Wavesfactory Cassette - It's Gorgeous

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esselfortium
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07 Nov 2019

xboix wrote:
07 Nov 2019
It just feels like we are putting on our rose-tinted spectacles and harking back to an era of poor sound reproduction. It makes me wonder if in a few years the next generation of musos will be raving about plug-in that emulate MP3 and iTunes "Go on! Crank up the "Lossy" slider!"
You can already do this with Audiomatic :puf_wink:

Intentionally capturing the vibe of tape and other inherently-flawed formats for sound design purposes isn't a new phenomenon or passing fad. 25 years or so ago, Boards of Canada built their influential style partially around the use of old cassette machines to color and transform recordings. (And I spent many evenings trying to digitally mimic that sound in Reason 3.0 back when I was a teenager!) The sound of scratchy vinyl is similarly beloved, and then there's the modern electric guitar sound, the result of pushing beyond the limits of amp hardware that was only ever intended to sound clean and pristine. The history of recorded music is full of "imperfect" sounds becoming valued for the character imparted by those imperfections.
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Ottostrom
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07 Nov 2019

adfielding wrote:
07 Nov 2019
Well - I grabbed the demo earlier on and bought it after half an hour of playing around with it. Lovely, lovely effect. I've never had much luck with software-based cassette emulations but this one really surprised me. Looks great, sounds great, exactly what I've been looking for. Top job, Wavesfactory!
I didn't want to spend any extra money this month but it's getting hard to resist with such great first impressions!

Steedus
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07 Nov 2019

Yeah sure there's a bit of rose-tint going on, but these things (if used sparingly) are also a way to add some character back into music which is increasing recorded (if recorded at all) in a pristine, perfect digital way. I don't think any effect is a gimmick really. It's a tool, or a 'toy' to have some fun with. Or both :mrgreen:

Steedus
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08 Nov 2019

Incidentally, Jesús the update hints you've given so far are fantastic. One thing I might suggest, isn't a feature, but I find it strange that the sections for controlling all the various parameters for Stability and Artifacts aren't labelled in the settings screen. Just a nit-pick :puf_wink:

Bjørn Felle
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08 Nov 2019

Haven't watched the video, don't know what it does or what it sounds like, have only seen the thumbnail showing the interface, and I already know I want it :D
Image

Bjørn Felle
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08 Nov 2019

guitfnky wrote:
07 Nov 2019
xboix wrote:
07 Nov 2019


The thing with cassettes is... no-one ever raved about the sound quality of cassette tape. Or about the saturation, the distortion, the wow and flutter, the goddamn hiss, the blurry noise reduction system, the dropouts, or the snarled up spaghetti hanging out of your car dashboard. Vinyl has a quality. CD has a (different) quality. Valve amps have a quality. 12-bit samplers have a quality. But cassettes were only cool because you could record on them yourself and because you could play them in your car. They were never great sound-wise. It just feels like we are putting on our rose-tinted spectacles and harking back to an era of poor sound reproduction. It makes me wonder if in a few years the next generation of musos will be raving about plug-in that emulate MP3 and iTunes "Go on! Crank up the "Lossy" slider!"

But it seems I AM the only one who feels this way. The size of the market does not mean that the emperor is not naked. But YMMV :D
some of us DID love the warbles, the saturation, the rolled off highs, and yes, even the hiss...even back then. I remember futzing around with an old tape deck when the cover came off, seeing what happened when I forced it to play slower by adding pressure to the tape wheel (whatever it’s called). those experiments and the resulting sounds struck a chord with me even then.

“they were never great, sound wise”

yes, that’s exactly the point! 😊
I used to like the way they slowed down when your walkman batteries were running out
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adfielding
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08 Nov 2019

Ottostrom wrote:
07 Nov 2019
adfielding wrote:
07 Nov 2019
Well - I grabbed the demo earlier on and bought it after half an hour of playing around with it. Lovely, lovely effect. I've never had much luck with software-based cassette emulations but this one really surprised me. Looks great, sounds great, exactly what I've been looking for. Top job, Wavesfactory!
I didn't want to spend any extra money this month but it's getting hard to resist with such great first impressions!
Yeah, I'm really impressed with it. I ended up throwing some generative Complex-1 patches through it and wow, I could listen to that all day!

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guitfnky
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08 Nov 2019

jesusginard wrote:
07 Nov 2019
reddust wrote:
06 Nov 2019


I second this petition, I hope some of the Wavesfactory devs or CEO's is reading this thread :)
Hey! It's Jesús from Wavesfactory.

1. I can easily add that feature in the next update.
2. You're right, random snap is not controllable, it's pure random. Maybe not for Cassette but for a plug-in on its own in which you have different tape/vinyl glitches in a sequencer. It would be nice!
3. Funny that you mention tape stop. Coming soon:

Image

Thank you guys for the nice comments about Cassette! :)
I’m not sure, but I may have run across a bug in Reason. I had multiple Cassette instances in a session, and when I only had the GUI window open for one, everything was good to go. when I opened the GUI for a second instance (so now have two Cassette GUIs open), there was a delay of maybe a second or two whenever I tried to do anything (like start/stop playback w/space bar, or move a window, close a window, etc.).

I ended up crashing my PC as a result, but I’m not certain that’s caused by the plugin...I was trying to change the buffer settings to see if that helped, and accidentally made several changes before the UI could catch up, so it may have been my Focusrite driver that actually caused the crash.

I’ll try to recreate when I have time, but that won’t likely be until tomorrow or Sunday.
I write good music for good people

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Bjørn Felle
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08 Nov 2019

Mataya wrote:
08 Nov 2019
I like his explanation.

<a class="vglnk" href="
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tx
M
I cannot bring myself to watch anything entitled "remember this?" if it is something I remember. Those videos of kids trying to work out what a NES is made me feel about 400 years old.
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miyaru
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08 Nov 2019

Real tape had kind of magic....... When I studied at the Amsterdam SAE we had a two inch tapemachine there running 24 tracks. One track was for timecode. The time code was fed to a zx 80 sinclair doing the automation of the Soundtracs Jade console (VCA no moving faders). Later on we got a SSL there.

The slight compression when fed hard was marvelous, as was the warmth. But......... lots of maintanence was needed to keep the stuff going. Also tape was expensive: €150 for 15 minutes of tape.

That said these new plugins are great: one can choose clean or "taped" - we have the choice now.

I would not want to go back to tape, I prefer it the way it is nowadays. I enjoy working with Reason Suite 11 and Ableton Live Suite 10 - both have there pro' s and cons but togheter it can do most.

I would say happy buying on BF!!!!! :D
Greetings from Miyaru.
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hurricane
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08 Nov 2019

I've collected about 30 tape decks, portable tape players, and boomboxes over the past few years, and I mainly did it to get the real degraded cassette sound, but what I discovered was that the majority of my tape decks played back audio almost too well, and I struggled to find one with the wobble, flutter, discernible high end rolloff, and old cassette player artifacts I was looking for. The exaggerated, old, wonky cassette deck sound wasn't THAT exaggerated or apparent. Not saying cassette audio is pristine, punchy, glossy, and hi-fi but it's really good, and if you have decent tape decks, you then have to intentionally make your deck "bad". All the decks I've picked up at Goodwill, or through Craigslist and Offerup, have been in great condition. Even the top loaders from the 70s sound great. So this idea that you're going to get some instant Boards of Canada sound by playing your audio through a cassette deck, is just plain wrong!

Tapes sound great. :thumbs_up: But I'm glad plugins like Wavefactory's Cassette exist. Now I don't have to intentionally physically screw up my tape deck.
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diminished
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08 Nov 2019

hurricane wrote:
08 Nov 2019
I've collected about 30 tape decks, portable tape players, and boomboxes over the past few years, and I mainly did it to get the real degraded cassette sound, but what I discovered was that the majority of my tape decks played back audio almost too well, and I struggled to find one with the wobble, flutter, discernible high end rolloff, and old cassette player artifacts I was looking for. The exaggerated, old, wonky cassette deck sound wasn't THAT exaggerated or apparent. Not saying cassette audio is pristine, punchy, glossy, and hi-fi but it's really good, and if you have decent tape decks, you then have to intentionally make your deck "bad". All the decks I've picked up at Goodwill, or through Craigslist and Offerup, have been in great condition. Even the top loaders from the 70s sound great. So this idea that you're going to get some instant Boards of Canada sound by playing your audio through a cassette deck, is just plain wrong!

Tapes sound great. :thumbs_up: But I'm glad plugins like Wavefactory's Cassette exist. Now I don't have to intentionally physically screw up my tape deck.
Something you could experiment with, I enjoyed it: grab a cheap walkman and replace the transport belts with household rubber bands.
Here are some synth one-shots played back from such a modded device:
rubbertape.mp3
(673.06 KiB) Downloaded 75 times
:reason: Most recent track: resentment (synthwave) || Others: on my YouTube channel •ᴗ•

Mataya
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08 Nov 2019

[/quote]
I cannot bring myself to watch anything entitled "remember this?" if it is something I remember. Those videos of kids trying to work out what a NES is made me feel about 400 years old.
[/quote]

but it's not about nostalgia really, just a short but informative explanation of how it worked and sounded. I'm sure there's more to say, but this is also kinda interesting.

m

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reddust
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08 Nov 2019

xboix wrote:
07 Nov 2019

The thing with cassettes is... no-one ever raved about the sound quality of cassette tape. Or about the saturation, the distortion, the wow and flutter, the goddamn hiss, the blurry noise reduction system, the dropouts, or the snarled up spaghetti hanging out of your car dashboard. Vinyl has a quality. CD has a (different) quality. Valve amps have a quality. 12-bit samplers have a quality. But cassettes were only cool because you could record on them yourself and because you could play them in your car. They were never great sound-wise. It just feels like we are putting on our rose-tinted spectacles and harking back to an era of poor sound reproduction. It makes me wonder if in a few years the next generation of musos will be raving about plug-in that emulate MP3 and iTunes "Go on! Crank up the "Lossy" slider!"

But it seems I AM the only one who feels this way. The size of the market does not mean that the emperor is not naked. But YMMV :D
So what? Making music is not about finding the best sound quality but finding the sound you want or need to express what you want to say with your music. There are even music genres that base in “bad’ sound quality like the first black metal bands, chiptune or low fi hip hop music.

Sometimes you want to have exactly that ‘bad’ quality sound and what is right for you doesn’t need to be right for the rest of the world and the other way around as well. If you’re old enough to have lived the times we’re using cassettes was normal you should be old enough to know this as well

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jesusginard
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09 Nov 2019

guitfnky wrote:
08 Nov 2019
I’m not sure, but I may have run across a bug in Reason. I had multiple Cassette instances in a session, and when I only had the GUI window open for one, everything was good to go. when I opened the GUI for a second instance (so now have two Cassette GUIs open), there was a delay of maybe a second or two whenever I tried to do anything (like start/stop playback w/space bar, or move a window, close a window, etc.).

I ended up crashing my PC as a result, but I’m not certain that’s caused by the plugin...I was trying to change the buffer settings to see if that helped, and accidentally made several changes before the UI could catch up, so it may have been my Focusrite driver that actually caused the crash.

I’ll try to recreate when I have time, but that won’t likely be until tomorrow or Sunday.
If you experience any graphics lag you should disable the animation by clicking on the main menu (burger menu at the top right) and selecting "Cancel Animation".

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hurricane
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09 Nov 2019

I like Wavesfactory Cassette, and it's very useable in most situations, however, I don't like the frequency response of the metal tape. I'm talking about the clean sound of the tape itself, without artifacts, 100% stability. Pro and home - where the hell did my bass go?? Anyone who is familiar with cassettes knows that if you wanted the ultimate sound quality - solid bassy bass and an extended HF response, you would use metal tapes. I mean you could practically mimic CD audio with a metal tape and a good tape deck. WF's metal emulation sounds thin and the highs are waaaay too..high. That's not metal tape. I'd like a bias knob. Or some sort of frequency adjustment.
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EnochLight
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09 Nov 2019

hurricane wrote:
09 Nov 2019
I mean you could practically mimic CD audio with a metal tape and a good tape deck.
You and I have very different recollections of the 1980's and 90's. I had pretty nice tape decks (Sony, Tascam), and while metal tapes could get close to the frequency response of even my cheapest "Teac" CD player, everything just seemed.. off.. about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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hurricane
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09 Nov 2019

EnochLight wrote:
09 Nov 2019
hurricane wrote:
09 Nov 2019
I mean you could practically mimic CD audio with a metal tape and a good tape deck.
You and I have very different recollections of the 1980's and 90's. I had pretty nice tape decks (Sony, Tascam), and while metal tapes could get close to the frequency response of even my cheapest "Teac" CD player, everything just seemed.. off.. about it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Yeah but did you ever try metal on a Nakamichi or similar higher end deck with a 20hz-20kHz+ freq response?? Doesn’t sound 100% like a CD of course, but it’s close. Definitely doesn’t sound like WF Cassette.

WF looks to be modeling the frequency response of a metal tape played through a Tascam 414 (which I own) and its freq response is only 40hz-16khz. So maybe that’s it. I guess I’ll have to toss a metal tape into my Tascam and see what that’s all about but it’s internally calibrated for a type II so we’ll see.
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hurricane
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09 Nov 2019

Anyway - nobody's buying a cassette plugin for its studio quality hifi-ness, yes I get that. The overwhelming majority of people think "lo-fi" when it comes to cassettes. I do think that's a little unfair though, because by default, a cassette does not sound horrible. And in the right hands and with the right equipment it can actually sound really really good. But simply speaking, it IS just a cassette. And I believe the magic of the cassette sound is the memories associated with it. Listening to Van Halen's 1984 IN 1984 on a ratty boombox in your backyard on a hot summer day while chasing your dog because it snatched your most beloved Transformer - man....that was the best. For some of us, cassettes played the soundtracks of our youth. Ever sit in front of your dad's boombox waiting for your favorite song to come on, trying to hit record as fast as possible so you didn't cut off the beginning? Ever give a girl a mixtape of your favorite songs, playing it casual saying it was just some cool songs you put together only it really took you hours cuz you were trying to pick songs with secret messages and you put it on the best and cleanest tape you had, and you even wrote all the song names on the liner card in your very best penmanship???? Then you made yourself a copy on your dual cassette deck that your parents bought you at Montgomery Ward and listened to it in your room, while Thundercats was on, thinking she was listening to it at the same time you were. F*ck you Jessica, I liked you so much. That mix tape took me HOURS!

That was the sound of cassettes for me.
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diminished
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09 Nov 2019

hurricane wrote:
09 Nov 2019
Ever give a girl a mixtape of your favorite songs, playing it casual saying it was just some cool songs you put together only it really took you hours cuz you were trying to pick songs with secret messages and you put it on the best and cleanest tape you had, and you even wrote all the song names on the liner card in your very best penmanship???? Then you made yourself a copy on your dual cassette deck that your parents bought you at Montgomery Ward and listened to it in your room, while Thundercats was on, thinking she was listening to it at the same time you were. F*ck you Jessica, I liked you so much. That mix tape took me HOURS!
<3
Too many Jessicas. All those IEC II/Type II tapes wasted..
:reason: Most recent track: resentment (synthwave) || Others: on my YouTube channel •ᴗ•

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EnochLight
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09 Nov 2019

hurricane wrote:
09 Nov 2019
Yeah but did you ever try metal on a Nakamichi or similar higher end deck with a 20hz-20kHz+ freq response?? Doesn’t sound 100% like a CD of course, but it’s close. Definitely doesn’t sound like WF Cassette.
Yeah, Nakamichis were certainly out of my price range as a lad in the 80's/90's. My Sony and Tascam retailed for around $500 USD, though, so they weren't bad by any stretch. Thank the magic sky daddies for credit cards, for sure. :D
hurricane wrote:
09 Nov 2019
WF looks to be modeling the frequency response of a metal tape played through a Tascam 414 (which I own) and its freq response is only 40hz-16khz. So maybe that’s it. I guess I’ll have to toss a metal tape into my Tascam and see what that’s all about but it’s internally calibrated for a type II so we’ll see.
There's so much hardware out there that can be physically modeled, it would be hard to do it all I suppose. Had WF modeled a Nakamichi set to metal, there wouldn't be much difference than a CD though, according to your ears? So the question is: why would you do that?

It's best used as a creative effect, for sure.

*EDIT:
hurricane wrote:
09 Nov 2019
Anyway - nobody's buying a cassette plugin for its studio quality hifi-ness, yes I get that. The overwhelming majority of people think "lo-fi" when it comes to cassettes.
Right, exactly.
hurricane wrote:
09 Nov 2019
Ever give a girl a mixtape of your favorite songs, playing it casual saying it was just some cool songs you put together only it really took you hours cuz you were trying to pick songs with secret messages and you put it on the best and cleanest tape you had, and you even wrote all the song names on the liner card in your very best penmanship????
Dude, this literally describes the relationship with my (now) wife for the first few years. I know we disagree on a lot of stuff, but something tells me we'd have been best buds back in the day. :lol:
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dvdrtldg
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09 Nov 2019

xboix wrote:
07 Nov 2019

The thing with cassettes is... no-one ever raved about the sound quality of cassette tape.
Yeah but that was then. News flash: musical horizons are constantly changing. E g. there's a whole genre of ambient music these days that's all about hiss and tape compression and warbly lo fi dropping out degraded sound. It's not some sort of nostalgia trip, it's an experiment in texture and atmosphere. Cassette tape as a creative tool, not a fetish object
But it seems I AM the only one who feels this way. The size of the market does not mean that the emperor is not naked.
Translation: "Everyone's a fashion victim, and I alone have perspicacity to discern quality from rubbish". Amazing to see how sooner or later everyone turns into their dad

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motuscott
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09 Nov 2019

Jessica I'm truly sorry.
Please unlock the door
Who’s using the royal plural now baby? 🧂

EdGrip
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10 Nov 2019

dvdrtldg wrote:
09 Nov 2019
Translation: "Everyone's a fashion victim, and I alone have perspicacity to discern quality from rubbish". Amazing to see how sooner or later everyone turns into their dad
I LOL'd ^_^

Honestly, I think just noise is magic. There's a whole generation above me who valued every advance in studio or audio technology for its lack of noise above all. The elimination of noise was the goal of every best-practice engineering technique and the holy grail of equipment.
But noise and hiss are lovely. Like a sauce, or like salt. They can make a bed for other beautiful textures to compress into, which feels so much richer and more satisfying than pure perfect blackness.

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