|
|
Post by kcatthedog on Dec 1, 2022 2:47:18 GMT -6
|
|
|
|
Post by the other mark williams on Dec 1, 2022 3:12:33 GMT -6
I used to use a bunch of Chris's stuff, but it's been a few years since I pulled any of them up. He's a very interesting dude. Definitely still off the beaten path a bit. |
|
|
|
Post by copperx on Dec 1, 2022 9:17:48 GMT -6
The Airwindows deesser detection algorithm is impressive. More often than not, it works better than DMG TrackDS and the Fabfilter one. However, the lack of gain reduction metering is sad.
|
|
|
|
Post by plinker on Dec 1, 2022 9:25:52 GMT -6
I bought a few of his plugs years ago. I agree with the previous sentiments. He’s got interesting capabilities, really innovative, but his UI was really poor back then. I don’t know if it’s gotten better.
|
|
|
|
Post by robo on Dec 1, 2022 12:07:44 GMT -6
I bought a few of his plugs years ago. I agree with the previous sentiments. He’s got interesting capabilities, really innovative, but his UI was really poor back then. I don’t know if it’s gotten better. There is no UI for Airwindows plugins, just sliders with labels. This “use your ears” approach is part of what most of us users find attractive. I subscribe to Chris’ Patreon because I regularly use his plugins, but they are all free and open both in use and code. There are A LOT of plugins so it’s intimidating to jump into. Here are the ones that get used on pretty much every project for me: Console8 (summing/console emu, has peculiar workflow) Monitoring3 (all the utilities you’d want at the end of mixbus) Focus (a few saturators with bandpass slider) Bandaxall (obvs) Acceleration (high freq limiter/ compensating boost) Air (obvs) Texture (psychoacoustic magic) ClipOnly2 (clipper that gobbles harshness) Tube (obvs) Srsly (stereo magic) |
|
|
|
Post by bossanova on Dec 1, 2022 12:25:01 GMT -6
I've been down the rabbit hole with a few of Chris's processors. There were periods where I used the console and tape plugs and in the end just wasn't getting the sound I wanted or preferred the sound when they were bypassed. And it's not that they weren't doing interesting things, just that it was easier for me to stop second guessing whether they were ultimately helping.
I also used his dithers for a little while but now I just use the standard Reaper dither with ultra high quality resampling.
The Airwindows plugs that actually get the most use from me are his utility plugs like Monitoring and Left/Right To Mono. That last one is so basic but it's a surprising PITA to do it elsewhere.
|
|
|
|
Post by mcirish on Dec 1, 2022 12:29:10 GMT -6
He seems like a very smart guy and possibly some of his code is brilliant. That said, his lack of interest in any GUI keeps his products from being more widely used. I've used a few in the past but found the lack of meters and even a basic gui to be unusable for me. If I'm staring at something all day, it can't look like Windows 95. Sorry to be harsh.
|
|
|
|
Post by the other mark williams on Dec 1, 2022 13:11:35 GMT -6
Chris's refusal to do a custom GUI of any kind is part of his overall ethos, so I don't begrudge him that at all. He used to crack me up when he would talk about never having any "blinkenlights" in his plugins. I really appreciate his spirit and his character. I remember an email conversation I had with him back in 2010 or so, and I was telling him about a particular problem I was having with some audio I'd recorded under waaaaay less than ideal conditions. He literally coded a plugin overnight that helped with the problem. I was not expecting that, and it was very cool of him.
I did eventually stop using his plugins for various reasons, but I still have a lot of respect for how he's managed to carve out a very particular corner of the audio world for himself. It's inspiring in many ways.
|
|
|
|
Post by yewtreemagic on Dec 2, 2022 17:17:24 GMT -6
I'm another Airwindows user and Patreon subscriber, and regularly use quite a few of his plug-ins. I agree that the lack of GUI's, and particularly the lack of any metering, makes using them trickier, but have found some of them very useful once I've got my head around their gain-staging (many rely on being fed signals approaching 0dBFS for their effects to become audible, which makes them trickier to incorporate into individual channels running near -18dBFS than on the mixing buss). I also love the way he uses his 'golden ears' and mathematical brain to come up with novel new algorithms to acheive an end result, but our ears part company when he firmly sticks with his belief that the negative audible effects of oversampling code are invariably worse than the sound of aliasing  |
|
