If you buy a tape vst today.

[Unaspected]

I just purchased Tape the other day and concur with what sqigls is saying.

The beauty about well designed hardware emulations is that you have a wealth of tone control in just a few parameters and especially in how you gain stage. I was mixing drums last night using only The Drop (on all but the room signal - that took a little tube distortion from HG-2 as well) and see no need for any surgical EQing. The Drop is quite the tone box.

I'm going to complete the mix by placing Tape at the end of the the chain on every channel to emulate having tracked the performance to tape. Once the other instruments have been tracked and processed with Tape (at the end of the chain), I'll mix with Tape only on the master buss. I would suggest that, if you're going to bounce stems (all your busses) then you'll want Tape at the end of your group busses but if you're producing a single stereo file to be mastered, you would only place Tape at the end of the master channel. That makes most sense to me.

It depends a bit of the usage. If you looking more for some kind of tape effect, U-He Satin could be a better option, because it allows tweaking of many parameters.

For me, this would be a negative point as I only want tape tone. Softube's Tape doesn't provide many parameters but those that it does are very useful (good design). It's quick to set and arrive at a useful sound.

magnetic is a nice tape strip in sale for 29 bucks, i use this as part of
tone shaping chains.

Magnetic does lofi cassette tape pretty well - which is why I bought it. I couldn't compare it to Softube Tape though, they're in different leagues.

[Harry_HH]

Tape is the ONLY one I'd use.
AudioThing Reels is good for lo-fi stuff, but i don't like any of the others.
Slate VTM for example, is shite. The waves stuff, all of them just can't really nail tape.
Their behaviour regarding transients for example, is just a bit goofy.

Softube Tape is TIGHT for ultra surgical computer sculpted sounds.
The others aren't. In my opinion and experience. The bass and top-end can be adjusted for a bit of TASTE, not just 'choose the best of whatever some code monkey could manage to bang out before he sold it to you'.
I'm not talking 'EDM' here, i mean the fine arts. Tight low end. Crispy highs that don't slice your ears off.

ruffle those feathers

Unfortunately Softube has given the authorization for Göbbels, which demands your iLok password, before it allows you to use the plugin. I have pending unused, paid Softube plugin because of that.

[sqigls]

at least they're not Waves

[Burillo]

i think they have a way of using Softube plugs without Gobbler.

[Unaspected]

at least they're not Waves

I would worry because I've yet to see you write anything I don't agree with.

[Unaspected]

i think they have a way of using Softube plugs without Gobbler.

They do. You don't have to link to Gobbler. There are essentially three ways to do it all - with two installation methods. iLok account linking can be done manually - it should appear in your account once registered. It's all detailed on Softube's website: https://www.softube.com/download.php

[Teksonik]

If I bought a Tape Plugin today this would be the day Hell Freezes Over.......

[trmupstage]

Softube Tape is on all my drum channels. Just the slightest bit of saturation/compression helps to glue the tracks together and tame some of the transients in a subtle way. Very useful.

BTW: I'm using this on acoustic drum tracks, not samples. I'm not sure samples would benefit from it but real drums do.

[jens]

Just tried Console Shaper on a submix bus, then this, feeding the 2 bus with Softube Tape mix effect with passthrough enabled.
If this makes sense, like having two 2 busses using mix fx.

I do it the other way around - Console Shaper on the master, Tape on a submix bus that everything else is going into - works great!

[Local Man]

I've been trying out Softube Tape and I am surprised by how subtle it is (full disclosure: I have a cold right now so I could definitely be missing some finer details).
There has been a lot of discussion lately about what these tape plugins are actually supposed to be doing and for that matter what recording to tape actually does. I'm struggling to find what I'm looking for out of a tape plugin. The "realistic" ones are way too subtle and for me don't really add anything to the mix that couldn't otherwise achieve (when A/B'd I usually don't care one way or the other) and the more Lofi effect oriented one's just sound muddy to me.
The thing I am looking for in a tape plugin is what I like to think of as the forgiving nature of tape. Like many, I've never used a studio grade reel to reel machine. My only experience with tape at all was on a 4 track cassette recorder when I first started. Now obviously that is not the tape sound people talk about when they talk about how great tape sounds. The cassette sound was one people grew to hate. But some of the things I liked about recording to cassettes (the smooth high frequency roll off, the natural sounding compression, the overall gelling effect), I hear in many classic studio recordings, just minus the extreme noise and distortion (and with a much more full frequency spectrum). The tape sound that I hear on classic albums from the 70s for example is not at all as subtle as something like Softube tape. The closest I can come to reproducing that sound in my DAW is by recording everything transposed up by a couple of semitones at a faster tempo and then slowing the speed down until I reach the original key. To me that's the sound I'm missing from these pristine tape plugins. I don't know how to describe it but there is a certain slowness to it. The transients are literally slower. It gives things some extra weight and your ear kind of accepts little timing and pitch issues more because they don't sound as abrupt. This is the same as the forgiving nature of tape that I am talking about. I guess what I am trying to say is that I know that tape evolved to the point where it is so pristine that it is almost indisguishable from good digital audio, but that is not the kind of tape I want to emulate in my DAW (I mean what's the point?). But I also don't want that Lofi, nasty cassette sound that is really only useful for that kind of cartoonish, nostalgia laden sound. I want a tape plugin that sounds obvious but not because it is some distorted mess. Maybe it's just not possible yet, I don't know.

And if you want to know the kind of sound I am talking about, listen to Sticky Fingers or Electric Warrior by T Rex or any Queen album or really anything from that era. The tape sound that you can hear on these albums is in no way as subtle as something like Softube Tape.

[Harry_HH]

i think they have a way of using Softube plugs without Gobbler.

They do. You don't have to link to Gobbler. There are essentially three ways to do it all - with two installation methods. iLok account linking can be done manually - it should appear in your account once registered. It's all detailed on Softube's website: https://www.softube.com/download.php

It is very strange if this really is the case: 2017 I was in contact with the Softube support, and they didn't give any other alternatives than using Gobbler. Gobbler had to alternative auth. method: bad and worse. The bad one included giving Gobbler both your iLok username and password. The worse was (is?) the Gobbler App installer, the user had to install to the DAW.

NOTE. This all concerned Softube plugins purchased from dealers. Plugins purchased directly from Softube can (could?) redeem via iLok Manager. Unfortunately my Softube plugin is purchased via dealer, as most of my plugins are.

In addition to the Sofube category command (I can document the whole conversation by mail, if needed) either to use Gobbler or 'hit the road' , I had a long discussion with the Gobbler management in the Gearslutz.
I wrote to the iLok support and to the dealer I purchased the plugin.
No result, the plugin is still unauthorized.

If, after all this, there really is a way to authorize Softube plugin purchased via dealer/vendor WITHOUT the Gobbler, please write the instructions down here. I believe the Softube "alternative method" is same as iLok redeem, but that works only plugins purchased directly from Softube.

I don't believe that, after used about 100 hours in the near past trying authorize my Softube plugin without Gobbler, by discussing both with the Softube, Gobbler, dealer and iLok supports, and they all said 'Nay'.

[do_androids_dream]

Softube Tape is on all my drum channels. Just the slightest bit of saturation/compression helps to glue the tracks together and tame some of the transients in a subtle way. Very useful.

BTW: I'm using this on acoustic drum tracks, not samples. I'm not sure samples would benefit from it but real drums do.

Plugins have no knowledge of whether you're using acoustic drum tracks or 'samples'. It's just an audio signal. It's going to impart its qualities to whatever you feed it. That's why I can use Ferric TDS on acoustic folk or techno or death metal masters. It will impart what it does regardless. Sometimes I wish plugin manufacturers would market more on what their plugins actually do to a signal rather than what romanticised bit of kit the gui looks like.

[beely]

I had heard good things about Tape in the past, so was open to trying it out, and when the sale came along, I resisted for a day or two before trying out the demo. I already had a Softube/Gobbler account, but you don't need the Gobbler app to install or authorise.

Anyway, I tried out the demo, and really liked it.

For context - like everyone doing home recording in the 80s, you were using tape - in my case, cassette 4-tracks, and they were, of course terrible sounding. When I did take my MIDI stuff to a local studio to put on reel-to-reel, I never really liked what I heard coming back, what I wanted to hear back was a pristine recording of my synths etc as it sounded, not that crushing of transients and so on.

So, I've never been *that* fond of tape, due to those experiences.
(Of course, everyone's idea of what "tape" means, or sounds like, is different.)

I have explored a bunch of tape saturation options, including impulses, and usually found that in most cases, these plugins were trying way too hard to shout "TAPE!!" on your audio - too much EQ shifting, too much transient crushing etc for my tastes. No matter what I did, they tended to be way to "tapey" for my tastes.

So one of the things I *really* liked about Softube's Tape was that it wasn't trying to hard to shout TAPE on my sources, it can be nicely subtle (though of course, if you drive the inputs really hard, back down the tape speeds etc it can get grungy) - it just doesn't kill the life out of transients, but just adds some slight softening in a (to me) pleasing way.

So it's one of the first tape plugins I tried that really worked for me (I thought Satin was great too, but it's over-complex for my needs), both very subtley on individual/all tracks, and on the mix buss. Exploring the various three types, and pushing the input and saturation knobs, and the high freq control gives a nice range of predictable colours to use, without too many interacting controls to understand.

So I bought Tape, it's low latency, low-CPU, and subtle enough to actually *use*, and I'm very pleased with it.

And it's got a few extra uses to grunge up individual sources, and the tape flanging option is kinda cool as a little extra. So it gets a thumbs up here!

[SoundPorn]

Still the most accurate sounding actual tape emulation i've heard is AirWindows free From Tape 5. Hornet has a good tape plugin and Toneboosters ReelBus is really good.

[dark water]

I often use Satin, Reelbus and AirWindows 5, which are all decent tape emulations.
Softube seems to be an excellent one too, though I don't have it.

However, this is currently available and is a bit of a bargain at its early access price:
https://www.acustica-audio.com/store/products/taupe

FWIW, the members of Gearslutz are very enthusiastic about it in the thread there, and to my ears it sound fantastic.
It is also surprisingly for AcusticaAudio very low on CPU (anyone such as myself who has used Nebula etc for about 10 years will know all about CPU usage...).
Lastly, it's good to experiment with and comes based on a number of tape machines.
(In passing, the Lemon Delay plugin from AcusticaAudio also offers some excellent tape FX etc).