Audio Damage have released Traverse, available for $29.00 (desktop version) and $2.99 (iOS version).
Traverse is a lo-fi tape effect and stereo delay in one plugin. The cassette side runs a hysteresis-modeled tape engine with Drive, Wow, Flutter, and a tilt-EQ Tone control. The delay side does what delays do — Time, Feedback, Width, sync, ping-pong. A Post-Delay routing toggle lets you swap their order, so you can use it as either a tape-flavored delay or a cassette effect with a delay built in.
Layered on top: a four-control splice system for procedural dropouts, and a procedural noise generator with nine styles — Hiss, Crackle, Dust, Fan Rumble, 60Hz Hum, 50Hz Hum, White, Pink, and the Califone Card Reader. The noise routes into the cassette path, so whatever else you’ve dialed in shapes it on the way out.
Drum buses are the obvious target — a couple turns of Drive and some Wow take a clean kit and age it down to a generation-loss dub. Vocals respond well too, with the noise floor up; the Hum and Hiss voices give you AM-radio room tone without having to record anything. We tend to use it on pads more than anything, with the splice rate up and the Card Reader noise voice running, for the broken-equipment thing. And if you park it across a single guitar chord and push Feedback, the loop self-saturates into a drone you can ride. That last one is our favorite.
Features include:
- Cassette engine with magnetic-hysteresis tape model – State-dependent nonlinearity hysteresis equations wrapped between pre-emphasis and de-emphasis filters, with oversampling at the saturator stage. Errr. In English, sounds like a cassette deck. Internal gain compensation keeps output level consistent across the full Drive sweep.
- Drive – Sweeps from clean new tape to fully driven, shedding iron oxide. The hysteresis curve responds to signal history, which is what separates this from a static saturation curve.
- Wow and Flutter – Two independent depth knobs for the cassette’s slow pitch drift (Wow) and faster modulation jitter (Flutter), each driven by its own LFO with a noise component layered in. Per-channel modulation gives the stereo image a natural cassette wobble.
- Tone – Bipolar tilt EQ sitting inside the cassette signal flow. Darker to the left, brighter to the right, flat at center. One knob does the work of separate high and low shelves.
- Tape emulator inside the feedback loop – Every repeat is re-processed through Drive, Tone, Wow, and Flutter. Push Feedback and the repeats bloom into a self-saturating wash; pull it back for two or three colored echoes.
- Time – Stereo delay time from 20 ms to 10 seconds in free mode, or snapped to host-tempo beat divisions (straight and triplet, 1/32 through two whole notes) when Sync is engaged.
- Feedback – Recirculation amount, ceiling-limited so the loop cannot run away even with Drive at maximum.
- Width – Continuous ping-pong control. Positive values send the first echo to the right and cross-feed the channels.
- Splice system – Procedural tape splice simulator with four interacting controls. Time sets event rate (0.5 seconds to one minute between events, knob travel packed at the fast end where it matters). Depth sets the amount. Pitch and Amp toggle the pitch-chirp and amplitude-dip components of each dropout, so you can dial in anything from a clean spool to a worn-out shoebox tape.
- Curated noise generator – Nine procedural noise voices: Hiss, Crackle, Dust, Fan Rumble, 60Hz Hum, 50Hz Hum, White, Pink, and the Califone Card Reader. Pick a voice, set the amount, and the noise feeds straight into the cassette path where it gets shaped on every repeat just like the input signal does.
- Gated noise – When on, the noise floor drops 20 dB below the Noise setting whenever the input is silent, so the room tone speaks only when the track does and disappears between phrases.
- Post-delay routing toggle – Off (default) is the Space-Echo model: cassette first, delay second, with feedback returning through the full cassette chain. On flips the order so the cassette processes the delay tail only, turning Traverse into a more conventional tape-flavored delay with a clean input path.
- Mix – Standard dry / wet blend, defaulting to fully wet so the plugin reads as an effect from the moment it loads.
- Click-free Bypass – Smoothed 50 ms crossfade for live A/B comparisons and live performance use.
Transverse is available to PC, Mac, Linux and iOS users (VST3, AU, AAX, CLAP and AUv3).
For more information on Transverse , click here:
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