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AirWindows Reference

Controls, practical uses, and cautions for the eight Airwindows effects included with GlassTracker.

These effects appear under GlassTracker Bundled when you add an insert to a Channel, Master, or AU Return strip. They use the same editor, bypass, parameter mapping, project-state, and recovery flow as other hosted effects, but ship inside GlassTracker and do not require a separate AUv3 installation.

They start audible, and they keep your dry signal

Each one loads on a GlassTracker starting point chosen for an insert: you should hear it working straight away, and the untreated signal still passes through. Airwindows’ own defaults are aimed at an aux send instead, where several of these effects open fully wet and two of them do nothing at all until a control is moved. Add one to the REV or DEL send bus and it loads fully wet automatically, which is what you want there.

Choose an effect

Effect	Type	Good starting use
ButterComp2	Compressor	Gentle bus glue and tonal smoothing.
Capacitor2	Filter	Analog-flavored tone shaping and sweeps.
ClearCoat	Ambience	Bright early reflections without a long tail.
ClipOnly3	Clipper	Catch peaks at the end of a chain.
Dark	Wordlength reducer	Darker digital texture or deliberate bitcrushing.
Galactic2	Reverb	Very large pads, drones, and spatial washes.
Mackity	Console drive	Raw vintage mixer-input overload.
TapeDelay2	Delay	Moving, imperfect tape echoes.

Dynamics and output

ButterComp2

A smooth compressor for joining sounds together without sharply announcing the gain reduction. Its detector behavior becomes slower and more characterful as it is driven, so it can also reshape ambience and reverb tails.

Control	What it does
Compress	Raises the amount of compression and the audible character of the detector.
Output	Trims the processed level for gain matching.
Dry/Wet	Blends the original and compressed signals for parallel compression.

Start with a modest Compress setting and compare at equal loudness. Increase Dry/Wet gradually when you want glue without losing transients.

ClipOnly3

A control-free final clipper. Audio below its threshold passes without intentional level processing; peaks entering clipping are softened to make the transition less abrupt.

ClipOnly3 is not a limiter

It has no threshold, ceiling, release, or output controls. Place it near the end of a chain to catch brief peaks, and lower the level before it if clipping becomes a constant audible effect.

Filters and color

Capacitor2

A combined low-pass and high-pass filter with signal-dependent analog modeling. The NonLin control lets the filter movement react more strongly to level, adding character beyond a static clean filter.

Control	What it does
Lowpass	Sets the upper-frequency cutoff.
Highpass	Sets the lower-frequency cutoff.
NonLin	Changes the amount and direction of level-sensitive filter behavior.
Dry/Wet	Blends the filtered and original signals.

Use it for broad cleanup, animated filter sweeps, or parallel filtering. Raise NonLin after setting the basic passband.

Mackity

Models the input-stage behavior of an early compact Mackie mixer. It is intended for raw, springy overload rather than transparent gain.

Control	What it does
In Trim	Sets how hard the modeled input stage is driven.
Out Pad	Reduces the result so driven and clean levels can be compared.

Increase In Trim until the desired punch or breakup appears, then use Out Pad to restore headroom before the next insert.

Dark

A wordlength reducer designed to make low-level digital texture feel darker. It can work as subtle final-stage quantization or as an obvious variable-resolution bitcrusher.

Control	What it does
Quant	Selects the base output wordlength mode.
DeRez	Continuously lowers effective resolution for increasingly obvious crushing.

Keep DeRez low for subtle output texture. Raise it when the reduction itself should become part of the sound.

Dark can be inaudible by design

With Quant at its high-resolution setting and DeRez down, the reduction lands far below anything you can hear on a channel — that combination is a deliberate no-op. GlassTracker loads it lower down instead, where the texture is part of the sound. Raise DeRez for more.

Ambience and delay

ClearCoat

A bank of 17 bright, compact ambience patterns. It emphasizes nearby reflections and small lively spaces instead of producing a long reverb tail.

Control	What it does
Select	Chooses one of the ambience patterns.
Dry/Wet	Blends the ambience with the original signal.

Try it when a dry source needs dimension or sparkle but Galactic2 would occupy too much space.

Galactic2

A very wide, very large stereo reverb designed for sustained sounds and space ambience. Drive changes how strongly the reverb network is excited; Sustain controls how long energy remains inside it.

Control	What it does
Drive	Trims the signal feeding the reverb. Maximum is unity; lowering it drops the level into the network steeply.
Sustain	Extends the decay toward self-sustaining ambience.
Darken	Softens high-frequency energy in the reverb.
Wetness	Crossfades reverb against dry — at maximum the dry signal is gone entirely. The read-out shows the percentage.

Wetness is steeper than it looks

The curve is heavily weighted toward the wet end: halfway up is already about 94% wet, and the range useful on an insert lives in roughly the bottom fifth of the travel. Watch the percentage read-out rather than the slider position. On the REV or DEL send bus, fully wet is correct.

High Sustain can continue indefinitely

Above roughly two-thirds, the tail can become effectively endless. At maximum it may slowly gain energy. Lower Sustain, bypass the insert, or stop the source if the wash begins to build unexpectedly.

TapeDelay2

A tape-style echo with deliberately limited bandwidth and irregular motion. Changing Time behaves like changing tape speed, so echoes bend in pitch instead of jumping cleanly to a new position.

Control	What it does
Time	Sets delay time and produces tape-like pitch movement when changed. Higher settings are shorter echoes. The read-out shows the resulting time in milliseconds.
Regen	Returns delayed sound to the input for additional repeats.
Freq	Sets the tone-filter frequency inside the echo path.
Reso	Adds emphasis around the echo filter frequency.
Flutter	Adds irregular, level-reactive tape-speed movement.
Dry/Wet	Blends the echo with the original signal.

Set Time and Regen first, then shape the repeats with Freq and Reso. Add Flutter last so its movement is judged in the intended feedback pattern.

Time runs backwards, and it is a tape speed

The control is a tape speed, not a delay length, so turning it up shortens the echo: the full range runs from about 2000 ms at the bottom to about 70 ms at the top. Because it sweeps a fixed-length loop, the same setting is a slightly different time at a different sample rate — roughly 77 ms at 44.1 kHz against 71 ms at 48 kHz. Read the milliseconds next to the slider rather than the position of the slider.

Watch high regeneration

Large Regen settings can produce a self-sustaining or growing echo. Reduce Regen before experimenting with resonant filtering at high levels.

Source and refresh

These descriptions are paraphrased for GlassTracker from the creator’s evolving Airwindopedia. Consult that source for the broader Airwindows catalog, design notes, and future revisions.