Creative Effects

TAPERECALL

Cassette emulation modelled as a machine, with a transport you can play.

£39 £49Launch price

See the measurements

Formats: VST3 · AU · Standalone
Operating system: macOS · Universal
Version: v1.0.0

What it does

A deck you can actually drive.

A cassette is not a dark EQ and some noise. It is a mechanism: a motor that never quite holds speed, a head that loses contact with the tape, an oxide that saturates before it clips, and a noise-reduction system that never quite undoes itself.

TAPERECALL models those things as the physical effects they are, which is why it behaves differently at every setting instead of applying the same colour harder — and why the transport keys drive the capstan rather than an animation. Press STOP and the read pointer stops advancing while the write pointer carries on: the pitch falls away and the gap between them opens.

Transport is a parameter rather than a click, so a shuttle can be drawn into an arrangement.

Key features

A real varispeed transport

The four keys drive the capstan, not an animation. STOP brings it to a halt; the level fades with the last of the speed because a stalled read pointer returns the same sample repeatedly. PLAY spins it back up. The two shuttle keys bend the speed while held.

Wow and flutter specified as pitch, not delay

Each source is specified as a peak pitch deviation — the same quantity a service manual quotes — and displacement is derived by integration. That is why turning up the Rate does not also turn up the depth. Both properties are asserted by unit test.

Five layers, none of which is an LFO

Drift is a mean-reverting random walk over seconds. Wow is two sines at a ratio of φ, so their sum has no period. Flutter is a sine plus a band-limited random contour. Plus scrape and occasional capstan ticks. Randomness crossfades each toward its stochastic counterpart.

Dropouts are spacing loss, not a gate

When tape lifts off the head the loss follows roughly 55 dB per wavelength of separation — so it is savagely frequency dependent. The same lift that costs 12 dB at 10 kHz costs about a tenth of a dB at 100 Hz. A plain gain dip sounds like someone riding a fader; this sounds like the sound briefly going under water.

A compander that straddles the tape

Consumer noise reduction only works if its two halves sit on opposite sides of the noise. Built dual-path, so the decoder derives its side-chain from its own output and the two halves cancel exactly — whatever the filter shape or level law.

Mode is the machine, not the tape

Cassette, Microcassette, Reel to Reel and Dictation differ by transport speed alone. One number drives gap loss, head bump, noise floor and stability together, because recorded wavelength is speed over frequency.

The interface

TAPERECALL on its Master Glue preset in Reel to Reel mode, with Type IV Metal tape selected and the wow, flutter and dropout amounts pulled well down. — TAPERECALL · 1 of 1

How it works

The signal path, as the plugin’s own documentation states it.

input trim
  → noise-reduction ENCODE        (before the tape)
  → tape input saturation         (oversampled, antiderivative anti-aliased)
  → tape frequency response       (head bump, gap loss)
  → tape compression
  → wow / flutter / drift         (modulated fractional delay)
  → azimuth error                 (per-channel HF loss and read offset)
  → dropouts                      (spacing loss)
  → tape hiss                     (bias noise + modulation noise)
  → noise-reduction DECODE
  → output filtering
  → mix and output gain

Audio

Audio demos for TAPERECALL are not published yet.

We would rather show you nothing than show you a demo that was not recorded through this plugin.

Measured

TaperecallTests · M-series Mac · 48 kHz · stereo · 512-sample blocks

CPU — Eco (1×): 0.75 %
CPU — Standard (2×): 1.09 %
CPU — High (4×): 1.38 %
Realtime factor — Eco: 133×
Alias rejection on a folded harmonic, 4×: below −100 dB
Editor render vs master artwork, mean absolute difference: ≈6 / 255
Allocations, locks or file access after prepare(): none

Figures are produced by this plugin’s own test suite and benchmark, on the hardware and sample rate named above. They are not estimates.

Controls

Tape

Type: I ferric, II chrome or IV metal — how much level the tape takes before it compresses, how far the high end extends, how quiet the floor is.
Condition: One of six named states, each with its own emphasis rather than six points on one line.
Age: A continuous macro that closes the remaining distance to fully degraded.

Saturation

Mode: A warm or B crushed.
Drive / Character / Amount: A weighted blend of three bases, each of which integrates analytically, so anti-aliasing keeps working however the weights are set.

Motion

Wow & Flutter: Wow, Rate, Flutter, Rate, Randomness, Stereo, Sync with division, FM.
Dropouts: Amount, Rate, Length, Width, Randomness.

Noise & output

Tape Noise: Amount, Brightness, Width.
Noise Reduction: Amount, Brightness, Attack, Release, Mix. Exposed rather than fixed, because the same machinery is a genuinely useful dynamic high-frequency processor.
Output: Input, Output, Mix, Low Cut, High Cut.
Quality: Eco (none), Standard (2×), High (4×). The only control that changes latency.

Machine

Mode: Cassette, Microcassette, Reel to Reel, Dictation.
Colour: Warm Ferric, Bright Chrome, Neutral, Dark Dub, Lo-Fi Radio — a fixed tone shape after the tape, deliberately a different axis from Tape Type.
Transport: Rewind, Play, Stop, Fast Forward. A parameter, not a click.

Technical details

Formats: VST3 · AU · Standalone
Operating system: macOS 10.13 or later
Architecture: Universal — Apple Silicon and Intel
Plugin code: Tprc
Version: 1.0.0
Latency: A whole number of samples at every quality setting. Quality is the only control that changes it.
CPU: 0.75–1.38 % of one core
Factory presets: 23

Ordered the way someone scanning the menu would want them: Mix (settings that leave a mix alone), Character, Movement, Machines, then Broken.

Worth knowing

The interface is the approved artwork with its moving parts lifted off, checked by rendering the editor offscreen and differencing it against the master region by region.