TapeDesk can be a plain four-track recorder or a groovebox with a synth, a sequencer and drums. You switch from one to the other whenever you like, and your tapes don't notice.
Four tracks that can become six, and ten minutes of tape. Speed goes from 0.25x to 2x and the pitch moves with it, like on a tape deck. With loop on, every pass adds a layer. If you're recording on your own, the take can wait for you to clap.
With sources you record several tracks in one pass. The synth goes to one and your voice to another, with the phone alone or with a multichannel interface.
Eleven synthesis engines built on Plaits, by Émilie Gillet (Mutable Instruments), plus a sampler and a drum kit.
Each engine has four macros, two envelopes, a filter, two LFOs and its own effect. And the tape remembers which sound you recorded each track with.
| drift | drift · swarm · bloom · spread | Analog swarm, stereo |
| poly | shape · fat · tone · voice | Virtual analog |
| fold | fold · shape · warp · motion | Wavefolding |
| fm | index · ratio · bite · swell | Two-operator FM |
| pluck | pluck · damp · tone · body | Plucked string, dies away on its own |
| mallet | strike · ring · tone · shimmer | Tuned percussion |
| wave | scan · shape · quant · evolve | Wavetable |
| cz | peak · shape · harm · sweep | Phase distortion |
| ensemble | ensemble · register · air · vibrato | String machine, stereo |
| noise | grit · peak · color · gust | Noise and texture |
| dx | patch · mod · bright · stretch | Six-operator FM, with a bank of 32 patches. Loads .syx cartridges |
| sample | waveform · note | Keyboard sampler, with one file, trim and loop |
| kit | 24 pads | Drums, in two banks of 12 |
keys only plays notes in the scale. chords puts a chord on each pad, close-voiced and in the middle of the keyboard. seq has four sequencers, and one of them is ping, a pool table where every bell a ball crosses rings. It's hard to look away.
eucalyptus is a piano roll that loops. When you like how it sounds, you print it to tape.
Twenty-four pads in two banks. The sound can come from a file, a video, the mic or a track on the tape, and chop spreads a break across the empty pads.
Tracks at the top, keyboard at the bottom and the take in the middle, big. You play the synth and record it without changing screens, and with sources your voice goes to another track at the same time.
One strip per track, two effect buses and drive to push the mix into the limiter. The master eq has four bands and you draw it with your finger.
There are seven effects, and any bus can also load an AUv3 from another app. crush, haze and wobble eat the original sound. The more you send them, the less is left of the track.
| tapesat | drive · tone · bias · age | Tape saturation. age goes from fresh tape to an old cassette. First it dulls the highs and brings up the hiss. Past a third of the way, the wow comes in. |
| delay | time · fbk · tone · wow | Tape echo, from 30 to 750 ms. Move time and the echo slides. |
| reverb | decay · tone · drip · damp | Eight feedback lines. drip is the spring shimmer. |
| crush | rate · bits · grit · tone | Takes the sample rate down to 1.5 kHz and the bits down to 3, with no anti-alias filter. |
| haze | freq · move · res · shape | A filter moved by the signal itself or by an LFO, free or locked to tempo. |
| wobble | depth · rate · shape · drop | Pitch wobble and tape dropouts. |
| shimmer | shmr · size · tone · bloom | Reverb with an octave that feeds back in. The interval goes from −12 to +12. |
Each song is a tape, with its tracks, its tempo, its loop and its mix. It comes out as wav or m4a, whole, as stems or as one pass of the loop, and it sounds the same as it did while you were listening.
Ableton Link, MIDI clock in and out, and any MIDI keyboard over USB, Bluetooth or the network. With MIDI learn your hardware controls reach almost everything, from the transport to the eq bands.
Inside another app, TapeDesk comes in two pieces. TapeDesk: Tape is the tape with its mix, and it records when the host hits play. TapeDesk: Play is the synth as an instrument, with 37 parameters to automate.
The tapes are the same as in the app. Anything you record inside a host shows up in TapeDesk afterwards.
It keeps playing with the app in the background, and the transport shows up on the lock screen. If the app closes halfway through a take, it offers to recover it when you come back.
It doesn't collect any data. It comes in fifteen languages, in light, dark or auto, and with four icons to choose from.
