High Bias

The problem

Tape emulation is sold as a plugin that loads inside a digital audio workstation. Running a browser tab or a single file through a tape path therefore means installing a DAW, routing system audio into it through a virtual device, and buying a plugin — a great deal of machinery for an effect. Most tape plugins are also a knob panel: the two controls that most defined how a real deck sounded, tape speed and bias, are usually not there at all.

The approach

High Bias is the deck itself, running in a tab. Capture a tab or drop in a file, and the audio passes through a modelled tape path into an equaliser and an effects rack. The controls do real signal processing rather than decorate: tape speed moves both the high-frequency rolloff and the head-bump frequency and depth, because faster tape genuinely stores more top end and puts the bump lower, and bias is a high shelf with Type II sitting at 0 dB because that is the alignment the deck assumes. Everything runs in the browser through the Web Audio API — nothing is uploaded, and the result can be recorded.

What it does

A modelled tape path

Four tape speeds from 1⅞ to 15 ips, three bias types — ferric, chrome and metal — and ±24% varispeed, with the shift shown in semitones as well as percent, because on tape speed and pitch are one control.

Eleven-band equaliser

Peaking filters from 31 Hz to 20 kHz with six presets, placed between the input trim and the meter tap so the VU needles show what you did rather than what arrived.

Twelve-slot reorderable effects rack

Tape saturation, wow and flutter, bass boost, reverb, delay, chorus, flanger, phaser, distortion, compressor, tape hiss and stereo width. Slots can be dragged into any order, and the rack fades out briefly to rewire so a reorder never clicks.

Instruments that behave like instruments

Needle VU meters on a voltage-linear scale, a CRT scope with wave, X-Y and spectrum modes, and speaker cones driven by the bass envelope rather than the waveform. Four room lighting scenes: day, night, dusk and back room.

Record what you heard

Recording taps the output after the tape path, equaliser and effects but before the speaker trims, so muting a cabinet never changes the capture.

Nothing leaves the browser

Capture, processing and recording are all local. No account, no upload and no server-side processing.

Pricing

Free.