Airwindows

ButterComp2

TL;DW: ButterComp2 is improved ButterComp with an output control and sound upgrades.

As requested, ButterComp with output gain. And an unexpected bugfix. And a tone upgrade!

So here’s what happened: in working on the new ButterComp, I found a mistake. Because of a thing C programming lets you do (assign, in an if statement) it turned out the original ButterComp didn’t actually use the interleaved compressors after all. The one in CStrip does, but actual ButterComp (which has its own distinct fans!) doesn’t. It’s strictly a bi-polar compressor: it does each half of the wave different, and blends them.

Because of this, I’ve made the source code (also being released) represent what the plugin actually does in practice. It’s a little simplified, and it’s worth paying attention to, for people who like the simplest most minimal form of ButterComp.

But, because of this, I get to release ButterComp2 as very much its own thing! I even came up with a subtle tweak: it modifies its release just a touch, slowing it when the signal’s hot. That’s on a sample-by-sample basis… and it’s on the OUTPUT of the compressor. So, this further smoothing effect is subject to the output level control. And the dry/wet. In fact if you had it all dry, the release modification is therefore as if you had it on the input… making it blend not only between positive and negative wave compression, but also between feedback and feed-forward release time modifications :)

But really what you need to do is listen to it.

With the interleaved compressors fully working AND the bi-polar compression on each, there is indeed the four distinct compressors working in parallel. The whole thing is very gentle (hence the name) but you’ll get a glue and tonal reshaping out of it as it will even out the bulk of the waveform, making it balanced between positive and negative. It’ll also soak up treble detail in a characteristic way, and you’ll really hear the quality of ButterComp2 on ambiences and reverb tails. It’ll float things in space in this holographic way… I thought it made for a significant tonal improvement over the simpler ButterComp.

All this work is supported by my Patreon, and I’ve got plenty more to do so I appreciate the help. Although the challenges of continuing to deal with my Mom and Dad’s deaths (and even the gray cat: she passed away between Mom and Dad) are still with me, I’m keeping busy as much as I can, and some things have gone well: for anyone concerned about Steinberg’s plans for sunsetting VST2, I have now got their license to continue making VST2. Signed and everything, so I can’t help anybody post-October who wants to make VST2s but I’ll be able to keep making them, legally. Pretty sure I can also specify what files you’d need to add to my open source that would make the results build.

In the future, things like music and plugin-making become a kind of communication. There’ll be just one commercial plugin, with 57,000 knobs on it, and you can only rent it and everyone commercial must have it… and then the rest of us, we share interesting little creations back and forth, our works appreciated by a circle of friends who happen to be friends of music or of coding, linked across states and countries by our cooperation.

Until then… thanks for listening to my curious and awkward but helpful voice :)

Date September 30, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 3 Comments

Pop

TL;DW: Pop is a crazy overcompressor with a very exaggerated sound.

Pop

Why another compressor?

Yes, ‘because they all act and sound a little different’, but what’s the deal with this one in particular?

Pop was designed to be overstressed to get an effect like the Allen & Heath mini-limiter used on some 80s Genesis and Phil Collins songs: that huge attack, the way that little subtleties jump boldly out of the mix, the sheer squish and gnarl of it all. It wasn’t really about trying to model the specific gear so much as trying to get the effect, or more of the effect: I especially wanted the front end of sounds to burst through with enormous presence, but I also wanted to bring up little details out of the performance.

Pop’s a huge success at this. On some audio, I can get weird little reverb elements from the background to seem to hover up front even while loud stuff is being smashed. It’s designed to volume invert: the idea is if you’re hitting it with superloud things it can overcompensate and push the volume down extra far, letting you further exaggerate the effect.

As such, there are some sounds this just can’t do. If you try and get a huge thunderous smashed sound of it, it will just go super 80s and give you a loud attack and maybe even backwards decay, or some reinvention of the body of the sound. You have to set the level carefully to get the right sound happening, so it’s not terribly flexible: Pop is picky and you have to work it almost like it’s an instrument. It does run without latency, so in theory you could do like Phil did and track directly into it (or track into the DAW with it already present in the monitoring path) so you could modulate your singing intensity to work with it. That ought to work. Also remember a slapback echo, and to actually doubletrack!

If I can ever get the real preamp/compressor, I’ll study the heck out of it and do Pop 2. I’ll keep an eye out, as that would be really rewarding work and I could probably get closer to the real thing with that kind of reference :)

Patreon is how I’d be in a position to do that work: if I do well enough with Patreon, I can invest in bits of gear that I’d be really interested in emulating. As you can see, I can put a lot of effort into modeling a limiter that I don’t even have! How much nicer would it be if I could work on stuff and really study it in person. Another example: my old ResEQ is a little bit like the resonator networks in the old Polymoog. You know, the one that’s not gnarly like a classic Moog but has its own strange and deeply unreliable mojo… well, part of a Polymoog is a series of resonator filters that give an amazing effect. And I can do stuff similar to that with ResEQ, which was an innovative way to produce a resonant EQ peak. But how much neater would it be to turn that technology to giving you the Polymoog resonator functionality, as that synth had it?

Date September 16, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 7 Comments

UnBox

TL;DW: Unbox is a distortion where only the harmonics that don’t alias are allowed to distort.

Unbox

While I’m putting out my library of plugins according to plan, sometimes I need to take a detour into new stuff. UnBox is one example.

The idea’s as follows: if you distort stuff digitally, it aliases. This can be seen as harmonics seemingly bouncing off the highest frequency, and going back down again. The idea is that if you have digital saturation or distortion without massive oversampling, you’ll always have aliasing and everything is ruined forever.

That’s not quite true. It depends on the frequency, and the form of distortion… and many of my plugins have gentle enough distortion curves that they throw a limited number of harmonics. If you are only generating harmonics within the range of digital audio’s frequencies, you’re fine and there will be no problem until you feed the system a frequency that’s too high. You’re not automatically feeding superhigh frequencies all the time if you’re working with natural recordings: not all sounds contain that kind of high frequency content.

If you DO have that sort of high frequency content, what then? It occurred to me I could take the difference between dry and distorted, store it in an averaging filter, and average it. This would suppress high frequency content in only the distortion artifacts. (I then learned that I needed to average the signal being fed to the distortion part, which is Spiral again: it got a little complicated)

And I could even highpass the distortion part… and all this is applying only to the distortion part. It’s all handled as a single subtract from the raw signal coming in.

What that means is this: UnBox is a distortion that cuts down the level of the signal, but ONLY the mids. Depending on how it’s set, it will let through more and more of the ‘dry’ highs, unaffected. It’ll also let through a hint of bass for definition. Underneath this layer of clarity, the distorted part can be made pretty distorted, but it’ll stay free of aliasing even up into the high frequencies, because those frequencies aren’t actually getting applied to the distortion, and the distortion output’s also being smoothed after the fact. So you’ve got a texture-thickener, an energy-adder, that retains a very analog quality because all of the overtones stay clear of aliasing WITHOUT oversampling. The raw sound is still a direct pass-through and that’s where the clarity comes from.

Wish me luck: I’m having frantic people leave me messages saying that Steinberg will kill my ability to release VST plugins. If they did, I’d have to go back to AU only I guess, but please torrent and distribute the NewUpdates.zip with my plugin library in case they send the black helicopters. More seriously, I’ve sent in their VST2 licensing form (I think I may have already? They’re just sowing chaos at this point) and I’m building all my stuff on time-capsule computers (or virtual machines) that do not change, so I can continue to do things like support PPC Macs. I am the last person to be bullied away from legacy support and they’ll just have to deal with that fact: if all goes well I’ll have my little VST2 agreement and will be fine.

Also, I do not sell the VST plugins: I’m supported by Patreon which is basically selling ME as a working developer. I do realize that if I’m forced not to include VST support that would be a big challenge, but I’m not going to get forced away from VST support after all the years people were begging for it. I chart my course and Steinberg can just deal with that, and I would be very surprised if I was ordered not to include VST in my open-source efforts. Also, I’m not a large enough business to harass, and I’ve never sold even one VST plugin: my incorporating VST went along with my going Patreon, and there are no DRM features on the plugins so even I can’t shut them off remotely. Everything’s going to be fine, if I can have anything to say about it. Enjoy today’s new plugin, which includes both Windows and Linux VST versions alongside the 64/32/PPC binary Audio Units for Mac.

Date September 9, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Ditherbox

TL;DW: Ditherbox is a switchable selection of dithers in 16 and 24 bit, plus monitoring tools.

Ditherbox

This one’s fairly simple to explain. It’s (nearly) every Airwindows dither plugin in one box, with a control to select between them.

Well, there’s a bit more: Ditherbox comes with 16 bit versions built in (the individual plugins are based on 24 bit, with the exception of NotJustAnotherCD). So rather than messing around with BitShiftGain (which will still give you any weird bit depth you could wish for) you can output to CD-quality 16 bit directly from Ditherbox. That was kind of waiting for Ditherbox to come out, didn’t want to steal all of its thunder.

Oh, did I say thunder? Ditherbox also comes with monitoring tools: calibrated SlewOnly and SubsOnly playback, where it’s supposed to give you roughly the same levels and dynamics from full bandwidth, SlewOnly and SubsOnly. Might not be exactly the same, but if one of them is wildly different from the full bandwidth you might have a look at the mix.

Lastly, it has a new trick: Silhouette! The idea behind this one is simple: calibrated noise replaces your mix. If you can still hear beats and dynamic behavior, or best of all if your music is kind of recognizable, it’s a good sign! That means your mix is communicating information dynamically. If it’s just a wash, you might want to look at your overcompression or over-limiting, because especially now in the days of replay gain, it’s good to leave the ability to communicate with dynamics and not squish everything too much. It’ll also tell you things about how spikey your compression peaks are, and the dynamic texture of your drum impacts.

This plugin marks the open-sourcing of everything I’ve ever done dither-wise, including the Benford Realness-based Not Just Another Dither (named by the internet!). Seemed sensible, as they are all included in Ditherbox (well… actually the TPDF-based stuff like TapeDither, NodeDither, PaulDither, DoublePaul didn’t get included as they weren’t in the original Ditherbox. I’m kind of exhausted doing this one and VSTing it and opensourcing everything: there was a lot of fussy porting work and barely room to move the slider on the VST: forgive, plz?)

Anyhow, with MOST of the Airwindows dither work represented, hopefully this is fun to fool with. I do still recommend Not Just Another Dither on general principles, as in practical terms it’s the best one. You can still put TapeDither on outputs going to a mix, I’m just saying, it all culminated in NJAD.

This is all supported by Patreon. I am rekt, heading to bed now. Goodnight :)

Date September 2, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 16 Comments

Chris

ButterComp2

Pop

UnBox

Ditherbox

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Kinds Of Things

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