Airwindows

Pockey

TL;DW: Pockey is 12 bit (and under) lo-fi hiphop in a plugin.

This plugin is designed to give you the most vibe possible out of a particular target: 12 bit uLaw-sampled lo-fi hiphop. It’s based on earlier plugins like DeRez and BitGlitter, but is tailored to deliver just the right kind of warm fuzzy texture like an old sampler… or the Pocket Operator sampler that’s a lot more accessible than retro 12-bit is.

Pockey uses uLaw encoding to stretch 12 bit sampling to where it sounds pretty nearly CD quality, except there’s a whole vibe and texture you get through having the soft, delicate sounds slightly low-bit and the louder sounds even more crunchy than that. The lowest setting on the resolution slider is exactly 12 bit, and everything higher than that gives you progressively more lo-fi in an ‘analog bitcrush’ mode, meaning that it will gradually build as you turn it up, rather than jump from step to step. That way you can fade smoothly from 4-bit to 12, if you like.

The frequency crush effect is also special: it uses an edge-softening algorithm a little bit like PurestDrive, for the purpose of turning the harsh and grating frequency crush you’d normally get from a plugin, into something a little more resonant, more sonorous. It’s still a sort of digital nasty, but steps way over in the direction of ‘classic sampler digital nasty’, again in a way that suits the more chill lo-fi genres. If you’re looking to have it be as clean as possible, take your audio and explore in the very lowest settings of the frequency control for a spot that’s minimally intrusive, or a digital-sampler overtone that works best with the sounds you’re using. All the stuff near 0 ought to be well behaved. Then as you crank it up, you’ll get rowdier digital artifacts, but always with that softening that helps lo-fi hiphop provide a soothing backdrop to life: which is partly due to the absence of super-extended frequencies grabbing your attention.

It’s both an art and a science, and Pockey is there to help you find the art through me digging into the science of how these things are done :)

download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

Date September 11, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 1 Comment

Monitoring3

TL;DW: Monitoring3 is Monitoring, but with Ten Nines into Dark as the wordlength reducer.

Monitoring3.zip(673k)

Here’s a little update for users of Monitoring! Monitoring is the end-of-2-buss plugin that allows you to check your mix in lots of different ways. You can get 24 or 16 bit output out of it (as in, direct to CD format for saving as 16 bit), lots of reference sounds like SubsOnly, SlewOnly, PeaksOnly that will let you hear your mix in a very different way (if it’s way out of balance when you can only hear the deepest subs, or the brightest highs, you can re-adjust things.) PeaksOnly shows you a fake and unnatural sound that will enhance the inaudible peak energy and highlight anything that might be too loud because it’s heavy on peak energy. You’ve got four variations on Cans for headphone mixing (which gives you crossfeed in the form of allpassed, blurred audio a bit like what PeaksOnly does), you’ve got mono and side checks, narrowed-bandwidth checks like Aurat (including one-side mono versions to more closely resemble use of a real mono mix-check speaker) and even utilities like VoiceTrick, which gives you mono with one speaker out of phase: position a mic exactly between the speakers and you can lay vocal tracks without headphones if you need to (not perfect, but it should work).

In short, Monitoring, but with one little change. Everything is the same, but now Monitoring3 uses Airwindows Ten Nines into Dark for the wordlength reducer. This was originally built into Console8: I’ve decided that was silly, especially since I make use of Monitoring a lot and had overlooked its usefulness. So if you’ve never heard of these, they’re final dithers (especially to 24 bit) with lots of interesting monitoring-check options, and 1, 2, and 3 all offer different wordlength reduction, being otherwise identical. Console8 is also being updated in place, the only change being that it no longer dithers to 24 bit. Instead, you’re to use the dither in Monitoring, or whatever else you wish.

download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

The original version, which didn’t apply the ultrasonic filtering on VSTs, is at Monitoring3original.zip(673k)

Date September 4, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 10 Comments

Flipity

TL;DW: Flipity is a channel phase flipper/swapper utility.

Flipity.zip(590k)

This is per a request. Someone asked for a plugin to flip the phase of the left channel :) well, how about flip the phase of the left or the right channel? Or the phase of the left AND the right channel? Or swap the channels, L for R, R for L? Or, swap the channels and then flip the phase of what is now the left channel? Or swap the channels and then flip the phase of what is now the right channel? Or flip both?

That’s Flipity. Utility plugin that apparently isn’t available on some DAWs. Fair enough then :)

You’ll note that the rest of the video is mentioning that MY ALBUM IS OUT :D yep!

It’s called Welcome To Free Luna, and it’s for sale ($7 for a solid 73 minutes of music, 15 songs, 24/96 if you want it). Buying my album is both encouraging, helps me unlock stuff like the ability to do 25 minute proggy songs for the next album (unlocked!) and helps support my work with Airwindows, which continues at its usual breakneck speed. Heck, just in the C to Ds alone you have Chamber2, ClipSoftly, Dubly and Dynamics coming up, and that’s not even counting the split-off of the Console8 dither into its own version of Monitoring (and the removal from Console8BussOut, letting you use whatever dither you want with it).

Before today you’ve not heard any of the music from Welcome To Free Luna. I’d love to see this be the bandcamp-sized, Airwindows-sized version of a hit record, so if you never get on my patreon consider getting the album. Bandcamp lets you listen to the whole thing straight through several times before getting snippy, and I welcome you giving it that free spin, see if you like it.

The album is pure analog captured unprocessed on a Lavry Black ADC, and un-fussed with, other than heavy heavy nonlinear editing for effect and arrangement (like Eddy Offord used to do for Yes and ELP). The free tools I used there were not plugins, but I’ve made available my alternate firmware for the Music Thing Modular Chord Organ, and I will be releasing the breakbeat samples I used, both as high resolution raw samples, and as the special 12-bit versions I used in the Music Thing Modular Radio Music on the album, plus I’ll tell you how I did it. The theme of the album is human-AI relations, cyborgs etc. and the modular synthesizer is in fact composing about half the chords and breakbeats itself, just guided by me jamming along with it in a symbiotic relationship, so the album Welcome To Free Luna is itself an example of its own theme… but enough backstory, hope you like Flipity and hope you like the new album :)

Welcome To Free Luna, my new album!

download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

Date August 28, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

Doublelay

TL;DW: Doublelay is StereoDoubler with independent delays and feedback.

Doublelay.zip(649k)

This one was a request: I have a weakness for doing plugins for folks who worked on records I grew up listening to on vinyl. So often we recognize only the rock stars, but the guys behind the desks do so much to help the magic happen. And this plugin is there to bring the magic. It was a GREAT suggestion.

Doublelay starts with Stereo Doubler, then adds delay taps to the pitch-shifted L and R independently, and then it also lets you feed back the results into the input again, in a secret combination that nobody knowing me will be surprised to know is the Golden Ratio. It’s 0.618…. direct feedback, and the inverse as crossfeed. The direct feedback will continue pitch shifting up and up, and the inverse/crossfeed will continue shifting the pitch back again to where it started. The end result is an ability to further expand the spatiality and pitch-iality of the effect to taste, up to 1.0 where you’ll get close to infinite feedback… unless you’re using the pitch shifting, where it will trail off faintly into color-smeared audio trails.

Or you can skip the feedback and use it to thicken vocals and things, or do an ‘echojam’ effect in stereo with just two taps where the echoes are also pitch shifts, or have one side not be a delay and the other side be a big delay: turns out there are a lot of things you can do, and since this is a very immediate (based on the very ‘raw’ sounding Glitch Shifter by way of Stereo Doubler) delay based effect, the added ambience you create will not fill up nearly as much space as a full-on reverb might do. Truly a great way to fill up some mix space with what you’ve already got in the tracks, and go on from there if you like. And I hope you do like Doublelay.

download StarterKit.zip for just the basics
download 64 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Signed M1/Intel Mac AUs.dmg
download Signed M1/Intel Mac VSTs.dmg
download LinuxVSTs.zip
download LinuxARMVSTs.zip for the Pi
download Retro 32 Bit Windows VSTs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac AUs.zip
download Retro PPC/32/64 Mac VSTs.zip
Mediafire Backup of all downloads
All this is free and open source under the MIT license, brought to you by my Patreon.

Date August 22, 2022
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Chris

Pockey

Monitoring3

Flipity

Doublelay

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

Patreon Promo Club