Airwindows

3DClip

3DClip was a pretty alarming loudenator!

It had six controls. LOUDER, Highs Retain, Highs Voicing, Lows Retain, Lows Voicing, and Max Clip Level. It was the introduction of Slate FG-X style techniques to Airwindows clipping.

That means a specific thing. Back in the day, when the FG-X hype was at its peak (I was trying to save up for surgery for a cat with a tumor, and the cat later died for lack of this surgery so I did not like this hype that was directed straight at clippers such as my ADClip), I was studying what that plugin did to get its impressive loudnesses, and why it broke up when pushed too far.

Turns out it stored up energy to release elsewhere in the sound—and 3DClip was my way of doing that more primitively. Why make a sophisticated, CPU-hungry and fragile thing to do this when you can simply sneak the energy back in using Haas effect to mask its presence?

And so the Airwindows alternate technique was born. It bears no resemblance to the much more complicated FG-X method of doing this, but it works about as well.

3DClip runs one sample of latency.

Date September 27, 2010
Author Chris
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ADClip

The original ADClip was invented to deal with an issue with clipping: you get a hard, fatiguing sound. Soft clipping reduces this problem, but makes things sound more trashy and grungey.

What ADClip did to fix this was, keeping track of the surroundings of a clipped sample. If it’s in the middle of a batch of clipped samples, it outputs the max clip level. If the sample is unclipped it passes it through, automatically, with no change (this is different from soft clipping which affects legitimate samples)

But if a sample clips and the PREVIOUS sample wasn’t, ADClip outputs an intermediate value. And if a sample clips and the NEXT sample isn’t (it runs a sample of latency to do this), likewise.

What this does is, it softens onsets of clipped waveforms. Stuff that’s going to hit clipping gets those sharp corners ’rounded off’. More importantly, high frequency stuff that would hit clipping (and perhaps overstress the playback DAC) tends to get scaled right back. You can’t push highs through ADClip at the same level that you can clip lows and mids. It actively fights clipping itself into digital glare, and one side-effect is that if you are hitting it with bright audio, the ‘clipped’ result will be mostly as loud as sheer digital clipping, but the peak samples of all the highs will be hitting in all different places. They’re not all at the same ‘iron bar’ clip point, just the clipped lows are. The highs effectively get soft-clipped without touching any of the legit unclipped sample values.

The first ADClip has three controls: boost, hardness, and max clip level. Hardness adjusts the effect of the unclipping, scaling from an exaggerated effect to pure digital clipping.

You should be using the most current version of this plugin, but if you want earlier versions (demo-able) or even this first version for which I don’t have a demo, buy the current version and email me and I’ll send the earlier one.

The first ADClip runs one sample of latency.

Date September 27, 2010
Author Chris
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Channel2

Channel2 is the classic freebie analogifying plugin, Channel, brought up to date. The selector switch bug is fixed, so you can play with the Neve and API settings! There’s anti-aliasing for a slicker, less digital sound! It’s better than ever and still totally free.

Channel2 works in three ways. First, there’s a very faint touch of highpassing, reining in the extremes of digital bass to more of what’s practical in analog circuits. This was worked out by measuring impulses from real hardware, but the application is very simple. Then, there’s a slew clipper that restricts the slew rate of the plugin. Lastly, there’s the same type of saturation present in Density, but applied in the simplest way, and then blended with the input signal as dry/wet—which means the curve becomes gentler and gentler as you saturate less. It’s this super-gentle saturation curve that people loved in Channel.

Channel2 runs one sample of latency.

Date September 24, 2010
Author Chris
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Antialiasing Plugins

You’ll see a heck of a lot of updates around this time: it’s because I’d hit on a thread on Gearslutz about aliasing in plugins, and it caused much consternation in Airwindows-land.

I dropped everything and started devising ways for my plugins to alias less, or differently, in hopes of stepping farther away from ‘ITB sound’.

So, the fall of 2010 saw many plugins getting upgraded to ‘antialiased’ versions. Some of these legitimately existed earlier than this, but the version I’ve got is often from this period. Since I went through later and made ’em all 64-bit, what’s on the site is what we’ve got. I don’t want to dig up even older builds if they’re not going to be 64-bit, considering that everything currently available including the old versions and the freebies are all 64 bit without exception.

Date September 23, 2010
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

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3DClip

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