Airwindows

DeBez

TL;DW: DeBez gives you retro sampley textures!

DeBez in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Lo-Fi’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
DeBez.zip (501k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Here’s a way-point along the path of me figuring out how to do things! DeBez is a little bit like previous DeRez plugins I’ve made, and a little bit like my reverbs, and a little bit like HipCrush. I got there from here, and you can add these sounds to your palette!

It combines three things. First, bitcrush like in HipCrush where moving the control to the right gives you ‘compressey’ bitcrushes that will bring up noise floors and make them roar, and moving the control to the left gives you ‘gated’ textures where the bitcrush is offset so it’ll cut out. This is more obvious on extreme bitcrushes, but it’ll be the case even on subtler, ‘texture changing’ bitcrushes.

The DeBez control is simply Bezier undersampling, just like in my reverbs. It’s smoothing the edges of the bitcrushing, happening after the crush. To the right, you’re getting a ‘continuous’ version which generates a weird digital-hell overtone. To the left, you get a ‘stepped’ version of the same thing, one that snaps to integer numbers to suppress (mostly) the overtone. That one might be what you want if you’re going for an ‘old sampler’ effect, as it’ll be less edgy, more solid.

Then, instead of just a dry/wet you’re getting an inv/dry/wet control. Turn that up all the way and you get the full DeBez effect, at the middle you have dry again, but to the left you are subtracting the crushed version from dry. This is gonna interact in curious ways as you do things like bitcrush in gatey mode, or roll off highs with DeBez, or play with that overtone.

And what does it do when you do that? It exactly clones the vintage and unobtainable sampler of… haha no. It absolutely does not! Instead it makes sounds that have NOT been heard before. It’s on you to see if they’re useful, and I can’t tell you what it’s useful for because I don’t often go for bitcrush effects in the first place so I’m not the one with a vision here. The point is, now you have a tiny plugin that can produce really unusual sounds along these lines, and when you include subtracting the crush version (which can also be a treble-cut, or overtone-added version) it’s a tiny mad science lab just waiting to happen.

Have fun! I have one more weekend before 2026 and plenty of stuff to do so I’ll get back to work :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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 December 21, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 2 Comments

PurestDualPan

TL;DW: PurestDualPan is an updated PurestGain but as a dual pan.

PurestDualPan in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Utility’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
PurestDualPan.zip (499k) standalone(AU, VST2)

This one’s by patron request: as in, one specific patron REALLY wanted a PurestDualPan, so now everybody has one :)

It is using dezippering, but instead of the much slower one from PurestGain, it’s the quicker and more direct one from out of the Z filter plugins. It’s using the pan law I used in Console9 and later, that uses sine functions to come up with a pan law. And it’s using a quirky little audio taper in its left and right gain controls, so that 0.5 is unity gain, but full crank is actually 3.069492192001773 because it’s 2 to the power of the golden ratio, same for the taper of attenuating anything. This produces a funny sort of taper that I like, and also makes it impossible to reference the actual control’s number in any useful way. So, behave as if you can’t see numbers, they certainly won’t be what you think they are and there’s no predicting what they will be in dB terms.

I have a Bit Shift one also, but it doesn’t strictly count as that because it requires an add as part of the algorithm. This one counts as a PurestGain, though! If you’re a PurestGain fan, this is the same only as a dual pan.

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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 December 14, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

PurestSaturation

TL;DW: PurestSaturation is an experiment in softclipping.

PurestSaturation in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Saturation’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
PurestSaturation.zip (491k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Not so long ago, I pushed and pulled the parameters of a sin() function (thing called a Taylor series expansion) to produce TapeHack, which is a softclip that uses the wrong values for a sin() softclip, to produce another softclip that feels more retro and vintage.

But what if we did something weirder? Specifically, doing this requires that you divide by increasingly huge numbers. For a real sin() these are factorials (very huge indeed). For TapeHack, I doctored these until the shape of the softclip did exactly what I wanted.

Remember how my BitShiftGain works? The ultra-clean gain change I can do (either internal to a plugin, or as the plugin of that name) because if you multiply or divide by exactly powers of 2, in any floating point format, it’ll change the game without ever recalculating the ‘mantissa’ of the number. It only changes the ‘exponent’. And if you don’t change the mantissa… you never requantize. So you have literal perfect gain change that is totally and perfectly lossless within the entire range of the exponent… as long as you only change by 6.08 dB increments.

A bit like the Monty Python skit where a man inherits miles of string, except due to bad planning it is in six inch lengths…

But hey, if you’re doing a Taylor series, the first stage’s subtracted at 15.56 dB down. Then, 41.58 dB down. Then, 74.04 dB and so on.

What if instead, -18 and -42 and -72 and -108 and -150 dB? Rather than the correct math, instead using whatever division will make sure the mantissa is exactly the same?

And here we are. ‘BitShiftGain’ but five times over, inside a saturation algorithm, set up to be intentionally wrong but as if we’re passing through the parts of the algorithm, losslessly. Except our notion of ‘losslessly’ is very much Airwindowsized and requires that we use the wrong dividers… except for that’s how we have TapeHack.

What happens? Try it and find out. I’ve never heard a sophisticated sine approximation algorithm that completely breaks math in order to be able to get as many mantissas unquantized, before. Remember, it’s also a distortion of what a sin() would be, so it’s guaranteed to be different and have a distinct sound, but this is somewhat arbitrary. I find it to be more dynamic than ordinary softclip, and I’m still working out the variations and what I might get out of it. Today it’s this! Hope you like it :)

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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 December 7, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 8 Comments

VerbThic

TL;DW: VerbThic is a classic artificial reverb for being opaque and textured.

VerbThic in Airwindows Consolidated under ‘Reverb’ (CLAP, AU, VST3, LV2)
VerbThic.zip (562k) standalone(AU, VST2)

Turns out VerbTiny has a sibling! And a secret… but that’s for later.

VerbThic is a special case. It’s exactly like VerbTiny in every respect, with one difference that may or may not be obvious (I’m hoping it is, but you never can tell). All my other reverbs, very much including VerbTiny, are meant to sound as far back as possible. The whole reason VerbTiny came out is, I stumbled across a reverb algorithm for a 4×4 Householder matrix that had unusually high peak energy relative to RMS.

This is not well understood in a world where everything is about making the RMS be louder no matter what, and where peaks are considered ‘unheard’ and unimportant, but I’ve been developing a focus on peak energy for years, and especially with my reverbs where I feel the heightened peak energy makes their spaces feel more distant, rather than ‘an up front sound effect’.

So imagine my surprise when I ended up with another algorithm, much like VerbTiny, even a fairly similar room size, except it was the opposite! It produced unusually LOW peak energy. In theory, this would produce a reverb that doesn’t sound far away: more like a fog that combines with sounds to thicken them up.

And so, that’s VerbThic. Works the same way as VerbTiny, but meant to do the opposite job, spatially. On top of that, I found a way to re-use variables which cut down the size of the plugin considerably… and which very likely improves its memory use in your DAW, so it got more CPU (or at least memory) efficient. And, in the process of making it sound more up-front, I stumbled over a variation of the TapeHack ‘altered sin() equation’ concept that was all about taking a saturation effect to an extreme: applying a succession of corrections that were ALWAYS scaled through bit-shifting the exponent, even if that was not the correct amount to use. And I got an interesting-sounding saturation effect that sounds very different from TapeHack and also sounds a lot like nothing at all… I’ll be exploring that one more in future. VerbThic is there to add body to sounds while seeming to come from the same depth as the sounds, rather than ‘distant’. Consider it an interesting twist to try.

Oh, the secret of VerbTiny? The CPU optimization also worked for VerbTiny, running a little more efficiently while not affecting the sound (or saved mixes) the slightest amount. So, I’ve amended the code and re-uploaded it. Go ahead and redownload it as it’s changed since last week, purely in terms of how many variables it uses to do the same thing. Have fun!

Airwindows Consolidated Download
Most recent VCV Rack Module
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 November 30, 2025
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Chris

DeBez

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PurestSaturation

VerbThic

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