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 overlay: 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.

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.

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+)