Airwindows

ElectroHat

TL;DW: Hihat tone generator (uses original sound as control voltage)

I’ve always liked this one. ElectroHat uses primitive residue sequences to produce a ‘noise’ like effect that makes the hi-hat, but since it’s such a crude method of generating randomness, you get artifacts and peculiar electronic noises instead of nice pure noise. Peculiar electronic noises turn out to be a lot of fun as hi-hats!

You use this by feeding some sort of control voltage to it. It responds very, very quickly, so if there’s any amplitude modulation as part of your wave, you’ll hear it affecting the hat. You can use that on purpose, you can use a real DC control voltage to drive it, or you can simply make the envelope you want using a square wave tone for the underlying signal: it’ll rectify the squarewave to be only positive, and that’ll end up the same as a control voltage.

This work is supported by my Patreon. I’m still trying to get better and feel horrible, but I think I managed to get this VST (Linux included) done properly. If you’re using Github and managing a repository from an old system (like my dev laptop) you might find that they killed your ability to push changes, even from the command line (just a couple days ago). I worked around this by struggling weakly with it for hours and then giving up and doing my git uploading on my desktop machine. Hmph. Anyway, ElectroHat is now open source, so if you want to experiment with the method please do. Like I’ve often said, sometimes it’s good to have noise that is only moderately random, because then it comes in colors and textures.

I debugged the brighten control after making the video, so you’ll find it’s got a much more hi-hat-like sound when you try it. Hope you like it.

Date February 25, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Voice Of The Starship

TL;DW: Deep noise tone source.

VoiceOfTheStarship

I won’t get into too much detail here: I’m sick again and the video hopefully explains things. Just: this is the core of Noise, in maybe a more approachable form. (I’d love to see this in VCV Rack, it’d be a good low-frequency wander for LFOs and things)

It lets you go from regular noise to deep dark noise to purely subsonic rumble. I also used this algorithm for background ambience in my game Counterpart. Now it’s open source under the MIT license, so other game projects can have algorithmic noise (better and more flexible than wave files)

This work is supported by my Patreon. And now I will go and try to sleep and rest. <3

Date February 18, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 5 Comments

Airwindows Linux

Look down.

Look up.

Your Airwindows plugins are now LinuxVST :D

What, every new one from now on?

No. ALL of them.

NewUpdates.zip (also, the direct downloads: search for individual plugins if you prefer)

(okay, more like ‘currently developed ones that have been VST’: 84 separate packages. Everything I still had code for, not including ‘initial bug versions’ that got fixed but I kept the released versions around because you gotta let people download weird versions if they need them for recall)

This is thanks to Eugene Cherny (who is ech2 on github) who knew how to build LinuxVSTs when me and my brother couldn’t get ’em to work. Open source is cool: Eugene didn’t do that much of the work, just did a script-based system for autobuilding the plugins that are currently open sourced under the MIT license. That meant that I could use the system too… and I did the work of setting it up for every single plugin Airwindows maintains as VST (and a few that are coming up). And I ran the script (currently on my github too) and away it went, and then it was just repackaging everything up. The grunt work.

But as we learned when I had the denormal-bug-fixes to solve, I’m not scared of grunt work, especially when a script is doing part of the heavy lifting. (if anyone can make a script that entirely or in part does a port to VCV Rack, I’ll do this all over again and then the also open-source Rack will have ALL the Airwindows plugins. They could ship with it so long as the MIT license is honored with a credit)

They seem to work just dandy. So at last the promise is honored: all at once, as I sort of expected. And LinuxVST is now a permanent part of what Airwindows does, and increasingly you’ll see MIT-licensed open source (not sure if anyone noticed, but I’m doing the one opensource from the catalog of what’s come before per month, AND all current releases: so the numbers are increasing faster than you’d think. I never said I wouldn’t also opensource everything new that comes out)

Have fun, Linux-mongers! :D

Date February 12, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 15 Comments

Acceleration

TL;DW: Acceleration limiter tames edge, leaves brightness.

Acceleration

This is a nice little plugin. :)

As requested, I’ve made a dedicated acceleration limiter, like the one in ToVinyl4. You don’t have to mess with Groove Wear, or highpass anything: as a result, this ends up being the ‘high end’ acceleration limiter, mastering grade and useful in situations where ToVinyl might be overkill (ToVinyl was made in an era where I still had to make ‘amazing marketable plugins with lots of features so people would pay $50 quickly before it got all pirated etc’)

Ah, I remember those days ;P

But now, it’s different because Acceleration is free! AU, Mac and PC VST (stay tuned for a surprise on that front) and if you can’t pay, go ahead and use it anyway. If you can, please do because I think the usefulness of me doing this work will become increasingly obvious, and the usefulness of me opensourcing plugin code has also become increasingly obvious. And it’s brought you Acceleration, here and now.

The reason to be excited about that is, Acceleration’s not a simple filter. It pretty much targets exactly the digital behavior that creates Gibb effect overshoots (the reason you often have to pad heavily limited material down to stop it being crackly and glare-y) and would probably work very well as literally an acceleration limiter for record cutting heads. But, in a largely digital world, it might be even more useful because you can feed it any old ITB mix, any weird edgy source material, and it’ll clean up the nasty digital brightness while not sounding like it’s doing anything. Check the video (it should be relatively obvious if you’ve got half decent tweeters) and try it out. The key is to not try and get the apparent volume of the highs to be less: instead, you’re going after the character, or the presentation. If highs seem to be coming forward with nasty spikey extra energy, Acceleration will fix that tonal problem without altering the basic mix balance.

This work is supported by my Patreon, and again I expect to deliver a nice surprise quite soon that will further illustrate why keeping me on the job is nice. I hope you enjoy Acceleration as much as I do. :)

Date February 11, 2018
Author Chris
Comments 6 Comments

Chris

ElectroHat

Voice Of The Starship

Airwindows Linux

Acceleration

handsewn bespoke digital audio

Kinds Of Things

The Last Year

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