Airwindows

Clip2

Clip2 is a lot like Clip, except the antialiasing was tweaked a bit and there’s a slider. The slider lets you set a threshold, because I had a user who asked for the ability to bring the clip threshold down that way.

One result is, you can teach yourself about peak versus RMS energy using Clip2. You just bring the slider down, from the 0 db threshold down to -24 db, and listen for what happens. Since there’s no gain trim, it won’t fool you by making ‘louder/distorted’ seem better, and you can find the point where you hear clipping more easily.

This is worth doing: people ignore peak energy at their peril. You may not directly hear the transients that go way above the ‘body’ of the sound, but they’re still sensed, and getting familiar with what peak energy is like can be a huge advantage. Very few sounds really need to be mixed so loud that they can’t have peak energy, and deft use of peak energy makes all the difference in a mix. That’s what keeps a mix from going flat and boring.

Date September 20, 2011
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

SoftGate

SoftGateDemo is an AU universal binary plugin, to help with sampling and sample instrument creation!

The purpose of this one is more like mastering noise reduction or de-essing. As the gate closes, it also rolls off highs- instead of going for outright gated effects, it’s designed to not really close completely, just to soften and suppress hiss and background noise. This is for the purpose of working with instrument samples that must decay to silence, or reverb impulses that do likewise.

Bright Threshold and Darken Speed should be pretty obvious, and Base Silence is the control that’s like a de-esser: it’s the depth to which the plugin can gate. In noise reduction often it’s better to just step on hiss and noise rather than trying to wipe it to digital black, and this plugin is all about letting you transition from a fully bright, unaltered sample to an attenuated and highs-softened one seamlessly.

Sample instruments you make will have a warmer, less fatiguing sound due to the softer background hiss, and reverb impulses will decay into the distance better- you can dial in your preferred decay, and there’s a SoftGateLinked plugin included so you can work with stereo files, as well as mono files, properly!

SoftGate is $50.

Date September 18, 2011
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

SubsOnly

SubsOnly is a utility plugin to use with Voxengo SPAN, in Density Mode. That will give you the best ‘VU style’, sense-the-loudness-of-the-track, metering, and when you put one of these utilities in front of SPAN, it’s calibrated so equal levels will give you appropriate amounts of extreme subs. If the levels are out of whack, your balances are also out of whack. (Not all mixes will produce the subsonic frequencies SubsOnly tests for, so it’s okay if they’re not present, but they should not be blowing away the outputs)

SubsOnly is a very simple algorithm: it’s just twenty-six IIR lowpasses in series. This produces an outrageous but very primitive lowpass, so you can also use it as an audio filter. It should sound a lot like listening to your mix from an adjacent house, or something, and you can use it to see what instruments are taking up subsonic space and get a sense of how the beat comes across at a distance.

This algorithm is available in Ditherbox, for convenience. That way you can switch it in for mix checking, without having to load extra plugins.

Date August 28, 2011
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

SlewOnly

SlewOnly is a utility plugin to use with Voxengo SPAN, in Density Mode. That will give you the best ‘VU style’, sense-the-loudness-of-the-track, metering, and when you put one of these utilities in front of SPAN, it’s calibrated so equal levels will give you appropriate amounts of extreme highs. If the levels are out of whack, your balances are also out of whack. (it’s fine to have quieter output with SlewOnly: peak levels should not be hotter than the regular mix, though.)

SlewOnly is a very simple algorithm: apart from some volume boosting to calibrate it, all that happens is that each sample has the previous sample subtracted. This produces an outrageous but very primitive highpass, so you can also use it as an audio filter.

This algorithm is available in Ditherbox, for convenience. That way you can switch it in for mix checking, without having to load extra plugins.

Date August 24, 2011
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

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Clip2

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SubsOnly

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