Retrocord vs deriva tape machine

Retrocord is a retroactive multitrack audio recorder. It works like a tape that's always recording from your selected input, so when you play something worth keeping, you can save the last few minutes — after the fact. How it works Choose your audio input and a buffer length. Retrocord records silently in the background. When you want to keep what you just played, tap a duration to capture. The audio lands in your library as a recording you can play back, edit, organize, and export. Multitrack support Retrocord records every channel your audio input exposes, each as its own track. Connect a class-compliant multichannel USB audio interface — such as the Focusrite Scarlett series or similar — and capture individual inputs as separate stems. Mute and solo tracks during playback, then export them to your DAW to mix and arrange later. Edit before you export Retrocord lets you shape a capture without leaving the app: - Trim — set start and end points against a recording to keep only the part that matters - Split — cut a capture in two at the playhead to create separate recordings - Gain — adjust level in 3 dB steps, up to ±24 dB Your library, on every device Recordings live in an organized library — sessions hold captures, captures hold tracks — with waveforms, names, and durations at a glance. Your library syncs privately across your iPhone, iPad, and Mac through your own iCloud account. Lossless, and smaller Captures are stored as Apple Lossless (ALAC) — full 24-bit, 48 kHz quality at roughly half the size of uncompressed WAV. When it's time to move audio out, export individual tracks or a flattened mix as ALAC or 24-bit WAV, with your trim and gain applied. Use cases - Capturing jams and improvisations without arming a DAW - Recording stems from multichannel audio interfaces - Field recording, where the moment you want has already passed by the time you'd hit record - Interviews and spoken word, where restarting a conversation to get a clean take isn't an option - Practice sessions, rehearsals, and songwriting where good ideas surface unpredictably Details - Works with any class-compliant USB audio interface - Also supports the built-in microphone on iPhone and iPad - Stereo pairing toggle for interleaved L/R channels - Per-track mute and solo during playback - Non-destructive trim, split, and gain - Apple Lossless (ALAC) storage; export to ALAC or 24-bit/48 kHz WAV - Private iCloud sync across your devices, through your own iCloud account - No third-party account, no analytics — your recordings are yours

deriva is a tape machine plugin that is meant to give a polished and warm silky sound on your mix or master bus. built on published research papers¹ and my own experience recording with analog tape in studio, the sound is true to how real tape actually sounds. although the engine under the hood is advanced and complex, the controls are meant to be simple and easy, so you can set and forget and focus on your music. a fun feature is that you can pull the tape while the audio is running, causing the pitch to go up or down. the controls are pretty much self-explanatory: input and drive control how hard the signal and saturation will be. also sounds great on drums! bias simulates everything from a badly aligned machine to a brand new and serviced one, together with wear. a common misconception is that there is a lot of wow and flutter on tape machines. most professional tape machines do not have much flutter and wow, but in deriva you can push the machine a bit if you like - now with separate controls. tape speed affects the sound of the tape, where the lowest is dark and the highest is studio clean. if you want to bring back some of the high frequencies lost in tape speed, you may use the tone knob next to it. if you're bored with the UI you also have the possibility to change the colors and invert them. ON THE IPAD deriva is an Audio Unit (AUv3) and works with Logic Pro, GarageBand, AUM, Cubasis, Loopy Pro, Drambo and the rest. the standalone version either works as a live effect for your instrument, but also as a tape machine player: load in your own song and listen to it "on tape". you may also record live, or export the whole song with your current settings. Requires iPadOS 15 or later. also available for Mac, Windows and Linux at eikremaudio.com. ¹ Jatin Chowdhury, "Real-Time Physical Modelling for Analog Tape Machines", Proc. DAFx-19, Birmingham, 2019 (CC-BY 3.0). Otto Mikkonen, Alec Wright, Eloi Moliner and Vesa Välimäki, "Neural Modeling of Magnetic Tape Recorders", Proc. DAFx-23, Copenhagen, 2023. deriva is an independent implementation written from the published papers.