sixteen tapes
listed from the most transparent to the most coloured. hover any tape for what it does and how hard each of the nine features works on it; right-click to make it the default for new instances.
tape medium
alive:medium
Intro Sale
sixteen invented tapes and nine features that react to what you play, subtle enough for thirty instances and the master at once. every copy draws its own serial number, so the tape on the next track is a slightly different machine.
- sixteen tapes
- nine features, live
- per-tape settings
- supply
- in / out
leave it on everything.
fractions of a dB, program-dependent, well under 1 % of a core per instance.
alive:medium makes a track sound like it lives on a physical medium. it is built to sit on most of a session and on the master at the same time, so it is deliberately subtle: fractions of a dB, program-dependent, and never quite the same twice. put it on thirty tracks and the mix gets warmer, not muddier.
pick a tape. sixteen invented calibrations run from sk-1, a mastering-clean reel, through chrome and ferric cassettes to four dark tapes (rst-3, ash-0, soot-8, vd-00) with heavy sag. hover one and the deck tells you what it does and how hard each feature works on it.
nine features run under the deck, each with its own live light. drift is the magic: no machine ever holds its calibration, and this one adds a slight, restless misalignment that gives depth to anything it touches and never repeats. around it: erasure softens loud, bright material; iron saturates the lows through a transformer; fatigue tires the tape on loud passages and lets it recover; loss dips the top; motion adds wow and flutter; supply makes every low hit pull the tape speed down and back; crosstalk bleeds each channel into the other; breath is hiss that swells in the quiet parts. open the gear and every feature on every tape has its own switch and amount.
every copy draws its own four-digit seed: its serial number. the same tape on the next track is a slightly different machine. click the seed to type one in.
- sixteen tapes, from mastering-clean sk-1 to black, heavy-sag vd-00
- nine features with live activity lights: drift, erasure, iron, fatigue, loss, motion, supply, crosstalk, breath
- per-tape feature switches and 0–100 % amounts in the gear view
- supply quality reg / stk / trd / fail — automatable, worse supply means a longer sag
- track / bus calibration
- in drives the tape with automatic output compensation; out is level only
- a per-copy seed: every instance is its own machine
- user presets with name and author
- fixed 2.7 ms latency
- well under 1 % of a core per instance
- au + vst3 · macos universal + windows x64
nine features, live
drift, erasure, iron, fatigue, loss, motion, supply, crosstalk, breath. each has a light under the deck that shows how hard it is working right now.
per-tape settings
open the gear and every feature on the loaded tape has its own switch and amount, 0 to 100 % of that tape’s calibration. drift is the magic: leave it on.
supply
how well the machine is powered, on any tape. regulated, stock, tired, failing: the worse the supply, the longer every low hit drags the tape down before it gets back to speed. automatable.
in / out
in is how hard you hit the tape: more saturation, a harder sag on every low hit, and the output compensated so your level stays put. out is your level, nothing else.
requirements
- OS (Mac)
- macOS 11 Big Sur or later
- OS (Windows)
- Windows 10 or later
- CPU
- Intel or Apple Silicon / AMD or Intel x64
- RAM
- 4 GB minimum, 8 GB recommended
- Size
- 20 MB
- Formats
- VST3, AU
- Latency
- 2.7 ms, fixed
versions
| version | date | notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0.0 | 2026-09-30 | first release. |
| 1.0.1 | 2026-10-01 | fixes sign-in and activation (licence lookup), typing in the login screen on macOS, and the purchase, docs and manage-devices links. |