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!

✱ 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.

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.

TAIP comes loaded with 135 presets to instantly warm up your digital recordings. The presets are created by friends of BABY Audio - including:

✱ Mark Needham (Fleetwood Mac, The Killers, Bloc Party, Elton John)

✱ Max Jaeger (Ariana Grande, Kanye West, Drake, Calvin Harris)

✱ Eestbound (Travis Scott, Young Thug, Jazz Cartier)

✱ Rob Kleiner (Sia, Britney Spears, David Guetta, Cee Lo)

✱ Cesar Sogbe (Prince, David Byrne, Jennifer Lopez)

✱ Plugin formats: VST, VST3, AU, AAX (64-bit).

✱ Platforms supported: Mac OS 10.11 and up (including Native Apple Silicon M1/M2 Compatibility). PC Windows 10 and newer.

✱ DAWs supported: All major DAWs, including Ableton Live, Pro Tools, Logic Pro, FL Studio, Cubase, Studio One, Bitwig, Reaper, Reason etc.

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