Airwindows

Facet

TL;DW: Facet is a new kind of hard clip that adds two sharp corners into the wave.

Post or die! No food until post! Post is life! I’m super exhausted today, so I hope this makes sense. If not, ask on the Monday livestream.

Facet came out of me trying to come up with a new and distinct kind of distortion for the combined-distortions plugin I’m going to do. Rather than just bring Drive, Density, Spiral, Mojo etc. together, I wanted to add something different.

So, Facet adds a ‘clip point’ but rather than a hard clip it just changes the ‘knee’ of the transfer function so your peaks can still go super high, way beyond 0 dB if you like.

But, they change ‘angle’ at a sharp point which becomes sort of a corner in the sound. Except for high settings it’s both high up in the loudness, and a very gentle ‘corner’: still sharp, but very little change.

And down near zero, it’s damn near total hard clipping. At silence, it literally is a hard clip to silence.

Aw hell. Play with it, see what you think. i can’t explain this one well, at least not right now. The mad scientist labs have released another weird one. It will act like it’s a hard clip or a semi-dirty saturation, except the range of adjustment acts different, and it’ll throw an odd artifact on pure low-frequency tones… just play with it, see what you get. It will find its way into the combined plugin because it’s got a flavor all its own, but I can’t describe it today.

I’ve survived this long on Patreon and most likely will still do so even if I don’t beat myself into the ground making new posts and plugins, but part of it is because I’ve had the opportunity to up my game quite a bit, and it’s meant weeks of nonstop work on stuff that isn’t plugins. I’m sure it’ll get easier in time :)

Date November 10, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

ToMono

TL;DW: ToMono (LeftoMono and RightoMono) copy one channel to both, losslessly.

ToMono.zip(655k)

Time for another tiny utility plugin or two!

LeftoMono or RightoMono exist for only one purpose: if your input is either left or right, it’s coming in on a stereo channel, and you have no use for the other side.

No, worse: you’re coming off some kind of camera or camcorder and the other side is not only ‘nothing’, it shows some noise or interference that’s actively bad. In those situations you are often given the option, ‘Convert to mono?’ but doing that will combine the real signal with the garbage, interference, not-really-clean-silence signal.

And so, ToMono. They do exactly what the name suggests. There’s nothing to them, no controls or UI of any kind, you don’t need to open any interface or do anything. Instantiate the one you need and boom: you are now copying the input data words from the side you want, to the side you don’t. Pure cloned mono of the highest possible quality in a single plugin. And since it’s so simple it’ll work in places like OBS where maybe sometimes they don’t handle generic VSTs properly or generate controls: hey, none needed!

This is a super boring plugin… except when you need it most. Hope you like it. (I no longer need it as I’m running my lav into the real mixing board… but I used LeftoMono last week, before putting it out. It can’t save the camera from other issues like robot-voice over HDMI, but it rescued me from the ‘interference and bad silence’ extra stereo channel. :)

Airwindows is supported by Patreon. That’s how I’m still here, I get to throw Patreon money at gear (including gear I hope to emulate in future or study technically) and it’s very much appreciated. Thank you :)

Date November 3, 2019
Author Chris
Comments No Comments

DeBess

TL;DW: DeBess is an improved DeEss, with perfect rejection of non-ess audio.

DeBess.zip(355k)

This should be fun! Sometimes it’s worth keeping a weird codger like me around ;) meet DeBess.

Named because, for some of you at least, it is at last The Best De Ess. Period. Ever.

…assuming certain conditions.

DeBess is an extension of my former DeEss, which itself was the high point of several earlier attempts at a special de-esser with an unusual algorithm for finding specifically ess content and rejecting anything else in that frequency range, no matter how many overtones it had. DeEss used a set of sample comparisons to try and find esses, and was very successful at this… except some folks had trouble getting it to engage, and others needed it to be more perfect at rejecting even the faintest softening of other content.

DeBess does this by extending the sample comparison window a LOT. In fact, it’s now a slider! You can set it to be even blurrier than DeEss if you like… or barely crack it open to replicate the original DeEss… or crank it up for high isolation de-essing. If you are recording on prosumer equipment or using moving-coil microphones, you might not get enough change between samples to engage DeBess. Same if you’re using high sample rates and your mics do NOT extend right up as far as the sampling lets you: DeBess is not for taking stage mics and making them lisp. It is very distinctly for taking the most high-end of vocal tracks and de-essing only the ess sounds out of them, with zero cost to anything else. Whatever you’re using, if your esses are blowing out the highest treble (which is exactly what you need a de-esser for) then it ought to work for you.

If you’re using high sample rate and struggling to get DeBess action and you’re going to be treble boosting for that ultra-bright voice sound, try brightening BEFORE DeBess and you’ll probably be able to get what you need. It wants very bright esses to work with, so it can duck and darken them. Use the filter control to shape a better EQ on your esses, rather than just trying to duck ’em.

Airwindows is supported by Patreon, so if you can afford to buy this for $50 like it was a commercial plugin, and you’d want to, then go throw $50 a year at the Patreon instead. If I’ve written another good plugin or done something else useful a year from now, you can keep it going :)

Date October 27, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 18 Comments

Monitoring (Redux)

TL;DW: Monitoring is your one-stop shop for final 2-buss work!

Monitoring.zip(419k)

Oh, hey, new camera! And I bent my glasses so they don’t blind you! (They still work for reading stuff though!)

But also… new MONITORING. So this outright replaces the previous one, ‘cos they’re basically the same, but with the following changes:

-Aurat now has mono-summed versions that come out of either the left or right speaker, so you can get a true mono grot-box single speaker mix check even if you don’t have one
-Phone’s now mono (no special single-speaker tricks, it’s more an afterthought but sure enough, you don’t normally get stereo cellphones)
-TWO new Cans algorithms, Cans C and Cans D.

Cans C is just ‘stronger, but basically still normal’, as requested. Cans D is something else again. It’s for really messing up the stereo, like when someone wanted to listen to old Beatles tracks and ‘fix’ the weird dual-mono mix (which I don’t normally approve of). But, since it uses SUCH a strong allpass stereo crossfeed, what you get has also got some characteristics of Peaks, without the exaggerations. So, if you can’t work with Peaks or find it disorienting, there’s a new ‘headphones energy redistributor’ in town and this one attacks exaggerated stereo too. Try it out and see what you think!

Patreon pays for a lot: it helps me upgrade my gear so people can take my operation more seriously. But it also leads to other stuff: not only all the livestreams, but also side-projects that can bring you new stuff in their own right. I’ve been building eurorack-module kits. I made four Radio Musics (also known as Chord Organs) and they all work great. Not only can I put out dedicated drum samples that are dithered correctly for the Radio Music (current ones are OK at rhythmic sample triggering, especially if you’re doing a backbeat that might lay behind the click anyway), but I’ll tell you now that I am going to be trying to write alternate firmware for the Chord Organ/Radio Music platform. Because they’re soooo nifty, and very affordable if you can solder up a kit. And I’m still aiming to do things with the Axoloti… so those of you who build stuff, that is your cue to take interest in the Radio Music and Axoloti if you’re not already interested.

Much like Émilie of Mutable Instruments, what I’m doing is compatible with other people running with it. So, look on it this way: if you support Airwindows so that I make some kind of amazing firmware with stuff that you could then turn around and design a faceplate for and build yourself and sell… hey, win/win as far as I’m concerned. I’ve done a lot towards trying to manufacture hardware but it’s becoming clear that I’d rather be a lighthouse: nothing would make me happier than to see my ideas out there getting used. (And since it’s all open source it keeps ya honest if you do mean to go into business on the back of my stuff: if you can, so can someone else, so be good! :) )

Talk to you later (or indeed sooner, as in ‘Monday at 11:00 AM EST’ for my Q&A stream!)

Date October 13, 2019
Author Chris
Comments 4 Comments

Chris

Facet

ToMono

DeBess

Monitoring (Redux)

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

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