Harsher Reality

Harsher Reality is a signal damage and recovery engine. Most lo-fi plugins damage a sound and walk away. Harsher Reality is built on the other half of the story: the machines that fought for the signal.

One dial, ACCEPT REALITY, takes your sound from clean and expensive to broken and hostile. Six media decide how it breaks, and the DENIAL recovery stage listens to what the destruction took away, the air, the body and the attack, and pushes it back through the wreckage. The sound stays broken, but it refuses to die.

Six machines, not six presets. Each medium carries its own baked-in voice, present even with all damage knobs at zero, and its own animated machine on the panel: a spinning reel-to-reel, a cassette, a turntable, a VHS deck, radios:

• Tape: warm, gentle, low hiss.
• Cassette: bright tape hiss, flutter.
• Vinyl: crackle spikes, dark surface noise, true 33 rpm wow.
• VHS: slow wobble and mains hum.
• Radio: squeezed bandpass and static bed.
• Digital: dead-silent floor, pure crunch.

Features:

• ACCEPT REALITY macro: clean to broken on one dial.
• Media-aware damage: wow/flutter, drop outs, wear, scratches, tracking, jitter.
• Media-aware signal loss: the station fading into static on radio, hard glitch cuts on digital.
• DENIAL recovery, the sound remembers what it was.
• Drop a WAV onto the plugin to hear it destroyed in real time, then export a 24-bit render.
• 100+ presets.

Editions:

• Harsher Reality Lite: free forever (Tape, Cassette and Vinyl plus the core damage set, no licence key).
• Harsher Reality Pro: a one-time 39.95 USD, with a 7-day full Pro trial in every install.

VST3, AU and Standalone for macOS and Windows.