Oolong Saturator

Oolong is a saturation plugin built for music production, mixing, and mastering. It's designed to offer exceptional flexibility, outstanding sound quality and a deeply musical character.

Free from the usual constraints of traditional analog modeling, Oolong draws inspiration from tube preamps and tape machines–but it's tuned by ear, not by textbook. The result: a sound that's not bound by emulation, but built to feel right.

With just a few simple controls, Oolong moves easily from subtle enhancement to bold distortion—from the sweet harmonics of a tube amp to the smooth dynamic shaping of vintage tape—and everything in between.

Try it out: https://berglindaudio.lemonsqueezy.com

Video Walkthrough with drum loop: {See video at top of page}

Keyboard examples: https://youtu.be/cVMAkYx2km0

Manual: Manual

FOR NOW IT IS ONLY MAC AU/VST3. WINDOWS VST3 IS COMING SOON.

Features:

• Highly flexible saturation with unique character from a complex adaptive algorithm.
• Excellent sound quality with very low aliasing.
• Clear, ergonomic, resizable GUI with intuitive controls.
• Carefully designed auto gain to help you make the best decisions.
• Low latency: 32 samples in 44.1k, 16 samples in 48k and no latency above that.
• Custom low and high EQ filters with high quality, decramped audio processing.
• Well behaved parameter automation (no clicks, crackling or pops).
• Very low CPU-usage.

What's unique about Oolong?

I created this plugin because I felt no saturation plugin I could find had the right combination of ease of use, flexibility and sound quality. Here are some of the (to my knowledge) unique features:

• The saturation algorithm adapts to the audio and saturates transients more than sustained notes. This extends the sweet spot of subtle-but-audible saturation from a range of a few dbs to a range of 20 dbs. It yields a wider range of saturation before you reach the point of obvious distortion and makes it easier to dial in the sound you are looking for on dynamic sources.
• With the full-control, we can handle bass heavy sounds without having the lows trigger heavy distortion, for example saturating the transient of a kick drum without affecting the fundamental too much, or saturating a whole mix without distorting the bass. This goes beyond the widely used emphasis-deemphasis technique.
• Smooth-control to adjust the amount of added upper harmonics.
• Wide-control to add subtle width in the added harmonics.
• Crispy-control to dynamically brighten or darken the sound.
• Some tricks in the saturation algorithm enable very low aliasing while having low latency and low CPU usage.
• Perfectly flat frequency and phase response unless you choose use the EQ.