Wave Alchemy Tapewave

[jens]

I suggest you try the plugin and decide yourself whether it offers anything useful to you.

[Ah_Dziz]

Wet/dry is useful for chorus/flange style effects. I'll have to give this a try. I still mostly use WF cassette.

[seangm]

Dial it back a bit!

And there's literally no dry / wet mix knob to do it!

Since when do tape-emulations have a dry-wet control?

You dial it back using both the wow and the flutter depth and the age, drive, comp and drift control.

Indeed it doesn't make any sense to have a dry/wet

If you use it as a creative effect then it makes sense to have a wet/dry control, it's not necessarily meant to be used only to emulate a recording on cassette, it's just adding some of that color. I have 8 different tape plugins and half of them have wet/dry control.

[careyletendre]

Why would I want my music to sound like it's recorded on cassette though? I genuinely don't get it...cassettes were mostly fkn awful. I used to have access to a studio Nakamichi back in the day and that sounded pretty good, but only because it sounded like it was recorded on something better than cassette and didn't actually sound like cassette .

For example.

[martiu]

Why would I want my music to sound like it's recorded on cassette though? I genuinely don't get it...cassettes were mostly fkn awful. I used to have access to a studio Nakamichi back in the day and that sounded pretty good, but only because it sounded like it was recorded on something better than cassette and didn't actually sound like cassette .

[Gam456]

One of the best crappy lofi sound is form audiothing Wires tape

[Lotuz2019]

One of the best crappy lofi sound is form audiothing Wires tape

It's a wire though, not tape.

[SLiC]

I like WA but I cant help but wonder why they thought there would be any market for 'another' tape machine, I know its cheap but is there realy anyone who doesn't have several of these already? You have been able to pick up UA, PA or Softube versions for just a few bucks...it just seems like a strange thing to bother developing in a 'saturated' market (pun intended!)

[wave alchemy]

Well, based on the demos on their site, i vastly prefer the audio when its bypassed . doesn't sound much like tape, and more like some combo of soft sat and compression with added wobblediness

Of course, the demos on the website are pushed pretty hard, as otherwise (as we've seen in the past), people complain about the plugin not doing much. We also like the idea of Tapewave being used as a character plugin - although certainly you can add it to the master bus with default settings to achieve a very realistic cassette sound with subtle life-like tape saturation and compression and very realistic frequency response curves. Espeically when used at 16X oversampling.

We created Tapewave out of a passion for tape. I was personally very dissatisfied with the basic sounding waveshaping / soft clipping style of distortion the other cassette plugins in this category are passing off as 'real sounding' tape saturation (You can replicate the saturation almost identically with any basic included DAW soft clipper / waveshaper for example). The saturation model in Tapewave uses detailed physical modeling and sounds far closer to tape than any of the other cassette plugins on the market in my humble opinion. Try running drums through Tapewave and turning up the drive knob and comparing that to driving the others heavily and you should hear a very noticeable difference, along with the low/end bump you get from real tape. Other plugins simply clip the sound and remove the transients, which is not how real tape behaves. Likewise for the cassette modes and age control too. We haven't done simple EQ / filter curves like the others here.

The compressor (when in Loc mode) is an incredibly accurate model of the classic Shure Level loc, which we felt would be a good pairing for this type of gritty effect, for adding character.

That's not to mention the digital aliasing type artefacts in the other plugins. Try running a 5kHz sine wave through some of the others, and you should hear a noticeable difference, or even better turn up Wow depth on both Tapewave and the others whilst doing this and you will clearly hear unwelcome digital effects.

I don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole, or go on too much of a rant, but hopefully you get the idea behind Tapewave. If we didn't feel that the quality was significantly higher than the current offerings, we wouldn't have put in the time to make this product.

You also get a very good and characterful output limiter (optional) based on a classic hardware unit, and what we feel is the smoothest and most accurate Wow / Flutter in any plugin. This is especially unique when using the Noise / Random mode, which unlike others that use LFOs to achieve this, we have used a complex Perlin noise generator, that has been fine tuned to model the pitch inconsistencies of real tape, whilst keeping it smooth and artifact free.

I hope this helps, and I'd definitely encourage you to do your own tests and comparisons

[wave alchemy]

I like WA but I cant help but wonder why they thought there would be any market for 'another' tape machine, I know its cheap but is there realy anyone who doesn't have several of these already? You have been able to pick up UA, PA or Softube versions for just a few bucks...it just seems like a strange thing to bother developing in a 'saturated' market (pun intended!)

There are only a small number of plugins that aim to give you a 'cassette' type sound. We tried all of them felt that none of them sounded very good to our ears (and have a lot of digital artefacts too). A blunt statement, but it's what I personally felt and I've personally been using real tape for many years. You can read a more detailed thought on that above.

We are not trying to emulate a clean / master tape machine like the others you mention. Tapewave is purely a character plugin and will give you a very different vibe to the others. Especially when paired with the Level Loc emulated compression engine. Think of Tapewave as a tool for dirtying up individual tracks, adding boatloads of character and punch to drums, or taking things into super retro, lofi territory with very in-depth cassette model curves, age control and what we believe to be the smoothest Wow / Flutter engine

[wave alchemy]

Wet/dry is useful for chorus/flange style effects. I'll have to give this a try. I still mostly use WF cassette.

Sure, we do have a 14-day fully functioning demo in case you missed it

[jens]

I like WA but I cant help but wonder why they thought there would be any market for 'another' tape machine, I know its cheap but is there realy anyone who doesn't have several of these already? You have been able to pick up UA, PA or Softube versions for just a few bucks...it just seems like a strange thing to bother developing in a 'saturated' market (pun intended!)

I have quite a number of tape-emulators (not much in the way of cassette though, the IK Tascam 388 aside), and still think this one brings a lot to the table the others don't... and with the intro-price it becomes almost a no-brainer for me.

And really: the sound examples don't do it justice in the slightest.

[Ego_Shredder]

We also like the idea of Tapewave being used as a character plugin - although certainly you can add it to the master bus with default settings to achieve a very realistic cassette sound with subtle life-like tape saturation and compression and very realistic frequency response curves. Espeically when used at 16X oversampling.

The saturation model in Tapewave uses detailed physical modeling and sounds far closer to tape than any of the other cassette plugins on the market in my humble opinion. Try running drums through Tapewave and turning up the drive knob and comparing that to driving the others heavily and you should hear a very noticeable difference, along with the low/end bump you get from real tape. Other plugins simply clip the sound and remove the transients, which is not how real tape behaves. Likewise for the cassette modes and age control too. We haven't done simple EQ / filter curves like the others here.

The compressor (when in Loc mode) is an incredibly accurate model of the classic Shure Level loc, which we felt would be a good pairing for this type of gritty effect, for adding character.

You also get a very good and characterful output limiter (optional) based on a classic hardware unit, and what we feel is the smoothest and most accurate Wow / Flutter in any plugin. This is especially unique when using the Noise / Random mode, which unlike others that use LFOs to achieve this, we have used a complex Perlin noise generator, that has been fine tuned to model the pitch inconsistencies of real tape, whilst keeping it smooth and artifact free.

I'd definitely encourage you to do your own tests and comparisons

This guy on YouTube certainly does his own tests and comparisons, and that is why I am sharing his video here as I thought the results were much more convincing than previous plugins from the past. NOTE: This is not my video and I do not have any affiliation with Wave Alchemy or their products.

[Effectsworks]

Love the interface! Generally I'm a big fan of WA.
Buuut the problem with these things is i have numerous tape emulation vsts. I don't need anymore tbh.
Also, I wasn't overly blown away by the demos.

[wave alchemy]

A: This cassette tape sounds like shit
B: I know, great, isn’t it?

Agreed many of the sound demos are OTT on the effect front. Dial it back a bit!

Sorry to hear that you don't like the plugin.

In case you are interested. Here is a more subtle, but still quite vibey A / B comparison with Tapewave used on the Master Buss with Ultra oversampling mode, applying around 3db of compression, slight 'age' effect and subtle tape saturation. Obviously things can go way subtler still, but hope this helps (note, the Raw mix is still peaking louder than Tapewave here):

Dry

Tapewave


Thanks!