What is the difference between wow and flutter?

Rate. Wow is a slow speed variation around one cycle per second, heard as a drifting pitch, and comes from an eccentric reel or a warped shell. Flutter is the same fault at nine to twelve cycles per second, caused by the capstan, and reads as a rough watery quality rather than as a pitch that drifts.

How much does the pitch move?

At the deepest setting the drift moves a four hundred and forty hertz tone by roughly a hundred and thirty three hertz either way. That is measured on a steady carrier, so on music the effect is spread across the material and heard as a general instability rather than as a single wobbling note.

Why does the saturation add even harmonics?

Because the clipping stage is asymmetric, so the waveform's positive and negative halves are treated differently. Symmetric clipping produces odd harmonics, which sound hard and square; an asymmetric characteristic produces the even ones, which is what gives tape its warmer, rounder character.

Does it add tape hiss?

No. The effect covers the transport and the medium's tone but not its noise, which keeps it usable on quiet material without burying it. If a noise floor is wanted, the vinyl record effect supplies a surface noise that can be set to a specific decibel level.

Can I set the wow and flutter separately?

No, each preset fixes the four figures together, because that is how real machines behave: a transport with heavy wow also tends to have strong flutter. Choosing the machine condition is therefore the control, rather than dialling each fault on its own.

Old Tape Effect

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Old Tape Effect imitates a tape machine in three ways at once: the slow pitch drift called wow, the fast wobble called flutter, and the soft saturation and high-frequency loss of the medium itself.

What is Old Tape Effect?

Choose one of three tape machines and apply; the copy is given a slow speed drift, a faster one, a drive stage and a high-frequency roll-off, in that order.

The three machines:

A ropy cassette: wow at 1.1 Hz with an eight millisecond swing, flutter at twelve hertz with one and two tenths of a millisecond, nine decibels of drive and a roll-off at five and a half kilohertz.
A worn cassette, which is the default: wow at seven tenths of a hertz with a four millisecond swing, flutter at ten hertz with seven tenths of a millisecond, six decibels of drive and a roll-off at eight kilohertz.
A studio reel in good condition: wow at three tenths of a hertz with one and a half milliseconds, flutter at nine hertz with three tenths, three decibels of drive and a roll-off at eleven kilohertz.

The three mechanisms fail in different ways, which is why the effect needs all of them. Wow is a slow speed variation, on the order of a cycle per second, caused by an eccentric reel or a warped cassette shell; it is heard as a gentle pitch drift that follows the rotation, and at the deepest setting here it moves a four hundred and forty hertz tone by about a hundred and thirty three hertz either way. Flutter is the same fault at a much faster rate, between nine and twelve cycles per second, caused by the capstan or by the tape's contact with the heads; because it is faster it reads as a rough, watery quality rather than as a drift in pitch. The two together are what make a tape recording sound unsteady, and the ratio between them is what distinguishes the machines: a ropy cassette has both a large slow swing and a strong fast wobble, while a well-kept studio reel has almost neither. Saturation is the third part and comes from the tape itself rather than from the transport. The drive stage applies a level-dependent gain that clips asymmetrically, which produces mostly even harmonics and grows as the signal gets louder, so quiet passages stay clean while loud ones thicken. The HF roll-off stands in for the loss of high frequencies that the medium imposes, and its figures tell the same story as the wobble, from five and a half kilohertz for a tired cassette up to eleven kilohertz for a studio machine.

What it leaves out:

No hiss or noise floor is added.
No dropouts, print-through or dropout fades.
No azimuth loss or channel crosstalk.
The presets are fixed, with no separate control of wow, flutter, drive or tone.
The pitch drift is periodic rather than random, since it follows two sine rates.
Output is sixteen bit WAV.

Use it when a recording should sound as though it came off a tape rather than out of a file: a lo-fi master, a haunted version of a mix, or a part that needs to sit back with the smoothness tape gives it. When the tape should also be worn and dusty rather than merely unsteady, the vinyl record effect adds crackle and surface noise, and when the medium should be a broadcast transmission rather than a magnetic one, the radio effect applies that band instead.

How to use Old Tape Effect

Drop an audio file onto the panel and let it decode.
Choose the tape machine whose condition matches the era you want.
Apply the effect, which drifts the pitch, saturates the signal and rolls off the top.
Download the WAV, then compare against the original to hear how much steadiness was lost.

When to use Old Tape Effect vs related tools

Old Tape Effect is the tool for the combined unsteadiness and softness of a tape machine, which no single modulation does on its own. Vinyl Record Effect supplies the crackle and surface noise of a record instead, and Radio Effect reproduces a broadcast band with its own saturation. When the pitch movement should be a musical modulation rather than a fault, Vibrato Effect and Chorus Effect are built for that.

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