Airwindows Stonefire: Free Mac/Windows/Linux/Pi AU/VST/Rack

[jinxtigr]

TL;DW: Stonefire is the non-EQ EQ designed for ConsoleX.

Stonefire.zip(516k)

There's a reason people have never turned to using Kalman filters for audio purposes.

They're tricky little buggers, unpredictable, with a 'filter slope' that makes no sense at all. They'll take the crossover point and bounce it around wildly, they'll throw in weird gatey behaviors, they'll turn what's supposed to be a 'smooth' 'filtered' sound into an edgy growl and sputter. They're meant to pull real data out of a pile of noise, not to take real audio and give you anything sensible. Nobody would want a Kalman filter for audio purposes.

Stonefire uses two different kinds of Kalman filters for audio, as crossovers. The top crossover is the same as what's in Air3. The bottom crossover comes with a range control (even though that won't give you a 'frequency') and is the same as what's in Kalman.

And when used properly, Stonefire gives you unprecedented levels of tonal control over the texture and presentation of your sound, in a way that almost doesn't even have to do with frequency.

There's three bands, plus the Range control. Air, Fire, and Stone. Each can be cut back to zero, or boosted (Fire and Stone match, while Air has a lot more gain on tap but will match from 0.5 down to 0.0.) If you cut them back to zero you'll get the weird Kalman behavior, but it'll help you set the Range control appropriately. You can set it so Stone covers the lowest lows (never JUST those, it will always do other stuff too) or up to the high mids and lower treble.

Then, if you keep everything balanced and make smaller adjustments, the secret of the Kalman filter emerges. You have to use it as a crossover, and let it apply its incredibly strong character to texture, not frequency. It utterly fails to be a 'filter', but it's an extraordinary texture-shaper, and it's what I'm going to be building the upcoming ConsoleX system around.

Use the Air control like you would in Air3. You can cut back super-highs while seeming to not affect the brightness at all, with a strikingly natural effect. Or, boost it to bring that sparkly aura and light up the sound. It's a custom algorithm that deals with high sample rates by just ramping up the boost: treat it with respect, but it's there to serve your needs for glitter or lack of same.

Use the Fire control like it was an attitude knob, as much as a midrange. You can get a lot of wildness out of this one with careful settings of Range. Between Fire and Stone, only one can be louder: it's a crossover. If you're boosting Fire, that means you want your sound to command attention.

Use the Stone control like it's the bedrock of your sound. If you lean entirely on it and kill all the Fire, you'll get a monumentally heavy, sputtering, gatey foundation that zeroes in on the lowest lows, but also tries to put backbone behind anything it thinks is heavy and powerful. This includes lower midrange. Cutting it can control unwieldy bass, but adding it isn't the same as adding a 'bass boost': it'll zero in on things like kick weight and try to present them with unnatural isolation. The secret to adding weight with the Stone control is to let it not seem to be that much of a boost: you can transform the feel of a sound well before you hear 'added bass'. You can also dial the Range up and use the same effect up into the midrange, for an intensely solid punchy character anywhere a sound seems flimsy.

God help you if you try to measure this thing with PluginDoctor or SPAN. I don't even have any idea what will happen. It's all made out of Kalman filters, which are not for use with audio.

Except… when they are

Enjoy the new tone shaping. If it's too ugly, use way less, see how it treats you

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[jinxtigr]

Oh… also, hilariously it was HERE that I found that the only other plugin maker ever to claim use of Kalman filters was… crysonic

I don't believe they really did reshape transients in their limiter with Kalman filtering because that wouldn't actually help at all with the limiting… but anyway THIS is what real actual Kalman filter sounds like. Namely, pretty strange, but used as a crossover it's very interesting

[Funky40]

Check on 303 !


Thank You Chris !

[Funky40]

CHECK THIS OUT ON PIANO !!....surprise, surprise.


some spare time ? here:
i run Pinanoteq K2.
I do not have the Yamaha YC5.....which the folks like for Pop, Rock.
But i would say Stonefire brings my K2 exactly "in this direction". ( vs. Rock-Pop)
More bite, more Sparkle, ........more something. More anything. But a bit less bass. (with my right now settings)

i´m not into Band- nor Production- context.
But i would guess this should work amazingly good "there".
Maybe even magicly good ?

my right now ( ~ ) settings:
Maybe take it +- as a "starting point" (our in Level might vary).
From Air to Range.
86
70
85
36.
Or just start with Range slightly down, the others at 75, then experiment


I´m not yet sure how good this thing is.
something from really Good, to insanely good, to magic, to "it´s a stroke of genius".
Time will tell, haha.

[meloco_go]

How Kalman filter would work in a detector of a dynamic processor?

[VariKusBrainZ]

Despite Crysonic business practice i liked their plugins

[DJErmac]

Excellent plugin, thanks !

[jinxtigr]

How Kalman filter would work in a detector of a dynamic processor?

I like the way you're thinking it would do whichever behavior you selected. For instance, if you made it key off of extreme low bass it would respond to the 'gatey, sputtery' thing and the dynamics would react to that. Therefore you could make a compression that really clamped down on low bass, but you're not hearing the detector, you're hearing the processor.

But it gets even more interesting, because normally part of making a compressor means cutting down volume AS the volume exceeds the threshold. I normally deal with that by instead modulating the speed at which it compresses or releases, but it's still a factor. It causes a subtle coloration to the sound that's more and more extreme as attack and release speed get shorter.

But with a Kalman filter, the sound being subtly added is not the original sound, instead it's the Kalman-ized sound. And we already know that if you're not listening to raw output, it blends in a really interesting way that applies a texture. But if you're just modulating volume using this effect that's guaranteed to be a subtle application of the sound… so it becomes an alternate way to apply either a highpass or a lowpass.

So if you're applying a highpass you're applying the 'fire' sound to compression, but what that's doing is taking AWAY more of that sound leaving the 'stone' sound, except what's left is still fullrange and only the dynamics modulations are modelled after the 'stone' sound with its extra punchiness in the lows.

And if you're applying the lowpass, you're applying that gatey punchy lows sound, taking away more of it (this is also where you'll find big dynamic peaks) and what's left is fullrange with the dynamics modeled after what's normally left in the 'fire' band.

And of course this is the only situation where I am genuinely, truly interested in multiband compression and seeing what happens when you compress both and then recombine them. The normal kind is really boring to me, but on this? That just got a lot more interesting.

Thank you for asking