Hey everyone.
I’ve noticed an issue with the Tape Stop touch mode and I wanted to see if anyone else noticed this.
The “stop” smoothly ramps down, but when you are holding the touch mode switch and then let go to “start” up the ramp sounds fine until the last 5% of the effect there is an audible click/jump sound. It essentially sounds like a smooth pitch shift moving from 0-95% smoothly, then jumping to 100%.
There have been a couple times where I’ve wanted to use this effect to record, but unfortunately unless buried in a mix, it is very easily distinguished as a digital effect unfortunately.
If it would help, I can post an audio clip to show what I mean.
Thanks!
Hi @fourcorners and thanks for posting on the forum.
The artifact you’re noticing is not a bug and is just a part of our design approach.
To achieve a smooth tape stop effect, we slowly increase the distance between the write and read heads. To “start” the tape again, we have to somehow get rid of the gap between them. And so we do this with a very quick crossfade right before it catches up again, which, depending on the input material, may or may not be noticeable.
This is the same approach used by most of the well known computer plugins that offer tape stop effects (See wavesfactory Cassette Transport for example).
Why do it this way? My preference is to do it this way because the pitch shifting method is extremely smooth and the input material actually stretches in time like a tape would do. If you compare it to another popular lo-fi pedal on the market that has a tape stop effect (Gen Loss MkII), you’ll find that one doesn’t have the crossfade but it sounds pretty gritty since they use a different pitch shifting method called PSOLA. It also doesn’t stretch in time, which makes it less realistic IMO.
Unfortunately, in digital land, there is no perfect real time tape stop effect and there will always be trade offs.
How to get around the crossfade and make it less obvious? Try faster start times (T2) when using slower stop times (T1).
I hope that helps answer your question!
Thanks for explaining, I appreciate it. I guess I just didn’t really understand why the stop sound was smooth, but the start-up sound had the glitch.
Yeah all good. Happy to provide context. 
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