Airwindows

ToVinyl3

ToVinyl3 is a universal binary AU plugin to center and accentuate bass, such as you’d do for vinyl mastering or to make an electronic music mix more efficient over a large PA system. You can cut side-channel bass and tighten and control the extreme lows in the middle, with great-sounding Airwindows filters.

Also, ToVinyl 3 includes high frequency limiting—an invisible digital harshness control, catching anything you choose to do in a mix so that the mix intention shines through but translates to all situations (including lossy compression, which suffers when you throw a lot of supersonic highs at it). Try it out! You may be able to dial back other ‘harshness reducers’ and get more sparkle out of your mixes without edginess.

Lastly, ToVinyl 3 comes with a Groove Wear control. If used to do actual vinyl mastering, you should leave this off, but if the target is a digital format (such as Pono…) you might try it. It breaks up the extreme highs in a characteristic way, scrubbing off some of the fizz and focussing the midrange and presence. You can also crank it, for effect (such as on a submix or drum buss). Groove Wear isn’t available anywhere else and a lot of people really like it, so listen carefully to what it does, not just in the highs.

I suggest using ToVinyl after most things on the 2-buss, but before a final clipper. For instance, a very analog-sounding output section might be ToTape, into ToVinyl, into ADClip, into Ditherbox (and perhaps Voxengo SPAN for some terrific metering—I swear by Density Mode).

ToVinyl3 is $50.

Date June 10, 2014
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Noise

NoiseDemo is a universal binary AU plugin for generating naturalistic environment noise, which you can use in sound design for video, or as a texture for music. You have four different tone shaping controls: a lowpass that can chase the envelope of the input sound, two highpass-related controls hooked to the guts of the noise generator algorithm, and a moving average at the very end which also affects dry signal.

The idea is that you can control the environment textures by putting something else underneath that might not be a great environment sound by itself, reinforce it with the noise and then filter both together with the ‘Distance’ filter (the moving average) for naturalness and to merge them sonically.

You can also use it as a terrific percussion broadener, like triggering a white noise generator and gating it along with the drum track but with much more sophistication and better texture. Noise will give you fantastic body and depth when used to do that trick, plus various controls that are immediately useful in an active mix context on such a track.

Noise is $50.

Date May 7, 2014
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Average

Average is a utility plugin for filtering. It averages adjacent samples, and adds the remaining fraction as a ‘leftover’ sample so you can smoothly fade between values. It uses all the Airwindows audio tricks like noise shaping to the 32-bit floating point buss, to be the best-sounding moving average you could possibly have! Truly an audiophile moving average, inspired by the need to preview Pono moving-average playback processing.

If you look at the output of this plugin in Voxengo Span (or whatever metering program you prefer), you can clearly see that the frequency behavior of this form of EQ is odd. There are extreme, obvious notches in the response. Two things about that: first, that’s sweepable in this plugin and my design lets you dial the notch in to a specific frequency if that helps you do what you’re doing. Second, I’m not convinced that is a fault, just an observed behavior of this type of filter.

By that, I mean that type of response is very similar to acoustic comb filtering. My idea here is that our ears can pick out time domain issues as problems, we seem to be able to hear quantization issues at least part of the time, but all day long we are hearing sounds with comb filtering, and tuning out those problems. I think our ears are designed to make light of comb filtering issues and these sorts of notches and response problems, and for that reason I think moving average lowpasses sound better than ‘they should’.

Hence, I’ll call this freebie ‘audiophile’ because I think its filtering sounds awesome. I’m aware it measures strangely, but I don’t associate those response irregularities with ‘terrible unnatural sound’. Rather, it mimicks nearly all natural sounds heard in real environments, and deserves to be a more common EQ tool.

Date May 5, 2014
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Righteous

Righteous is a universal binary AU plugin and the ultimate high-resolution mix buss. It was made to produce mixes for Neil Young’s PONO music player. That means some very specific things about how it is to be used.

It goes last on the 2-buss (you can run buss compression, but not limiting or clipping), and provides deep-bass bloom and digital de-glare, adapting itself to whatever type of high resolution output you’re using. If you’re going for the deepest midrange and the warmest tones, it will handle anything you throw at a 44.1K mix and stop it from glaring. If you’re pushing the treble frequencies with a high sample-rate mix, it will adapt its highs to that context and the de-glare shifts up to accomodate the increased capacity for ‘air’.

It expands deep bass and makes it bloom and resonate the way it does on analog gear, through use of harmonics to fill in energy that was lost to tube-style saturation. This causes the soundstage to be both deep, and warm as hell.

There is also the original Righteous which caused a serious bass boost and got revised quickly to amend that. It’s the same ID so you have to pick one to have in your Components folder, but you can have that as well.

You have to use 24-bit output, because it uses the Airwindows ‘Naturalize’ dither to open up 24-bit mixes. There is no provision for 16 bit or lossy compression at all. It’s for mixing to Pono final output, not as an intermediate stage—though 24 bit dither is also optimal as such a stage. If you must generate lower quality audio, just act like you’re remastering from that point and go from there.

You have to keep the body of the mix under -18dbFS or so. It is not any form of peak limiter or safety clipper. It does provide an extremely gentle tubelike transfer function but this does not stop you clipping and you shouldn’t come anywhere near clipping, or the body of the music will get overly tubby and the bass will get overblown. Righteous will only work if you don’t ‘slam the buss’. You can balance mixes so the final output is what comes off your DAW, and even get peaks near to full scale, but Righteous will force you to work in classic album dynamic terms and make it sound desirable in the way a regular DAW mix cannot ever be.

One more thing: people seem to get into the very original earliest version, which only ever existed as Audio Unit and for which I no longer have the code. I’ve had issues with people getting the demo, needing the full version, maybe having it continue to mute itself like a demo: so, to avoid that, if you’ve found this post the Easter Egg is that the link above is now to the full version. No demo. You’re welcome :)

Date March 27, 2014
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Chris

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