Airwindows

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

Logical3

Logical3Demo is a universal binary AU plugin and the definitive Airwindows 2-buss compressor! The way Logical transforms the sound is not subtle. It’s designed to glue the track but also provides a distinctive hit-record ‘presence’ to the highs, allowing a sweet spot to be found where everything really pops and communicates.

This draws on all the things I learned over the years, particularly the ‘black art’ tricks for making effective DSP without destroying CPU in the process: Logical’s generic interface and lack of extraneous code helps a lot there. It uses the latest Airwindows compressor algorithms as developed in ButterComp. And this time, it’s 96K-savvy and works at all sample rates! A perfect ‘set and forget’ buss comp.

Logical3 is $50.

Date February 13, 2014
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

MineSpace

MineSpace is something a bit out of the ordinary: a game ambiance reverb for Let’s Plays.

It came about because I did some Minecraft Let’s Plays, and was interested in applying reverb in giant caves and such. However, normal reverbs tended to be far too strong, and stereo reverb didn’t match well with the twisting, turning nature of gameplay… and there was no way to tell a reverb plugin to pan according to what the video footage showed.

What I settled on was MineSpace. It runs dual mono, very very faintly. If you crank it way up you can just about hear it on speakers (on headphones, it’s easier) and on defaults it’s largely subliminal. Because it’s dual-mono, reverb trails sort of chase sound positioning, in an unrealistic way but one that I think distracts less than the presentation of a single fixed space.

You can’t turn it up, it’s strictly grab-and-go. Just a hint of deep ambience behind the game audio… but a nice touch in post-production, before rendering videos. I recommend it for all manner of podcasting and videomaking… and if you think it’s too quiet, trust me, I may be saving you from a rookie mistake :)

Date January 31, 2014
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

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Average

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