Cassette by Wavesfactory

Cassette by Wavesfactory adds a vintage and retro feel to your music. With the uprising popularity of vinyl and cassettes, there’s no better time to start emulating their characteristics in your productions. Growing up in a tape cassette generation, the Wavesfactory team has really poured their passion into this plugin. Aiming to rewind time and bring back those flavours and characters of the old tapes this plugin both sounds and looks great.

A bit of imperfection or randomness can really add interest to a static sound. This plugin is a great way of recreating that quirkiness found on the old tape cassettes that some of us have a fond memory of. This is one of the first plugins I jump to when I’m looking to add a lo-fi or retro vibe to my productions.

Don’t be put off in thinking this will ruin your sounds in an attempt to create a pseudo-retro feel. The sound quality of this plugin is incredible. It only adds to the beauty of your sounds and can be tailored from the subtle to the extreme without completely destroying your ears.

The different tape types and settings give you plenty of options, helping you create the desired effect. The way the different tape models are displayed in the plugin is a cool visual touch too.

Watch the video or check out more features below.

You can grab a copy here: http://bit.ly/Wf-Cass (Plugin Boutique)

Watch Video:

Tape Emulation

Cassette has been carefully modelled after exhaustive analysis of several tape types (I, II, III and IV) and cassette recorders/players: Tascam 414 (Pro) and Omega Reporter-20 (Micro). Included a third deck named “Home” which is a combination of the Pro and Micro decks. As a result, you get the same sound and behaviour as the original units.

Magnetic tape is not sterile media. Because of that, it will impart its own sound signature to signals recorded into it. These include a different frequency response, frequency-dependent saturation, high-frequency compression, hiss, asperity noise and much more. Reproduction systems will also induce their fingerprint: wow, flutter, random high-frequency loss, crosstalk between channels, stereo unbalances and other.

All of these little quirks and random fluctuations have been modelled meticulously. Cassette imprints instant nostalgia, movement and analogue feel all around in its path. Cassette has been designed to be fun, pleasant to the ear and true to the medium.

What’s your type?

Wavesfactory modelled the four cassettes types available. Each one delivers different sonic characteristics.

• I: was the standard and most compatible tape format. Featured a ferric-oxide coating (Fe2O3). First appeared in the 1960s.
• II: with a chromium dioxide (CrO2) formulation was introduced at the dawn of the 1970s featuring an undeniable increase in high frequency response.
• III: living a short period between the mid 70s and early 80s, the ferro-chrome (FeCr) never made it into the golden era.
• IV: metal-formulated hit the scene at the end of the 70s. Features firmer bass as well as louder high frequencies.

Changing tapes will have an effect in the frequency response of the plugin but also in the saturation, compression, static noise (hiss) and dynamic noise (asperity noise).

Cassette by Wavesfactory Powerful Features

There’s much more under the hood than what you see at a first glance. In the settings panel, you are able to fully control all the parameters that make tape sound like tape. There are four sections.

• Tape: Wavesfactory always wanted to have a modular tape plugin in which they could enable or disable each step of the processing.
• Stability: Control how the Stability parameter in the front panel works internally. Includes “randomness” in order to make things unpredictable and analog.
• Extra: More of what makes a cassette sound like a cassette. Including the innovative “Re-Cassette” parameter.
• Artifacts: Control how the Artifacts parameter in the front panel works internally. Includes “Random Snap” for simulating the tape being caught momentarily causing pitch instability.

As you can see in this panel, Cassette uses oversampling in order to get rid of aliasing. The plugin always works at 192KHz sampling rate internally.

Cassette’s interface has been designed to be easy and quick to get the sound you’re looking for, but it also gives you the tools to go deeper.
The controls deemed most important are found in the main GUI: tape and deck selectors, input and output gain, erasures, spread, stability, static noise, dynamic noise and artefacts. You can also see the input and output meters above the correspondent input and output knobs. By clicking on the right and left arrows on the sides of the cassette art you’ll be changing the tape type. Just below that cassette, you’ll find the three switches that let you choose between the three different cassette decks.

At the centre, you can see the presets box with navigation arrows for easy switching. And at the top right you can see two icons. The ‘cog’ icon toggles the settings panel and the ‘burger menu’ icon toggles the main menu. At the bottom right corner, you’ll see the icon indicating that the whole GUI is resizable. Just drag to resize. The plug-in will remember its size and it can always be reset by clicking on the main menu and selecting “Default size”.

Cassette by Wavesfactory Vids & Links

If you would like to grab Cassette by Wavesfactory then please check it out using this link, which helps support Producer Life, thank you. Check the video from our YouTube channel that demonstrates some of Cassettes’ potential.

http://bit.ly/Wf-Cass