golem is very convenient. Along the same lines, ADT is like that only for fixed-tap delay comb filtering, but with a difference. It's easy to go between normal and out-of-phase summing (giving two ways to find a sound- go for the sound, or go for bad aspects and then cancel them) and it's also possible to treat the plugin like a box that can be overdriven, which further livens up the sound. The delay taps are interpolated, allowing for exact tuning of the voicing. If you need to bring out more dimensionality and character in a sound, it's worth looking at this utility. Finally, Gatelope was developed for one purpose- throwing an envelope filter on tom-tom mics so they'd stop picking up cymbal overheads after their initial attacks. It does that (not unlike the later SoftGate, but voiced for instruments, not mastering) but it also has another trick- sweeping a highpass up in similar fashion, which is incredibly effective at drying up kickdrum rumble.

Airwindows has put a lot of effort into making sampler instruments, possibly too much: there are people who do nothing but that, after all. But, as usual with Airwindows, there's a twist bringing original concepts to the field. Drums is the result. You can hear the sounds, but the real interest here is in sequencing grooves using velocity levels. The Drums EXS24 instruments are set up so that note timing is affected by velocity. Not randomness, velocity. This doesn't help you set up a lazy backbeat (you'd still need to do that in your MIDI sequencing) but what it does do is hesitate grace notes, and alter the whole feel of dynamic playing, specifically when sequenced or quantized. This can help a groove come together way faster- you can pretty much do anything and it'll sound like it was a good idea, intentional. You get many different sounds and can listen to every kit and instrument on the Drums page, and examples of how the sequencing part works- if there was ever an Airwindows 'secret weapon', these drums would qualify.

And that sums up all the additional modules and products. Thanks for taking the time to read this far, and I hope it's been rendered less confusing even though there's a lot to learn about. Nobody uses all these things all the time- it's just about having specific modules available for specific tasks.

-Chris