ELPHNT has released Analog Tape, a free Ableton Live Rack, designed to emulate various audio tape effects.
Here’s what they have to say about it:
There really is nothing like the sound of tape, whether you’re after that crunchy saturation, warm colour or the wonky, wobbly wow & flutter you can use TAPE to add some vintage flavour to your productions.
Now I’ll be the first to admit, TAPE is by no means the best tape emulation out there – there are some amazing plugins that emulate the sounds of analog tape with amazing accuracy using all sorts of algorithms and component and frequency response modelling to copy the sound of tape in a very detailed way.
However, there are much more general characteristics of tape that don’t require detail circuit modelling to achieve; TAPE cleverly copies these characteristics to create a tape sound that is very generic but surprisingly authentic.
Analog Tape is a free download via the ELPHNT site.
If you’ve used Analog Tape, leave a comment and share your thoughts on it!
Was about time. After all these years the only “for the people” affordable emulation (that sounds pretty sweet by the way) was ReelBus by tone boosters . I would advise to check their plugins out. affordable and very good sounding. I am not a professional mastering engineer or anything but in my ears they sound very good. Now lets try out this ableton tape thing-y .
Yay, thanks for the share Synthtopia! If anyone has any questions please let me know – there’s a contact page on the site.
I’m trying to submit you a message in your site, and it shows an error message saying “Unable to submit form. Please try again later”.
I downloaded twice, and both times it showed me a message in Ableton saying the plugin was broken.
Hi Paul,
Sorry you’ve been unable to submit the form, not sure why :/ What version of Live are you using? TAPE needs at least Live 9.7, Standard or Suite.
Funny how our tastes change with time…
I’m a child of the 70s and 80s … tape was everything and getting a great recording was a big deal. My cassette deck was able to record on normal, chromium dioxide and metal tape and had Dolby-B noise reduction … I could never afford metal tapes but Cr-dioxide tapes were just affordable and they were used to record those extra-special LPs (Rumours anyone???) … I would demagnitise the recording head, clean the recording head and tape capstan with alcohol and adjust the recording level just so – not too low or else the noise floor (tape hiss) would be too audible but not too loud so that it distorted (nicely distorted though – not the same as digital clipping) … I tried to get crystal clear recordings and really looked after the deck so that mechanically it was in great condition with very, very low wow and flutter.
I still have bags of old cassettes and occasionally play them … the quality has obviously degraded after all these years but they still have lots of charm.
I’m really feeling old now …
Some people think the final product is all that matters…
this sounds fantastic.
Unfortunately I downloaded twice, and both times it showed me a message in Ableton saying the plugin was broken. Somebody had the same problem?
Thanks!
yeh… preset could not be loaded- it’s probably broken
Hi mrMr, what version of Live are you using? TAPE needs at least Live 9.7+ to use, Standard or Suite. If you’re using an older version then you will get an error.