Caelum Audio Tape Pro £39.99

Tape saturation can be an excellent flavour-enhancing tool. Let’s see if this new affordable plugin from Caelum Audio tingles the taste buds

Fledgling developer Caelum Audio have already impressed with their free cassette tape plugin (now Tape Cassette 2). Their latest endeavour, Tape Pro (VST3, AU), takes the tape concept to the next level, expanding the IR and saturation-based plugin into a fully flexible tape emulation with delay.

Tape Pro is arranged in seven sections – Saturation, Response, Wow, Flutter, Delay, Noise and Output – and has stereo VU-style meters plus an animated open reel tape deck graphic. Two further displays provide feedback for both the saturation curve and tape impulse response, and the latter also shows in real-time the effects of the accompanied High Loss setting.

Tape Pro has two fundamental settings: Saturation Type, for which there are six choices, and tape Response Type, where you’ll find up to 12 options as well as Bypass. The six saturation types (Tape, Digital, Rectify, Half-Rectify, Sine and Smooth) can be modified considerably using the Asymmetry, Hysteresis and Remanence parameters, with overall distortion set with the Drive amount. Nevertheless, the core types all sound different: from the reasonably-subtle Tape and Smooth options with their predominantly third odd harmonics, via more edgy options (Sine and Digital), to the harmonically-rich Rectify and Half-Rectify.