Yes, it's not totally unknown to say the least. Not a commercial product, but much more interesting, since the developer is this Standford educated DSP genius guy. He also develops for some commercial companies, but his Chow Tape and his other freebies are very highly rated by those

They don't have overly fancy commercial GUI and can be a bit buggy at times (only on some setups), but the developer is a really friendly guy, who is very open to feedback from users!

 

https://medium.com/swlh/tape-emulation-with-neural-networks-699bb42b9394

 

I think this could sound good, but the "box tone" & marketing for the "Gold" portion worry me a bit.

From reading the manual, the box tone just seems like a slight high shelf with a low-pass filter applied before any nonlinear processing. Box tones are generally inaudible, and when they are, it's a dice roll on whether they sound good or bad in your mix. I'd rather just apply a high shelf or low-pass with greater control beforehand. Not a big deal I guess.

As for the "Gold" part, I'm not sure what they mean by artifacts associated with attack/release. Do they mean micro-transients that are missed with non-same-sample attack times? Pumping with release? Since these are virtually eliminated with good compressor designs. From the manual it claims to not have attack or release times to perform compression. A compressor without attack or release times is functionally just a soft clipper. You can test this out with Sixth Sample's "Clips" in which the compressor sounds the same as the soft clipper with true 0 attack/release times. (Have not null tested this)

"Gold performs a sample-by-sample analysis of the clipped signal and compresses the audio, leaving peaks and transients largely untouched."

Perhaps it's a soft clipper that only attempts to clip "non-transients"? Like a transient shaper but as a soft clipper? If anyone could shed some light on this with the demo or retail version that'd be appreciated as I don't want iLok on my computer. The concept does sound interesting but I fear it'll be much less exciting than the marketing & manual make it out to be.

 

that's kind of random. Chow Tape is kinda famous and some might say it's the best FREE Tape sim plugin. I also think it's good sounding if dialed correctly. It has a lot of controls making the huge range of Tape FX from the subtle mastering tape to 8bit lofi tape kinda sound if you want to go to town with every single little details about it. There's also Impact Soundworks Tape Sculptor which is a paid version of a Tape sim plugin using ChowTape DSP code.

 

there's another new player in town.

 

I can't really hear a difference between soft clippers. Is there anything actually different between them aside from the knee/shape & oversampling algorithm?

 

Not gonna lie, I'm really that close to buy it.

What do you guys reckon ?

Should I hold my breath for that one to appear on the sister site ?

 

alright, can anyone explain me why are there so many companies releasing clippers all at once and what's the appeal? like ffs it's a clipper, why are you charging $200 lol

 

I guess its a trend, like the tape plugin trend and the limiter trend.

It always happen that 3-4 company release the same type of product. I'm not sure there's anything to understand from it though.

We had the Linear EQ trend a few months ago.

 

they gotta find another name for saturation, too much saturation plugin in the market. Let's name it clipper, let it do some mediocre hard-clipping and add bunch of saturation options with fancy name, so it doesn't look like a saturation plugin. Clearly all these plugin are focusing on the "soft-clipping" part of it.

 

I swear there's so many goddamn tape plugins. Am I the only one who finds tape distortion distasteful? It just never seems to sound as pleasant as other types.

 

There is a sh!t load I must admit haha.

I do like a few of them but in small doses.

 

Same question here. I may buy it today or tomorrow tbh.

I don't really care what the technical terms are, i really like what it does to the sound. And it suits the genres i work in really well. I'm working on stuff right now that i'm super curious to try it out on. I literally can't stop thinking about the plugin during my day-to-day activities over the past few days lol. It has infiltrated my mind, haha. It must be mine... my precious....

It has a rent-to-own purchase model which is nice

Do you think the Impact Soundworks version is better than Chow Tape? Or is it the same?

 

it wasn't meant to sound ideally pleasant in the first place, theoretically it adds asymmetrical harmonics that is more odd order harmonics heavy, in music theory, that's just notes out of scale. It adds bite and edginess to the track while rounding off the transient in trade of spreading all those harmonics over the frequency spectrum. Off topic, in music it's how the dissonant collection of notes used creatively to create something unique, edgy but still awesome in its own way, but it's not for everyone. I rate musician by how good they work with those. It's the same concept with tape style saturation, tape machine and such. Hard to make sense of it at first but the more you aware and familiar with it, you can't live without it. Here's example of music that I believe using that kind of concept. Ah, they don't call it music anymore at this level, it's always a masterpiece and not everyone get it. Only experienced mixer/producer can work on it, or else mfs will try to pitch correct everything and notch out every resonance. lol

 

Last edited: Jun 17, 2023

one is free and another one already released on sister site (DCMAed though) so you can give them a test ride. I'd suggest try the free Chow Tape first, the controls are mostly the same, but the Impact Soundwork version added few more stuff (like it isn't enough already lol). Chow Tape has description on every controls too, so it's easier to understand.

The way I test a tape machine plugin is using plugin doctor vst and check every single controls first, and try to shape the harmonic to the way I know gonna sound good and varied them after, flux, modulation, whatever after from minimal to extreme. Then create bunch of presets (10-15) and then randomly use them on tracks. The best part about making those presets with Plugin Doctor is you can gain match them (almost) perfectly, and adjust the EQ until it's linear (or with low bump if you like em) so when you drop the preset on the track you working on, it saves you time and you can properly judge them quicker. Also put the other tape plugin you like on the B side of plugin doctor and try match them see how they react. It takes time but ChowTape is a good plugin to learn details about tape machine settings, highly recommended to learn all the controls. I didnt use the Impact Soundworks version that much to have a fair opinion on it yet. ChowTape though, quite often because I have favourite presets in it that works for certain situations. Ah don't forget to put the lowest number possible on Azimuth to get that slight imperfection of tape machine alignment, magic number is 0.04 I LOVE THAT SHIT!

 

This is my next d&d characters name

 

My ultimate mastering plugin will be called Golden God. It will have a picture of Robert Plant on it.

 

No... I try and try to like them but eventually I always take them off again.

 

I'm 100% with you on that one. 200$ is a sh!t ton of money for a plugin but not much in comparison to gear. 20$ a month on the other hand is just 2 bottle of wine less.

Not gonna lie, I hate to ''try'' a plugin and work on something and commit to then have to rework a huge chunk of the process because I found out at the end that it just doesn't help. I also don't have a contract to work on as we speak.

 

Yeah, it's deffo a trend. Somehow clipping has become the new hype in town. I guess what makes clipping so fascinating for amateur users is how drastic they can affect the sound. Lots of people who are into EDM and similar genres just clip the poop out of their drums and synths and their mix is halfway done already.

I would never pay 200 bucks for a clipper, especially not with free great alternatives around like GClip, VennAudio Free Clip or lately Peak Eater that can handle basic clipping tasks perfectly. If you want to pay for a clipper, get something like LVC Audio's Clipped-MAX which is hugely underrated and delivers a lot of bang for only a few bucks. It's nothing wrong with paying for a few additional parameters (usually not present on freeware clippers) to shape the sound further. Another one I really liked is the one by Newfangled Audio (Saturate), since it really sounds more high fidelity than most mathematically generic implementations, but comes with a hefty latency / CPU tax! So it's not really usable for tracking and "mixing while composing".

One thing I find missing in most clippers is emphasis and de-emphasis EQ , so you can target the clipping to hit specific parts of the frequency range more and others less (sort of like internal sidechaining in a compressor). For example: You don't want the bass to be oversaturated: turn the bass frequencies that goes into the clipping stage down and after the clipping stage the bass is being compensated, so there is no loss in bass, just less bass that is being clipped.. You can set this up manually with an EQ before and after a clipper, the one after the clipper doing the exact opposite of the one before the clipper. But that's not as comfortable as having it implemented directly into a clipping plugin...