Subhoofer by Ardura

Subhoofer is a sub and bass enhancement plugin aimed at being a lightweight replacement for other subharmonic generation plugins. Use it to make your bass audible on small speakers or extend the sub range in bass signals! You can also beef up guitars, add bass to other instruments, presence to vocals etc. Experiment!

Join the discord! https://discord.com/invite/hscQXkTdfz

Check out the KVR page: https://www.kvraudio.com/product/subhoofer-by-ardura

Description

Subhoofer can generate bass harmonics as well as a subharmonic in addition to a few saturations aiding it

KVR Page: https://www.kvraudio.com/product/subhoofer-by-ardura

The default settings are already configured to mimic a bass plugin of renaissance 🙂 However feel free to tweak further!

Parameters:

● In Gain - Gain before any processing happens

● Out Gain - Gain after all processing happens

● Wet - How much processed sound is there instead of dry/unprocessed sound

● Hardness - Tone control for harmonics - modified Chebyshev algorithm

● Harmonics - Generated harmonics added to the signal

● Harmonic Algorithm - The methods used to generate harmonics:

● A Bass New: Ardura's algorithm updated in 2024 for bass enhancement

● 8 Harmonic Stack: An 8 harmonic stack with a different low-focus than Algorithm 1

● Duro Console: A Modified 7 harmonic stack from Duro Console that favors non octave harmonics

● TanH Transfer: Harmonics added in from a tanh transfer function pretending to be tape

● Custom: Custom Harmonic Sliders for user to create their own tones

● Sub Gain - Gain for the subharmonic generator

● Sub Drive - Send the subharmonic signal to TanH Transfer for subtle Sub harmonics added in

Installation

Drag the vst3 file into your "C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3" directory or wherever your vst3 are stored. Done!

Examples and comparison

RBass

This is a sine wave run through Renaissance Bass(top), and also Subhoofer(bottom):

LoAir

This is a sine wave where Subhoofer generates the harmonic below similar to LoAir Before: After (extreme setting):

Known issues

● xcb flags as a security issue for some unchecked casts and unsafe returns from functions in a dependency

Building/Compiling Subhoofer Manually

You should do this if the precompiled binary fails or you have a unique system configuration (like linux)

After installing Rust on your system (and possibly restarting your terminal session), you can compile Actuate as follows:

Make sure your dependencies are installed. These are the packages you will need at minimum: libgl1-mesa-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libxcursor-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev libatk1.0-dev build-essential libgtk-3-dev libxcb-dri2-0-dev libxcb-icccm4-dev libx11-xcb-dev
- Note I have also found on some systems libc6 or glibc needs to be installed depending on your configuration
Run the build process in a terminal from the Subhoofer root directory

cargo xtask bundle Subhoofer --profile release

Or use the following for debugging:

cargo xtask bundle Subhoofer --profile profiling

Your outputs will be in the Subhoofer/target/bundled directory.
the *.clap you can copy to your clap directory/path, the vst3 one needs the folder structure copied on linux

Other Build information

The builds on GitHub and KVR are VST3 and CLAP format, and are compiled on the following machine types:

Ubuntu 22.04
Windows' 2022 build (Win10? The Github runner just lists "Windows-2022")
MacOS 12
The MacOS M1 build is on OS 14

Thanks!

This plugin was made possible thanks to the Nih-Plug Rust Library, the egui GUI library, and Airwindows source code thankfully being MIT licensed which helped me learn. I highly recommend supporting Chris https://www.airwindows.com/

ardura / Subhoofer