Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg

"very" close is subjective. In my opinion it is nowhere near running audio through real tape. The computation capability needed to fully simulate tape in real time is not there yet. To model all subtle interactions, phase etc you'd need to run audio in 10-100+ MHz range.

Nostalgia for sure, but it also makes the sound less perfect in a way that can be interesting musically. It adds harmonics, slightly detune everything, compresses, adds noise.

It's a good tool to make a sound that sound very artificial, sharp, perfect, into something more soft and perhaps interesting to some.

There's great VST plugins like "Sketch Cassette 2" that will do hiss, flutter, all of that, along with some great presets. That one's less about creating authentic sound profiles, more like creating lo-fi tracks and instruments for music production.

This is my go to for making things sound "worse" :)

https://www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_fx/effect/rc-20_...

Wavesfactory Cassette does exactly that for several well-known models.

Yeah

Tape hiss comes from the particle size on the tape and the amplifier "playing" that random natural orientation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tape_hiss

(I though it was more due to the amplifier but decided to look up first)

Metal tape (the dark black tape) sounded much better but only if you had high end equipment. Pure metal tape was rare outside japan and contributed to japan's 80s status as a mecca for consumer electronics.

Off topic, but only a couple of years ago the 3d printer community re-discovered these same kinds of flaws in the extruder gears that result in visible ripples in prints. When you put a gear on a stepper motor, and set it with a set screw, you’re pretty much always off center slightly.

> Analog media really were a bit crap. I get the creative distortion idea, but even so - ewww.

On digital music production some randomisation (sometimes called swing in sequencers) is often added so the notes aren't played exactly at the right time.

Perfection often sounds a bit dull the same way seeing a perfectly symmetrical human face feels weird.

If anyone wants a natural example of what tape can sound like, here's an interesting album on Spotify: Alice Atieno by Collela Mazee – https://open.spotify.com/album/6j72tDGcz97abyKDOP3aWp

Kenyan benga music from the early '80s or so. It's got every type of tape artifact. It's horrible, haha. There are even tracks where the tape head seems to be picking up the other side of the cassette in reverse.

It's not supposed to sound like that. Just a result of stewardship and rightsholders and incentives. Someone somewhere has a cassette tape and digitizes it. And uploads it to Spotify. Then it's forever.

(Frankly, I think it's gorgeous. The combination of the music and the recording is accidentally something really special. Laid-back but gently enthusiastic and warm 4/4 music, bright bur melancholy. Sounds like the Mega-Man 1 soundtrack played by a live band? And a really, really good band. And then it's all tragically messed up by the gears of history. Fluttering, swaying underwater. And… it's all so pretentious when I type it out… but it just… there's something about it. It's pretty great music for programming, haha.)

> Analog media really were a bit crap.

True but I find it strange how many of my favourite recording were made with this "crap" analogue equipment (well before I was born) and how many modern "perfect" recording sound terrible to me.

To me the sound of even subtle autotune is "eww". I can't stand the over compressed, "sugary" sound of current pop music. It's just not for me.

Perfection is Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters where his analogue synth goes out of tune and he brings it back without loosing the groove. The recording is better for that detail IMHO.

I never listen to Nevermind or Collected Ambient Works 1 and think, that would be better if it was recorded with a DAW.

Horses for courses I guess.

I wouldn't call the pro reel-to-reels crap. The imperfections were barely noticeable. Besides, there were other pros to the analogue days, like records having their actual own sound with human imperfections in-tact (unless you had a tonne of money and could afford to spend hours slicing tape). I despise how perfect and same-y everything sounds over the past 20 years. Of course I understand that this is all very subjective, but there just isn't as much access to more raw sounding records as, even very talented musicians who are probably capable of getting great takes which still quantize everything.

But ya ya, old man yells at clouds, I know.

I still record to tape, it's a lot of fun (cassette tape)! There are a bunch of problems to solve that take away from "just being creative" but I don't mind it. Part of that is that it's a forcing factor to improve musicianship because punching in on those consumer four-track machines doesn't really work (even though they have the capability).

> I'm so happy these kinds of imperfections are optional now, and not baked into music distribution systems as an expected flaw.

99.9% of the stuff on the music distribution systems we have now is lossily compressed with perceptual coding. That introduces a shitload more artifacts than any analogue wobble.

(I wonder if people 50 years from now will have special algorithms to introduce that coveted "authentic mp3 artifact vibe of the vintage 2010's".)

don't forget that tapes also stretch so that can also give similar sounds

"ntsc-rs is written in Rust, and is multithreaded and SIMD-accelerated."

This made me lol. I know so few video editor types that would use a plugin like this that would know what Rust was to be "impressed" by this bit of PR.

From https://github.com/jatinchowdhury18/AnalogTapeModel :

> CHOW Tape is an analog tape machine physical model, originally based on the Sony TC-260. The current version can be used to emulate a wide variety of reel-to-reel tape machines. Feel free to build and use for your own enjoyment.

> CHOW Tape is currently available in the following formats: VST, VST3, AU, AAX, AUv3, CLAP, LV2, Standalone plugin

That's like all of the DAW/DSP plugin formats.

Hopefully BespokeSynth VST3/LV2/CLAP plug-in hosting on Linux w/ Pipewire will be stable for it.

I found ToobAmp, which has a Neural Amp Modeler plug-in and also "TooB ML Amplifier" Artificial-Intelligence/Machine-Learning-based emulation of a number of different guitar amps and overdrive/distortion pedals based on Jatin Chowdhury's ML Amplifier library" https://github.com/rerdavies/ToobAmp

If you're interested in this topic, here are a few projects I found particularly interesting :

LTSpice Guitar Pedals : A collection of LTspice simulations of classic guitar pedals, useful for studying, modifying, and experimenting with analog circuits. https://github.com/cushychicken/ltspice-guitar-pedals

spiceAmp : An analog guitar amplifier simulator based on SPICE, designed to model tube amp circuits with high fidelity. https://github.com/olegkapitonov/spiceAmp

LiveSPICE : A real-time SPICE circuit simulator that lets you play audio through virtual analog circuits, making it possible to prototype and audition pedals and amplifiers interactively. https://github.com/dsharlet/LiveSPICE

So no tape saturation? That would be to me one of the most interesting bits of the tape sound, at least for musical applications.

Wonder if there would be a preset called "I left the tape on the dashboard too long last summer"

The tape is driven by rollers directly, the reels only pick up the slack.