Anyone who’s used real cassette tapes knows the magic of those unpredictable and charming pitch fluctuations known as wow & flutter. In the past, manufacturers worked hard to eliminate these irregularities, or you’d experience the best pitch modulation just before the machine broke down and needed repairs—making it a real challenge to work with.
Most plugins that claim to emulate wow & flutter rely on a simple LFO, but we’ve gone further by recreating random fluctuations that mimic the true behavior of analog tape. Best of all, unlike real tape decks, you can control exactly how much wow & flutter you want, without the risk of your machine suddenly giving out on you!
Dial in the drive
One of the best parts of using a cassette recorder is overdriving it for unique, character-filled saturation.
Our advanced saturation circuit captures the warm, analog drive you love while eliminating digital artifacts like aliasing. With 16x oversampling, Tapewave ensures a smooth, analog-like sound in your final mix. Plus, you can easily switch to standard or efficient modes to save CPU without sacrificing quality.
Unlike other plugins that rely on basic waveshaping or soft clipping, Tapewave’s tape saturation is meticulously modeled after real tape machines for an authentic sound experience.
- Experience the authentic sound of cassette tape in a streamlined, easy-to-use plugin
- Add life, soul and warmth to digital mixes
- Six unique tape styles, each delivering its own distinct character – from clean and punchy to dark, gritty, and lo-fi
- Take things further with Tape Age, a seamless control that transforms each tape style from pristine to worn-out – capturing a wide range of cassette degradation
- Painstakingly modelled analog tape saturation circuit
- Two analog-style compression modes, including a vibey Shure Level Loc emulation, let you crush transients or tame dynamics effortlessly
- Authentically recreate the unstable pitch movement inherent of old analog tape
- Creative Wow & Flutter engine for realistic pitch fluctuations, featuring both stable cosine curve modulation and a custom-tuned Perlin noise generator for authentic pitch warble
- Make Wow & Flutter even more unstable with the creative Drift control
- Switchable tape hiss circuit
- Punchy output maximizer for extra loudness
- Up to 16x oversampling for smooth, alias-free operation
- Internal preset browser with searching, tags and favorites
- 100 production-ready presets
- Resizable high-definition UI
- Undo and Redo parameter changes
- Available as VST3, AU and AAX on macOS and Windows
- Apple Silicon native on macOS
System Requirements
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Platforms supported: Mac OS and Windows
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Plugin formats: VST3, AU, AAX
- Native support for Apple Silicon chips
