Time Terrarium

Most delays give you one kind of echo and a set of knobs to adjust it. Time Terrarium has four, one in each corner of a glass, and a glowing orb that decides which of them your sound lands in. Leave the orb in a corner and you have a tape delay, or a ping-pong, or a shimmer. Put it between two and you hear both. Set it orbiting, or let the repeats migrate from one corner to the next, and the same phrase comes back as a different kind of echo on every pass.

Eleven species

Each corner holds one species, and each species has one Character control.

Species	What it is	Character
Moss	tape	Age — more wow, flutter and saturation, and darker repeats
Water	ping-pong	Current — how strongly the repeats swirl and smear
Crystal	shimmer	Interval — octave up, fifth up, octave and a fifth up, or octave down
Ash	reverse	Grain — shortens the reversed fragments into quicker, stuttering sparks
Frost	melting	Melt — the first echo stays clear, later ones blur into a softer wash
Dust	grains	Scatter — how far the grains spread in time and across the stereo field
Pebble	bouncing	Bounce — from an even roll to a stone skipping to rest
Wind	gusts	Gust — how far and how fast a filter sweeps through the repeats
Slate	clean	Drive — transparent at zero, warm saturation at the top
Quartz	slices	Slice — one long repeat, or a short fragment re-triggered up to six times
Loam	crushed	Degrade — sample-and-hold and bit depth, 15-bit down to 4-bit

The last three hold pitch exactly. Slate, Quartz and Loam all read the delay at one speed, so whatever they do to the tone, nothing moves in tune — useful when the plugin sits on something melodic and you want the character without the drift.

Click a habitat’s name to plant a different species there, or drag it onto another corner to swap the two. The default is Moss, Water, Crystal and Ash; the Wilds presets plant the other four.

The orb, and orbits

Drag the orb to choose where new sound lands. Orbit moves it for you: Circle, Figure 8, Pendulum or Drift, taking anything from half a bar to sixteen bars, with Depth for how far it travels from where you placed it. With Sync on and the host playing, the orbit follows the host’s bar position, so every cycle starts in time with the song.

Migrate and Pattern

Migrate sends each repeat on to the neighbouring habitat: clockwise from top left, or the other way round when turned left. With Moss, Water, Crystal and Ash in the corners, one note comes back as tape, then ping-pong, then shimmer, then reverse.

Pattern gives each habitat its own multiple of the echo time: Unison, Dotted, Triplet, Cascade, or Golden, spaced by the golden ratio so the four rhythms never quite line up.

Seal

Press Seal and the lid closes. Nothing new gets in, and the echoes already inside keep circulating and migrating at a steady level until you open it again. Play over it, or automate it at the end of a phrase and let the last notes hang. Sealed Jar is set up for exactly that.

Space

Bloom sends the echoes, and a little of the dry signal, into a reverb that grows larger and longer as you turn it up. Duck lowers the echoes while you play and lets them swell back in the gaps. Width runs from mono to 200%, and Low Cut and High Cut trim the echoes and the bloom without touching the dry signal.

Under the glass, one lane per habitat shows the repeats a single note would make with the current settings — loudest as the biggest dots — so you can see a pattern before you play into it.

38 presets, and Roll

Seven groups: Essentials, Rhythmic, Ambient, Ecosystems, Character, Wilds and Clean, each preset with a line about what it does. The eight in Clean are built only from species that hold pitch, from a plain digital echo (Straight Line) to bit-crushed dub repeats (Broken Tape). When you want somewhere new to start, Roll throws a fresh patch — orb, orbit, time, habitats, pattern and space — and leaves your Mix and Output alone.