I've seen a few reverent Airwindows mentions in the new Tech Room (some by me), and I'm finally feeling unlazy enough to start a catch-all Airwindows thread.
Updates, talk, advice. Or, if the thread dies here, at least I've spread the word a little. Unsolicited, obv, I'm just a fan.

https://www.airwindows.com/

Really shockingly high-quality AU/VST plugins, presently on a weekly release schedule, free at point of access.
There's no registration/licensing, you just download some files for free, but you can donate to his Patreon.

Lots of ideas that are too pristine and low-key, or too weird or broken-seeming, to ever really be the purview of Waves or Slate or whomever you get ads from.
There's all the expected stuff like tape emulation and Neve emulation, too, though even those are put together in unusual ways.

What appealed to me as a reluctant digital/ITB guy (I'm also moving OTB, parallel to this), is that AW seems to be the first plugin developer that not just understands the weaknesses of digital audio, but that foregrounds those limitations and teaches the user about them. On the last plugin release page he sort of restated AW's aim as "minimal processing to get the result, and insane overkill for word length and linearity." But they just sound great, on the regular visceral musical level.

I started with his Starter Kit and it really is nicely selected. The Monitoring plugin in there (on its own w/ a write-up over here) has been extremely helpful to me. But there's so much good to be found just clicking around on the site and finding something that sounds appealing, or even better, sounds like a terrible idea.

Top thread!

I am busy over the next couple of days, but have been neck deep in aw plug-ins for a while now. I shall brain dump ASAP

I've used a few of his more bonkers things over the years and enjoyed them hugely. I should really experiment with the starter kit, but I'm stupidly, anachronistically suspicious of the snake oil plugins that virtually everybody else seems perfectly happy to use and enjoy. Quite a number of AW plugs seem to be of that type; analogue/saturation/mojo/voodoo type.

I've only really tried the console and buss plugs (and maybe a tape emulator once or twice), which seem to help to mitigate 'digital flatness' that happens when I start pulling up faders in the box. I don't keep up with everything he does, and he seems a little nutso but I pitch a few bucks to his Patreon every month.

Adam_I_III wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 5:46 amI'm stupidly, anachronistically suspicious of the snake oil plugins that virtually everybody else seems perfectly happy to use and enjoy. Quite a number of AW plugs seem to be of that type; analogue/saturation/mojo/voodoo type.

I think AW gives you some of the least corny/kitschy ways to pull that kind of thing off if you need to. I have the same aversion, it's why I'd avoided the "coloration" plugins like BussColors at first. But in a FB convo I had while the board was down, FM Sam Scholten forget his username said that the "Neve" mode on the BussColors plugin sounded just like the Neve console he's used at Ardent Studios. I think that is high praise for a free plugin, from a guy who would know.

One of my favorite AW things is Pyewacket which is based on the extinct PWM compressors made by Pye. And I think this reflects a lot of what Chris does with this style of plugin. It isn't made from modeling every component of a Pye compressor or sampling one, because where would he get one. It's just a nice-sounding compressor that gestures in the same direction, done kind of by ear, with the code doing as little as possible to accomplish it. I think that's nice!

If you mean "snake oil" in the sense of wondering if AW stuff is legitimate, I would say sure it is—I feel like if you're a seller of snake oil it'd be a poor move to open-source your product and make payment entirely optional. When I read "snake oil" I think of Acustica (sorry Acustica), who you can contrast with Airwindows in most ways I can think of.

Mason wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 9:49 am

Adam_I_III wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 5:46 amI'm stupidly, anachronistically suspicious of the snake oil plugins that virtually everybody else seems perfectly happy to use and enjoy. Quite a number of AW plugs seem to be of that type; analogue/saturation/mojo/voodoo type.

I think AW gives you some of the least corny/kitschy ways to pull that kind of thing off if you need to. I have the same aversion, it's why I'd avoided the "coloration" plugins like BussColors at first. But in a FB convo I had while the board was down, FM Sam Scholten forget his username said that the "Neve" mode on the BussColors plugin sounded just like the Neve console he's used at Ardent Studios. I think that is high praise for a free plugin, from a guy who would know.

One of my favorite AW things is Pyewacket which is based on the extinct PWM compressors made by Pye. And I think this reflects a lot of what Chris does with this style of plugin. It isn't made from modeling every component of a Pye compressor or sampling one, because where would he get one. It's just a nice-sounding compressor that gestures in the same direction, done kind of by ear, with the code doing as little as possible to accomplish it. I think that's nice!

If you mean "snake oil" in the sense of wondering if AW stuff is legitimate, I would say sure it is—I feel like if you're a seller of snake oil it'd be a poor move to open-source your product and make payment entirely optional. When I read "snake oil" I think of Acustica (sorry Acustica), who you can contrast with Airwindows in most ways I can think of.

I don't really mean that I think his stuff is snake oil, just that I have a mistrust of the colouration stuff even though I know it to be accepted as legitimate widely. I should spend some time adjusting my prejudices.

What Chris is doing is wild. If anyone reading this is completely new to airwindows...it is a plugin company run by one awesome programmer Chris, who makes all of them himself. They have no GUI and no installer. You just drag them to the appropriate folder in Home>Library>Audio>Plugins (on a Mac, no idea for Windows). There are over 400 of them. Your DAW will generate a little window with a fader or two on it. But some of them do no even have faders. There are plugins for everything, from reverb, to dithers, from mixing desk emulations, to capacitor emulations, from wild spatialisers, to monitoring systems. There is a new one every week, and they come with long detailed instruction videos. The names are often a play on words. This is whole ecosystem that starts to make sense very slowly, but one gets the hang of it.

Background: Firstly, set up a console environment and mix your sound as per your desires. All the aw console plugins come in pairs - one plugin for individual tracks/channels which is always the very last plugin on the track - the are called ConsoleChannel. And there is one plugin for busses which is always the very first plugin on the buss - this is called ConsoleBuss. All sub-busses will have A ConsoleBuss plugin at the start, and a ConsoleChannel plugin at the end. The exception is the master/2buss. This does not have any instance of ConsoleBuss at the end.

There are many different Console plugins from Chris, and they all have different flavours and slightly different names. Most have faders, and the point is that you leave your DAW's faders at unity gain, and use the aw console system faders to do the mixing.

Now... : )

Copying my post from another forum:

Here is one neat trick that I like a lot. I do a lot of weirdo folky stuff with fingerstyle guitar, but I think that this might translate across sources. I tend to do this on the 2buss, as I often have multiple mics for a single guitar part.

Once you have the basic sound/tone floor the way you like it, do this:

Put some kind of plugin that lets you mono the bass after your consolebuss plugin. Maybe not right after, but definitely not before (as nothing should be before).

Then mono the bass, choosing a frequency where you think it gives a nice balance. I find this easier with Headphones. Too little, and things can sound fragmented. Too much, and things can feel claustrophobic. You will know when you find the sweet spot.

Suppose that the sweet spot is at 300Hz, so you are monoing everything from 300Hz and below.

Now, _after_ the bass monoing plugin, insert an instance of airwindows ToVinyl4. Raise the level of the Side Highpass slider on ToVinyl4 up to the same level as your bass mono threshold, and then back it off a bit until you hear and feel the movement around the soundstage as the low-end crosses over the highpass and mono thresholds.

All of a sudden it will be like sitting in the room with the instrument, with sound bouncing off things around you but in a very natural way. It is subtle, but opens up the soundstage and lets things move.

I just checked a project and my bass-mono was 300 with the TV4 SHP at 238.1. But I did this with my eyes closed and just listened. Needless to say the sweet spots will be very very very program dependent. You will know as soon as you hit them I promise : )

To goose this up a bit, do the following. Earlier in the chain, try another instance of bass monoing followed by something that will delay the mid channel a teensy bit (Voxengo Sound Delay is free and works a treat). Later in the chain, try Airwindows ToTape6 and move the flutter around until it is working nicely with the movement that you have already with TV4.

The result is kind of warbly and relaxed, but situated confidently on account of the monoing and SHPing.

I tend to make rather sparse music with a lot of negative space, but if I was doing a denser mix, I would probably give this a try anyhow!

Do report back if you give this a go : )

p.s. Airwindows Baxandall is a great EQ. Tiny bass cuts with it can give wonderful clarity to the low end.

p.p.s. If you have a mix that you like with rather a lot going on (maybe with lots of aw colouring things and Console7 and whatnot), then export it, and then start a new project inserting the exported master within the PurestConsole2 environment. Then try the bass mono and SHP trick above without the worry of getting lost within a forest of plugins. At any rate, it is best to be very happy with your mix as things stand before the above, otherwise there can be too much going on at times.

They're really the best plugins and I hope he never quits. You can be someone like me--completely ignorant of whatever technical stuff Chris is talking about--and still get unique sounds by stacking plugins willy-nilly and randomizing all sorts of parameters. I'm sure the console is great but I mostly appreciate the plugins as a point of inspiration like automatic writing. I've gotten some cool ideas by putting ReaSynth through twenty Airwindows plugins.

Leeplusplus wrote: Mon Sep 20, 2021 10:52 pm They're really the best plugins and I hope he never quits. You can be someone like me--completely ignorant of whatever technical stuff Chris is talking about--and still get unique sounds by stacking plugins willy-nilly and randomizing all sorts of parameters. I'm sure the console is great but I mostly appreciate the plugins as a point of inspiration like automatic writing. I've gotten some cool ideas by putting ReaSynth through twenty Airwindows plugins.

Hear hear!

The modular nature of it - the way that each plugin does something very particular and has a very small cpu hit - let one "build" one's own unique plugin chains.

I shall start posting some that I have found pretty useful soon : )

Adam_I_III wrote: Sun Sep 19, 2021 12:35 pm I don't really mean that I think his stuff is snake oil, just that I have a mistrust of the colouration stuff even though I know it to be accepted as legitimate widely. I should spend some time adjusting my prejudices.

I started taking it more seriously after a few frustrating 'mixed in Pro Tools, then remixed through a console' experiences. We were happy with our tracks, but in order to get a demo out quickly we mixed the 6 songs in the box one or two evenings. We added some fun blown out compression to liven some things up, we thought it was cool and moved on.

6 months later we had accumulated more songs, so decided to mix them all together and thru a Trident console this time. Just pulling up the faders on that thing sounded better than the demo ever did, even though we hadn't done anything else yet! (nor did we feel like we needed to do much after that) Clearly there were distortions happening on the individual tracks and on the stereo buss too, as the raw tracks hadn't changed. Those are the types of differences the Airwindows stuff can add, and I'm encouraged by some of these posts to try using them a little more aggressively. There are other products that achieve this too but the goofy GUI reel to reel machines or whatever are annoying.