Airwindows Ultrasonic: Mac/Windows/Linux AU/VST

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raysaul wrote: Tue Nov 24, 2020 9:30 am Fabien from TDR made a compelling case on why ultrasonic filtering is important on high sample rates when they released their tool for that (which, sadly, remained in beta stage until this day, so Airwindows version is more than welcome)
Mine calculates its biquads in long double precision, and dithers to the floating point buss. Also, I often like my own versions of things, and like having featureless plugins with no interfaces. I feel they are more CPU-efficient, but I'm not sure it stays more CPU-efficient since I did the biquads with such long word lengths :)

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Question: Are Airwindows plugins ever updated?
Will we see an Apple Silicon version of this plugin, or VST3 in the future?
THIS MUSIC HAS BEEN MIXED TO BE PLAYED LOUD SO TURN IT UP

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Do interfaces impact CPU when they're not visible?

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ScrLk wrote: Tue Nov 24, 2020 7:38 pm The use of at least TDR's ultrasonic filter is to band limit your signal before you pass it over to the next process. You don't need to process anything that you don't hear after all, and all the extra bandwidth can do is cause trouble, which can end up back in the audible range.
Low sample rates (44.1/48) are the weakest to Aliasing Distortion, because there are more of those frequencies bouncing back into our audible range when processing with plugins (not when the track was just recorded).

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ScrLk wrote: Wed Nov 25, 2020 1:30 pm Do interfaces impact CPU when they're not visible?
They shouldn't.

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jamcat wrote: Wed Nov 25, 2020 2:43 am Question: Are Airwindows plugins ever updated?
Will we see an Apple Silicon version of this plugin, or VST3 in the future?
I don't like the way Steinberg forbade people from continuing to sign up to legally make VST2.4 (allowing only grandfathered devs like myself, who signed up by a certain deadline), and I don't like the way Apple brought my iMac Pro to a screeching halt one afternoon when a whole series of non-Apple apps refused to launch, on a day when I was gonna do live streaming, because they couldn't send their telemetry to an Apple server I'd never asked to have all my app launches reported to.

So it's gonna have to be 'we'll see', though you know if this really really bothered anybody, the code is MIT licensed, so technically you could port it to those things and begin SELLING it quite legally. And so could anybody else, so that might put a bit of a damper on the ol' greed factor :lol:

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jinxtigr wrote: Sat Nov 28, 2020 3:15 am
jamcat wrote: Wed Nov 25, 2020 2:43 am Question: Are Airwindows plugins ever updated?
Will we see an Apple Silicon version of this plugin, or VST3 in the future?
I don't like the way Steinberg forbade people from continuing to sign up to legally make VST2.4 (allowing only grandfathered devs like myself, who signed up by a certain deadline), and I don't like the way Apple brought my iMac Pro to a screeching halt one afternoon when a whole series of non-Apple apps refused to launch, on a day when I was gonna do live streaming, because they couldn't send their telemetry to an Apple server I'd never asked to have all my app launches reported to.

So it's gonna have to be 'we'll see', though you know if this really really bothered anybody, the code is MIT licensed, so technically you could port it to those things and begin SELLING it quite legally. And so could anybody else, so that might put a bit of a damper on the ol' greed factor :lol:
The reason I ask is because a lot of your plugins are very interesting, particularly these little ones like Ultrasonic that solve a specific issue. But as there are so many, and they are, as you say, bespoke, it seems that they are pretty much one-off and not going to be updated, as that would be quite an undertaking to do for free plugins.

For myself, I am very concerned with future-proofing. I don't want to get attached to a plugin that becomes part of my process only to have it no longer work one day if there is an update to my DAW or OS, and the developer is no longer around, or is not updating the plugin. A lot of good plugins have been lost to antiquity because of that.

So that's my predicament. I could see multiple instances of Ultrasonic on every channel becoming part of my workflow on every song. But I could also see Ultrasonic not loading anymore after upgrading to Studio One 6 or a new Apple Silicon Mac Pro.
THIS MUSIC HAS BEEN MIXED TO BE PLAYED LOUD SO TURN IT UP

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Interesting. I'm curious if such steep filter inserted on every channel, sometimes/often few times per channel, will not cause any cumulative artifacts by itself? I don't know what are the pros/cons of used filter in this plugin.

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This is another game changer for me, thanks so much Chris.

I do all my mastering work at a minimum of 96k. So far I have put it just before the transfer DAC output to my analogue chain (lots of non-linear processing happening there), and it has made things sound much better. I did also try it just before the final digital limiter, after the analogue chain, but it sometimes sounded too strong to have two of them in the chain, and for this particular project (classical music that required extremely little limiting) it probably wasn't necessary. I will continue to experiment putting it before the final limiter with material that needs to be more heavily limited, to see if makes a positive difference.

This in combo with NJAD or Dark "dithers", have really helped my masters retain more of an analogue sound. Fantastic stuff.

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jamcat wrote: Sat Nov 28, 2020 8:12 am The reason I ask is because a lot of your plugins are very interesting, particularly these little ones like Ultrasonic that solve a specific issue. But as there are so many, and they are, as you say, bespoke, it seems that they are pretty much one-off and not going to be updated, as that would be quite an undertaking to do for free plugins.

For myself, I am very concerned with future-proofing. I don't want to get attached to a plugin that becomes part of my process only to have it no longer work one day if there is an update to my DAW or OS, and the developer is no longer around, or is not updating the plugin. A lot of good plugins have been lost to antiquity because of that.
I can only say that when I have a substantial improvement in the overall framework of the plugins (such as, introducing dithering to the floating point buss) I update literally all the plugins, and it's months of work to do it.

Same for when I went from 32 bit AU to fat binary, PPC/32/64. I worked out the new build process, and then I updated every plugin for everybody for free (that was before Patreon days).

I'm more interested in past-proofing as what I see is a behavior from Apple to make new versions of stuff not work on older machines, so I resist that by building on an older machine and relying on the simplicity of the specification to carry the plugins forward: this is why you have to tell Catalina and subsequent MacOSes that the plugins are okay to use through Gatekeeper. There is no path for me to build that into the plugins without throwing away all previous working computers that could run plugins, so it's on the user. I'm given to understand there's no real speed penalty for emulating Intel under Apple Silicon: my stuff is already very efficient, so it may be that it'll just run under a Rosetta-like process indefinitely.

By the time that Apple throws away that Intel emulation and forces everybody to develop on Apple Silicon for Apple Silicon only, I may be entirely dedicated to building hardware synths out of CMOS chips and done with plugins ;) and of course, it's all MIT license and publicly available source on Github, which is owned by Microsoft, which I'm sure would be happy to have a library of code out there that's not Apple Silicon-only.

In short, if your concerns are about compatibility and stuff being made to not work (become obsolescent) when you update, I am not your problem there, and I am not the danger you face :D

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This is the first piece I mastered using Ultrasonic, which was placed just before NJAD and then out the transfer DAC to the analogue chain.

It was eight years in the making, and is a rendition of ‘Salve Intemerata’ by Thomas Tallis from the Renaissance period, by my client, Richard Galbraith. It is fully realised on modular synthesiser. I don’t normally spam forums with my mastering work, but very occasionally something so great and moving comes along that I feel obliged to! The synth programming, arrangement and mixing chops are all off the charts, and I thought Chris might be interested in hearing his delightful creations used. The lossless downloads from Bandcamp are at 24/96:

https://richardgalbraith.bandcamp.com/t ... mas-tallis

23 minutes of perfection. Just stunning. Crank it up! I really feel that Ultrasonic helped the sound quality in this case.

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