Creative Effects
TAPERECALL
Cassette emulation modelled as a machine, with a transport you can play.
Free 10-day trial. The download is the whole collection, 22 plug-ins in one installer, so you can try every one; start TAPERECALL's trial from inside the plug-in when you are ready. Downloading does not start it, and trying one plug-in does not start the others.
- AU (macOS)
- VST3
- AAX
- macOS Universal
- Windows 64-bit
- v1.0.3
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, and the reels follow the capstan.
Back in time after a shuttle
A deck in a session has to come back to the grid. STOP then PLAY puts it there: a stop closes the gap completely, and the spin-up runs slightly fast to pay back its own lag. Leave it on PLAY after a rewind and it recovers by itself, a two-second rewind in about 22 seconds.
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 are exactly complementary whatever the filter shape or level law. What it does to the hiss is modest and only in quiet passages; its character is in the mismatch, the familiar breathing, and it starts switched off.
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
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
TAPERECALL README and release audit · 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
- Reported latency at 48 kHz, Standard quality, AU and VST3
- 799 samples
- Editor render vs master artwork, mean absolute difference
- ≈6 / 255
- Allocations, locks or file access after prepare()
- none
- auval, shipping AU
- VALIDATION SUCCEEDED
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
- Type I Ferric, Type II Chrome or Type IV Metal: how much level the tape takes before it compresses, how far the high end extends, how quiet the floor is.
- Condition
- New Studio Tape, Used Cassette, Old Mixtape, Damaged Tape, Garage Recording or Extreme Degradation: 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, RANDOM, STEREO, with SYNC and a note division for the wow, and FM.
- DROPOUTS
- AMOUNT, RATE, LENGTH, WIDTH, RANDOM.
Noise & output
- TAPE NOISE
- AMOUNT, BRIGHTNESS, WIDTH.
- NOISE REDUCTION
- AMOUNT, BRIGHTNESS, ATTACK, RELEASE, MIX. Off until AMOUNT is raised. Exposed rather than fixed, because the same machinery is a genuinely useful dynamic high-frequency processor.
- OUTPUT
- INPUT, OUTPUT, MIX, LOW CUT, HIGH CUT.
Machine
- MODE
- Cassette, Microcassette, Reel to Reel, Dictation.
- COLOR
- Warm Ferric, Bright Chrome, Neutral, Dark Dub, Lo-Fi Radio: a fixed tone shape after the tape, deliberately a different axis from Tape Type.
- QUALITY
- Eco (none), Standard (2×), High (4×). The only control that changes latency.
- PRESET · SAVE
- Step through the factory bank and your own presets, and save yours.
- Transport
- Rewind, Play, Stop, Fast Forward. A parameter, not a click, so a shuttle can be drawn into an arrangement.
- Power
- Bypass, and the same parameter the host's bypass drives. It crossfades to the delay-matched dry path over 35 ms, so the tape keeps running underneath and switching back neither clicks nor restarts the noise.
Technical details
- Formats, macOS
- AU · VST3 · AAX
- Formats, Windows
- VST3 · AAX
- Operating system
- macOS 10.15 or later · Windows 10 or later, 64-bit
- Architecture, macOS
- Universal: Apple Silicon and Intel
- Architecture, Windows
- 64-bit
- Plugin code
- Tprc
- Version
- 1.0.3
- Latency
- 799 samples at 48 kHz on the default Standard quality, and a whole number of samples at every 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.
Also in these bundles
COMPLETE COLLECTION
Get TAPERECALL as part of COMPLETE COLLECTION, 22 plugins worth 708 for 199.
199
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