23Tape

23Tape is the most downloaded plugin 23DSP has made, and 23Tape_1 is the version it deserved: the same idea — a complete, dynamic simulation of magnetic tape — rebuilt from scratch on the Season 02 framework so it installs cleanly, validates everywhere and does exactly what the knobs say. Still free.

23Tape_1 is a new plugin, not an update. It carries a new plugin identity, so it installs alongside the old 23Tape rather than replacing it. Sessions that use 0.8.3 keep loading 0.8.3, and settings do not carry over — when you want a track on the new engine, insert 23Tape_1 and dial it in. The old downloads stay on Gumroad for a while, marked as outdated.

What the sections do

Tape characteristics. Speed — 7.5, 15 or 30 IPS — sets where the top end starts to roll away (about 7.5, 15 and 20 kHz) and where the head bump sits; slower tape is darker and bumpier. Type — Ferric, Chrome or Ferrichrome — gives each formulation its own frequency tilt and its own compression: Ferric is the warmest and squashes hardest, Ferrichrome the brightest and most open. Drive pushes into a hysteresis saturation stage, the nonlinear memory of magnetic tape rather than a static curve, and Bias shifts that curve while leaning on the tape compressor at the same time.

Noise. Band-limited Hiss with a Colour control, decorrelated between the channels so it sits in stereo rather than in the middle; Crinkle for the uneven texture of a worn oxide layer; and Wow and Flutter — slow drift around a quarter of a hertz and fast flutter in the 5–8 Hz range, each with its own depth.

Tonal. Head Bump, placed by the tape speed you chose — bipolar since 0.9.1, so it cuts the bump region as readily as it boosts it. Azimuth as a real left/right timing skew plus high-frequency loss. Rolloff for extra top-end loss on top of the speed’s own corner.

Character. Imperfections applies slow random drift across several stages at once — saturation, tone, wow and flutter rates — so nothing sits perfectly still. Age darkens the top end as the tape wears. Mix blends in parallel and Output trims; the engine reports its latency — about 6 ms — to the host, so the dry path is sample-aligned at any Mix setting.

Oversampling. A switch in the bottom bar — Off, 2× or 4× — runs the saturation stage at a higher rate, so hard Drive settings lose their aliasing rather than their tone: the stage is re-mapped so the sound stays the same, and the latency is identical at all three settings. Off by default.

Tested before it ships

Every build is validated with pluginval on Windows, macOS and Linux and with Apple’s auval, and the engine carries a regression suite: the dry path is sample-exact at Mix 0, silence in gives silence out, the output does not depend on the host’s buffer size, there is no thump when playback starts, and the hiss really is decorrelated between channels.