Airwindows

SpacedOut

SpacedOut is the ‘aliased MySpace monitoring’ section of the plugin SpaceOdyssey. This was a 2008 plugin designed to help people monitor what the MySpace audio player was going to do to their sound. At the time, MySpace was a big deal for bands and musicians, but if you uploaded music to it, your music would be played back at half sample rate to save bandwidth.

This was done by taking every other sample, which meant really heinous aliasing for any frequencies above 11K. You could combat this somewhat by filtering highs, or you could check your mix through SpacedOut to see how bad the aliasing would be. SpaceOdyssey had filtering with which you could enhance the roughly 10K area in hopes of making the result more sparkly, and it let you monitor through what’s in SpacedOut, and then switch it off to export your best attempt at something which would get through MySpace sounding acceptable.

These days, it’s SpacedOut that is left, as a sort of special effect. Use it to make stuff low-fi and trash it with aliasing, for free.

SpacedOut declares one sample of latency.

Date March 28, 2008
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

DrumSlam

DrumSlam is an emulation, but not of hardware. It’s a riff on the sound of Massey’s TapeHead.

Because why not?

Well, the reason why not is mostly this: that’s not my favorite sound, so it’s not such a great idea. I heard a midrange drive, a sort of treble air that comes in, and low frequency stuff in my (free) TapeHead AU that I tried. I did my best to replicate these things, but since I wasn’t going for stuff that excites me, I don’t feel my heart was really in this one.

No biggie. Here it is, in case other people feel differently.

Date March 12, 2008
Author Chris
Comments 9 Comments

FlatBass

FlatBass was part of my early experiments with drum samples. It’s not a drum instrument, it’s a sort of bass, obviously.

The idea was, I sold the drum sampler instruments outright, but you’d download the free FlatBass and get it to work in your DAW. If you could make that work, then you would probably be fine buying the drum sampler instrument as that was installed in the same way. That was the idea, anyhow!

FlatBass is a funny instrument, because it’s designed to be tiny. It’s very nearly a soundfont, looping its samples really obviously. I guess you can get a sort of organ-bass thing out of it? Anyhow, FlatBass is old and odd and free, and if anyone enjoys it that’s all I would ask. Electric Bass is somewhat better, instrument-wise, and also free.

Date March 8, 2008
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

DeHiss

DeHiss has just one control, Threshold. Sounds below this threshold will be de-hissed.

It’s not like a simple EQ: the algorithm’s doing freaky things relating to the mean level of samples, but for all practical purposes it acts like a gate that can clamp down brutally on high-frequency noise. The plugin was designed to cope with a tacky little prosumer USB mic pre that I won’t mention here, except to say it is the MXL Mic Mate and its claims of having a “Fully balanced, low-noise analog front end” are BAAAHAHAHAHA… erm, possibly somewhat exaggerated. But for $40 I suppose it’s all right (you can pay that much for a really high quality JACK…)

DeHiss maybe isn’t very sophisticated, but it sure as heck clamps down on noise. Most of what it’s doing codewise is dragging musical tone out of a pit of raw hiss. It’s a pretty good sounding lowpass in some ways and could be used as one if you just crank the threshold to full. I’ve tried it on basses and guitars, and it can produce pops and ticks from the threshold engaging/disengaging but it can also work pretty well as a gate, or as purely a lowpass. Since the method of clamping noise is so unusual, it produces a distinctive tone when used in place of a traditional lowpass, with a bit more muscle to it.

DeHiss declares one sample of latency.

Date January 28, 2008
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

Chris

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