TAIP

Warm Up Your Sound

• TAIP brings the true sound and behavior of analog tape into your DAW
• Use it to add organic saturation and life to sterile drums, instruments and vocals
• Intuitive and versatile feature set: customize any tape flavor for any need

A TAPE MACHINE FOR THE DAW ERA

Tape recordings have a musical quality that digital mixes often lack. We wanted to bring this quality into the DAW in the most uncompromising way.

Sonically, TAIP offers a faithful, AI-based, emulation of a 1971 European tape machine. Our plugin will add the same harmonic richness and non-linear magic as the hardware. But feature-wise, we’ve taken the liberty to go one step further: TAIP comes packaged with a set of innovative sound-design parameters that let you go from just ‘tape’ to ‘beyond tape’.

The result is a happy marriage between classic sound and modern versatility. And we encourage you to drive it hard!

FEATURES

• Drive: TAIP’s most important parameter – add a subtle touch of warmth or extreme saturation (or anything in between).
• Mix: Run your tape sound in parallel. Or combine the “Wear” and “Mix” parameters to create tape flanging.
• Model: ”Single” brings you one tape emulation, while “Dual” combines two tape machines in a series under the hood.
• Lo / Hi-Shape: Saturates the low/high end more or less than the rest of the frequency spectrum.
• Glue: Exaggerates the compression effect that naturally occurs in tape recordings.
• Noise: Adds more tape noise – or removes it entirely.
• Presence: Brings back the brightness that gets lost on tape recordings.
• Wear: Recreates the instabilities of a worn-out tape machine and subtly alters the tape speed.
• Input: Lets you distort the signal more – or less – without affecting the output level.
• Auto-Gain: Lets you add more drive while keeping a consistent plugin output.
• Color Modes: Switch between black, gray and white background colors.
• Resizability: Fully resizable plugin window.

HOW WE’RE USING AI IN TAIP

For a hardware emulation project like TAIP, AI offers an alternative (and in our opinion more faithful) approach over the traditional DSP method. Where a normal DSP emulation would entail ‘guesstimating’ the effect of various analog components and their mutual dependencies, we can use AI / neural networks to accurately decipher the sonic characteristics that make a tape machine sound and behave in the way it does. This happens by feeding an algorithm various training data* and teaching it to identify the exact characteristics of the hardware.

This process may sound overly digital for a plugin that brings an analog sound. But the reality is that ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ are two fundamentally different domains. To get a computer to behave in a certain way, it helps to think like it does. Re-creating an ‘analog-style’ signal path in DSP is thinking about the problem like a human. The AI approach helps us solve the problem like a machine would – for a more faithful emulation.

* No unlicensed (third-party) audio content was studied or copied to develop TAIP. The training data mainly consisted of white noise, sine sweeps etc. developed entirely in-house.