TAIP

Tape recordings have a musical quality that digital mixes often lack. We wanted to bring this quality into the DAW in the most uncompromising way.

Sonically, TAIP offers a faithful, AI-based, emulation of a 1971 European tape machine. Our plugin will add the same harmonic richness and non-linear magic as the hardware. But feature-wise, we’ve taken the liberty to go one step further: TAIP comes packaged with a set of innovative sound-design parameters that let you go from just ‘tape’ to ‘beyond tape’.

The result is a happy marriage between classic sound and modern versatility. And we encourage you to drive it hard!

• Drive:
  TAIP’s most important parameter - add a subtle touch of warmth or extreme saturation (or anything in between).
  
  
• Mix:
  Run your tape sound in parallel. Or combine the “Wear” and “Mix” parameters to create tape flanging.
  
  
• Model:
  ”Single” brings you one tape emulation, while “Dual” combines two tape machines in a series under the hood.
  
  
• Lo / Hi-Shape:
  Saturates the low/high end more or less than the rest of the frequency spectrum.
  
  
• Glue:
  Exaggerates the compression effect that naturally occurs in tape recordings.
  
  
• Noise:
  Adds more tape noise – or removes it entirely.
  
  
• Presence:
  Brings back the brightness that gets lost on tape recordings.
  
  
• Wear:
  Recreates the instabilities of a worn-out tape machine and subtly alters the tape speed.
  
  
• Input:
  Lets you distort the signal more - or less - without affecting the output level.
  
  
• Auto-Gain:
  Lets you add more drive while keeping a consistent plugin output.
  
  
• Color Modes:
  Switch between black, gray and white background colors.
  
  
• Resizability:
  Fully resizable plugin window.

‘AI’ is an overused - and often misused - term. But we believe it’s the future of music technology. It just needs to be used genuinely and with a legitimate purpose.

For a hardware emulation project like TAIP, AI offers an alternative (and in our opinion more faithful) approach over the traditional DSP method. Where a normal DSP emulation would entail ‘guesstimating’ the effect of various analog components and their mutual dependencies, we can use AI / neural networks to accurately decipher the sonic characteristics that make a tape machine sound and behave in the way it does. This happens by feeding an algorithm various training data of dry vs. processed audio and teaching it to identify the exact characteristics that make up the difference. Once these differences have been learned by the AI, we can apply them to new audio.

This process may sound overly digital for a plugin that brings an analog sound. But the reality is that ‘analog’ and ‘digital’ are two fundamentally different domains. To get a computer to behave in a certain way, it helps to think like it does. Re-creating an ‘analog-style’ signal path in DSP is thinking about the problem like a human. The AI approach helps us solve the problem like a machine would – for a more faithful emulation.

TAIP comes loaded with 135 presets to instantly warm up your digital recordings. The presets are created by friends of BABY Audio - including:

Mark Needham (Fleetwood Mac, The Killers, Bloc Party, Elton John)

Max Jaeger (Ariana Grande, Kanye West, Drake, Calvin Harris)

Eestbound (Travis Scott, Young Thug, Jazz Cartier)

Rob Kleiner (Sia, Britney Spears, David Guetta, Cee Lo)

Cesar Sogbe (Prince, David Byrne, Jennifer Lopez)