Airwindows

ADClip9

TL;DW: ADClip9 is the ClipOnly3 version of a loudenator/biggenator.

ADClip9.zip (507k) standalone(AU, VST2)
ADClip9 in Airwindows Consolidated (a separate project) under ‘Clipping’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

Update time! As promised, I’m putting out ClipOnly3 as an ADClip (the fundamental concepts are still ADClip, so that makes this ADClip9.)

Multiple things have changed since ADClip8, more than two years ago. The way this one works there’s no benefit to stacking up instances, so the colorful mode names like ‘Apocalypse’ go by the wayside… but more useful things in ADClip are retained or even expanded.

The three modes are Boost, Match, and ClipOnly. That means you’ve got a ‘pure loudenate’ setting, a ‘level matched’ setting with its own dB-measured control (which kept me up late at night rebuilding everything for the Nth time because it applied the correct amount, but wasn’t SHOWING the relevant dB in the interface) and a setting that’s silent until you start clipping and then shows the delta: this one can be used if you’re looking to not grind against musical content but only transient spikes.

The remaining controls are Noise and Ceiling, and technically they’re both thresholds. They are NOT measured in dB, they’re made to give subtler and subtler control as you go nearer to clipping directly at 0dB. The default settings of 0.7 and 0.75 closely match what ClipOnly3 does, which gets intersample peaks as close to 0 as I dared. If you lower Noise, what you’re doing is hitting the ‘transition to noise’ threshold sooner, without affecting the hard clip limit. If you lower Ceiling, you’re lowering the hard clip limit. You’ll probably end up moving both, but if you do it’s up to you to find your own balance point. Don’t expect it to become a ‘replace the audio with noise and clip the rest’ plugin: Silhouette might be your best bet for that, ADClip9 is still the Airwindows take on ‘softening the edges of clips with noise’ as found in ClipOnly3.

It’s been a couple years since I advanced the state of the art in ‘unreasonable loudenation’ and let people get their hands dirtier than with ClipOnly (which is always designed to be a transparent safety clipper with no controls that happens to behave perfectly.) So here you go, with a bit of luck this’ll hold people while I work on the opposite extremes of dynamics :)

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 3, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Suzan

TL;DW: Suzan is a new type of ladder filter.

Suzan.zip (507k) standalone(AU, VST2)
Suzan in Airwindows Consolidated (a separate project) under ‘Filter’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

So a funny thing happened to me on the way to Dattorro…

I was talking about the very simple state variable filter I made, Dattorro, and how it was very handy, could even substitute for a biquad filter according to Andy from Cytomic who’s an eager advocate of these (as opposed to, say, a biquad filter of direct form 1), and how I’d come up with a twist on it using only a sin() function to do the unexpected thing of subtracting the distorted bandpass element FROM the lowpass, and how that had a neat tone I liked. The twist was new, and I was excited about the possibilities.

Then, on a famously crotchety forum, a guy popped up to object… saying I shouldn’t call it not a biquad. It’s just an SVF and not direct form 1, but it’s still a biquadratic filter. You could even have literal analog filters that are biquads. I had the language wrong and he apologized for the fact that this drove him up the wall.

He’s Antoine Portes, and he’s writing an experimental book about filters called Working Class Filter Design. Biquadratic means the transfer function’s denominator is a quadratic formula, another name for second order polynomial. He’s been trying to do a really good Moog ladder, which apparently is more like fourth order, and he notes that we use Q for resonance, but there’s another part that goes 1/(2*Q) and this doesn’t have a consistent name. He’s calling it Damping, but suggests if you don’t like that you can call it Suzan for all the difference it’ll make to him.

Naturally, I was charmed though his math is over my foolish head :) and so, I got busy again, except it was with experimenting in code rather than figuring out the math of it. And I told him I’d name the filter, meant to be experiments on this fourth-order, Moog-flavored filter, ‘Suzan’ in his honor.

And this is the result. It’s a small stack of SVFs. The difference is, Antoine understandably is interested in representing these things in correct math, and doing sensible things at least some of the time. Me on the other hand… my whole deal is being able to try things that don’t exist yet. By all rights the AIs should be paying me to come up with novel things for them (maybe there’ll come a day when that’s a reality).

And so, Suzan is not two but three SVFs in series. And the SVFs are still normal, except I’m up to my Dattorro tricks but even worse. Stage A subtracts the bandpass of stage C. Stage B subtracts the bandpass of stage A… and stage C adds the bandpass of stage B. Oh, except they’re all the sines of those bandpasses, and the first two are using half the amplitude of the bandpass, the final one which adds is using the full amplitude going into the sine function.

I don’t claim justification for this or an analysis of why it works. Swept way up high it can have high frequency instability when hit with full blast white noise, which I hope doesn’t cause issues (I got it to where it was simply a boost but didn’t blow up). I find it’s a nice chunky resonant peak and even gives appropriate amounts of bass restriction when resonance is turned up… and the inappropriate use of feedback across the stages does a nice job of giving a colorful texture. One I am intimately familiar with both from records, and from owning everything from a MG-1 Concertmate to a Werkstatt to a Sub Phatty. But we’re not calling it that, because it isn’t one of those. It’s Suzan, and it’s trying to bring the right kind of mojo to my filter collection. I hope you like 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 for x86
download Pi4VSTs.zip for the Pi 4
download Pi5VSTs.zip for the Pi 5
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 April 26, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

WoodenBox

TL;DW: WoodenBox is like a miniature reverb for converting DI to acoustic.

WoodenBox.zip (583k) standalone(AU, VST2)
WoodenBox in Airwindows Consolidated (a separate project) under ‘Tone Color’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

The request was for a plugin to convert an electric guitar sound (presumably DI?) to the sound of an acoustic.

In a very abstract way, this might be the answer for that?

It’s more complicated, though, because as usual I’m exploring the larger ideas around that. The very most obvious thing to do would be ‘take the impulse response of an acoustic guitar, maybe if you’re feeling ambitious try to strip out the original electric’s tone quality or put big tone controls on or something, done’. But it might not be that simple…

What’s an acoustic guitar sound, anyway? Vibrations of wood, extra sonorities, resonances. Except those are called ‘wolf tones’ and are always bad. And anything we add along those lines will be other forms of wolf tones or resonator-guitar clangs, and will be bad. So what then?

One thing about an acoustic guitar is, it’s also a miniature room made out of wood. It vibrates, but also it reverberates. And I’ve been putting all this work into reverbs over the years… so what if I run the same grueling search for interesting, well-balanced rooms, but on miniature spaces? (never mind that I’ve only recently discovered new ways for the rooms to be better balanced!)

And so we have WoodenBox. Like the older reverbs based on ClearCoat, it has a bunch of different spaces/colors on tap. But they’re all extremely tiny compared to even a small room. There’s enough going on in them to produce a vague stereo-ish quality, but not so much that it’s a chorus effect. The tone is dense, confined: it doesn’t replace the need for a room or chamber sound. But it doctors and reshapes the tone in the way that a simple room reverb never would. And it can be used on many things beyond guitars… for instance, synth patches, or perhaps electronic drums.

I don’t know quite where this leads, but it’s an interesting start to have made. People who were asking to get smaller rooms out of me… well, you’re still getting those, but first you get stuck in a wooden box :)

Note that the Raspberry Pi version is now two versions, a Pi 4 version that’s the same as before, and a new Pi 5 version. I have not had time to check that it works as I’ve not installed Reaper on the Pi 500 I got, but the new ones are compiled on the Pi 500 just as the original Pi ones are compiled on the Pi 400. I’ll just keep adding them if Pi keeps improving them, you could already run a full Airwindows mix on the 4 :) I also don’t know if this’ll work on Asashi or anything like that, but a Pi 5 version I can supply, and this is it. Contains literally all the plugins (except Air2 and ZNotch2, and I don’t know why those didn’t work), and will contain all new plugins going forward.

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 for x86
download Pi4VSTs.zip for the Pi 4
download Pi5VSTs.zip for the Pi 5
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 April 19, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Baxandall3

TL;DW: Baxandall3 is for new tone colors.

Baxandall3.zip (518k) standalone(AU, VST2)
Baxandall3 in Airwindows Consolidated (a separate project) under ‘Filter’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)

The new Baxandall combines elements of Baxandall2, with things I’d left behind in Baxandall the original, to produce something that has tone colors which haven’t been heard before.

The catch is, it’s because people don’t go for these tone colors, or know how to get them, or what to do with them if they had them. But when has that ever stopped us? This could be your lucky day (or, a big waste of time :) )

The new Baxandall adopts the technique from its predecessor, letting you apply larger boosts and cuts, and sweeping the frequencies so you’re accentuating the extremes when you get extra aggressive. It’s based on Bessel filter slopes, but it brings back interleaving (meaning that it’ll take on odd and interesting flavors when you get aggressive with the highs, and it can only tilt so far).

But most of all, it brings back the Console processing (tweaked for maximum sonic density) and it does it in a strange, backwards way.

If you apply slight boosts, the loudness goes up… INSIDE the processing. This is the same as if you were playing with the DAW faders in a Console mix. It’s ‘Doing It Wrong’, but wrong on purpose. What happens when you do this basic, fundamental thing wrong?

Firstly, the filter becomes hypersensitive to near-flat settings. If you boost, you’re not just increasing that frequency’s level, you’re also pushing it harder into the ‘anti-saturation’ and getting that much hotter a result. The calibration’s off. It’ll be expanded, peakier, more dynamic.

If you cut, you’re pulling it back before it reaches ‘anti-saturation’, so it’s not only softer, it’s also more distorted. The dynamic punch is flattened, because it’s saturation that hasn’t been counteracted. You step really hard on the presence and punchiness of whatever’s being turned down.

There’s an input gain control so you can gain stage this, but it’s all working off Treble and Bass being either exactly 0.5, or Bad Things happen. The fact that they’re interleaved Bessel filters just means the things that happen are spread across a wider range. The tone shapings that can happen out of this are really interesting and bizarre.

Thing is, there’s a twist to the catch. Stuff being expanded and dynamic-ified when it gets louder? That behavior also makes things sound farther away. Suppressing and distorting stuff more when you turn it down? That tends to make things sound more close-up. So the most basic, fundamental operations of Baxandall3 simultaneously apply huge EQ curves, while also hiding them and making them shift spatially the opposite to what you’d expect. Normally when we push levels up we expect saturation to rise. In Console7, the first time I experimented with this mechanic, that’s what you get: more is also closer, and it’s very natural and easy to hear. (FatEQ is the same.) This? This is backwards.

I can’t even imagine what people will make of this. If you’re not being super-aggressive with it, you’ll find that it responds to the tiniest adjustments. If you are getting super-aggressive with it, let me know what works and what doesn’t because I’m still wrapping my head around how it even works. I assume there’s going to be some sort of sound that Baxandall3 fits perfectly, and I’m not entirely sure what it’d be. But in its backward spatial tomfoolery, I’m sure it’s the missing link for getting SOME kind of tone. Enjoy exploring!

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 April 12, 2026
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

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ADClip9

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Baxandall3

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