I’m Robert and this is a set of ports of Airwindows plugins with a little tweak here and there. For those not familiar with Airwindows: Chris Johnson is a longtime audio plugin developer who decided a few years ago to make the switch to Patreon and release his entire body of work as open source. Also, he is very much into modular, but hasn’t come around to create Rack modules himself (he came up with firmware for Music Thing Modular’s Chord Organ though). So I decided to give it a shot.
Anyway, I invite everyone to put the plugin through its paces before I submit it to the library. Hope you enjoy.
UPDATE: Aaaand it’s available in the library now. Thanks for the feedback and support. Cheers!
I didn’t explore it in depth, so I have almost nothing useful to report, except that it sounds fantastic and works perfectly. The chorus is definitely a standout, especially as a creative effect set to extreme settings.
Only problem I noticed: the right click > plugin > manual link is broken.
Documentation is the main bottleneck with Airwindows. Most of the 200+ plugins are more ruthlessly simple (in an elegant way) than weird IMO. The Rackwindows selection is quite representative of that. In practice even the weirder ones like Hombre tend to be very intuitive once you are clear about what they are for and how to use them (documentation problem).
Gainshifter is based on bit shift gain, which is meant to be a minimally lossy gain adjustment (moving in 6 dB increments.) AFAIK it shouldn’t distort on it’s own…
@n0jo I like the selection you made! Hard to imagine making a patch without at least one of these in moving forward.
Thinking about how much use they might get in the rack environment, I agree with @ablaut, the dynamics heavy hitters make sense: ADClip 7, Pressure 4, ButterComp2. I’m a sucker for the analog style saturators though: channel7 and busscolors4 are nice flexible packages.
(@ablaut I also love tubedesk, but is there as much of an advantage to having a full rack port (vs running it in Host) for the ones that have no control?)
Thanks for the kind words, guys. Good to see this draws some interest.
Requests? I should have seen that coming Yeah, it’s absolutely time for that, but please be patient, as I do something very different for a living and things might move slowly. For now the plan is to make sure this current collection is stable on all platforms and sounding exactly like their counterparts.
Btw I have a request too: I’d really appreciate any help with testing. Algorithms are easily messed up (I do not understand most of them in detail), particularly when making things polyphonic. Gain is a fickle thing too with some of these modules, e.g. Console working correctly is entirely dependent on proper input gain, but is somewhat difficult and laborious to test and I can absolutely not guarantee that it’s doing its thing as intended.
So yeah, any help and feedback is much appreciated. The more ears the merrier
Just wanted to say, I am Chris from Airwindows and I’m so grateful you’re doing this. I’ve yet to get the plugin building environment to work for me, so you are the only way I have to get my own audio code inside VCV Rack. I deeply appreciate it
Yeah, it’s absolutely time for that, but please be patient, as I do something very different for a living and things might move slowly. For now the plan is to make sure this current collection is stable on all platforms and sounding exactly like their counterparts.
