RE-DEEMER — free cassette tape echo (VST3 / CLAP / AU

The story

Around 2018, a cassette tape echo instrument was announced: a real cassette transport, a position sequencer played like a keyboard, self-oscillating Roland-style filters, an Anomaly switch that made the tape hiccup on purpose. People pre-ordered. It never shipped.

RE-DEEMER is that machine, redeemed in software — built from the original reference guide and block diagram, as a physical model rather than a delay with tape flavoring. The motor has inertia. The tape has hysteresis. The hiss is recorded onto the tape and echoes with your signal.

The machine room

The TAPE & MACHINE panel: tape stock drawer, aging controls with wear bar, machine trims

Fourteen real cassettes in the drawer — Maxell XL-II to no-name ferric — setting hiss, headroom and how fast the tape wears.
Tape aging: the longer the transport rolls, the more the oxide sheds — wow, dropouts and hiss creep up while the top end fades. Wear is saved with your project. Freeze it, or eject for a fresh tape.
A mis-settable deck: the NM/CH/MT switch is the deck, the cassette is the cassette. Chrome tape on a normal setting sounds exactly as wrong as it should.

Save your sounds · new in 1.1

The PRESETS tab: name a sound, save it, then load or delete saved presets

Presets, built in. Name and save the sound you've dialled in, load it back later, delete the ones you don't keep — right from the SETUP panel.
Sound, not session. A preset captures the controls — knobs, faders, the three sets, filters, mod, anomaly, tape type & stock — so loading one re-dials the panel without ejecting your tape or resetting its wear.
Yours, on disk. User presets are plain files in your config folder — back them up or copy them between machines.

What it does

REAL TAPE PHYSICS

Magnetic hysteresis (Jiles-Atherton), motor inertia, wow & flutter at calibrated cassette figures, head bump, self-erasure. TIME is motor speed: turning it bends the pitch of everything on tape.

POSITIONS & SETS

Eight positions, three fader sets, played from buttons or MIDI. The Cycle sequences them from 8 seconds per step to 4,000 steps per second — at audio rate your faders become a waveform — and phase-locks to your DAW's grid.

SELF-OSC FILTERS

24 dB/oct OTA highpass and lowpass inside the echo loop. Resonance to clean self-oscillation — gate it from the 1-8 buttons and play the filter like an 8-note synth.

A REAL TRANSPORT

PLAY mode manipulates the tape without recording. LOOP lifts the erase head for sound-on-sound layering. RW/FF shuttle. MTR kills the motor and the pitch dies with it. Double-tap eject for a fresh cassette.

THE ANOMALY

One deliberate tape hiccup, fired on the cycle's last step — a quick flick or a long singular wobble, pitch bending up or down. A broken machine, on demand.

FEEDBACK PAST 100%

Runaway feedback is bounded by tape saturation itself, not a limiter. It blooms, compresses, and stays musical while you play TIME and the filters.

What's new

v1.1.4 June 2026

Resonance keeps more low end. The filter no longer drains the bass as resonance rises, so big runaway feedbacks are easier to build. Self-oscillation is untouched.

v1.1.3 June 2026

Windows stability. The update check no longer interferes with plugin scanning on Windows.

v1.1.2 June 2026

Update notifier. A red dot by the SETUP button — and a "version available →" link inside SETUP — appears when a newer build is on this site. Quiet background check, no pop-ups, nothing to set up.

v1.1.1 June 2026

Lower CPU on quiet tails (Windows / Linux). The audio thread now flushes denormals, so the echo and filter tails no longer slip into the slow floating-point range as they ring down. No audible change; macOS was already unaffected.

v1.1.0 June 2026

Presets. Save / load / delete your own sounds from the new SETUP → PRESETS tab.
Interface refresh. Colour-coded W/G/B sets, a bezelled VU, the controls on one alignment grid, framed SETUP sections, and a smooth fade between tabs.

v1.0.4 June 2026

Windows & Linux became first-class — VST3 + CLAP, built and validated in CI on every release.

→ Full changelog

Get it

macOS — universal (Apple silicon + Intel), VST3 + CLAP + AU, signed & notarized. Unzip, run install.sh, rescan.
Windows / Linux — VST3 + CLAP, fresh builds (newer than the macOS ones; reports welcome). Copy the bundles per the included INSTALL.txt.
Read the manual — or skim the recipes and just turn knobs.
Requirements: any DAW that hosts VST3 or CLAP (or AU on macOS 10.13+).