Iron Oxide Classic 2

TL;DW: IronOxideClassic2 is my bandpassy tape sim, updated for high sample rate and aliasing control.

IronOxideClassic2.zip(371k)

Here’s a preview of things to come, shown on a blast from the past :)

Iron Oxide was one of my first successful plugins. It’s an old school tape emulation, meaning that it’s kind of bandpassy and is about saturating and slamming and aggressive tone coloring. It was made to compete with a pricey (well, back then it was) commercial plugin where the company had treated some of my friends poorly: I charged off and made a ‘commercial tape emulation killer’ plugin, with very unorthodox techniques. This is before my ToTape plugins, before head bumps: just a fat saturated tape-slam plugin.

This grew to have all sorts of things: separate ips controls for low and high cutoffs, flutter, just lots of stuff. But the original one was an input, a tape speed control, and an output… and Iron Oxide Classic is me returning to those roots. It’s also handy, because as I bring in stuff like undersampling of delay buffer plugins, I can get the fundamentals right on a simpler build. That’s what this is. It’s Iron Oxide Classic, the simplest form, but brought up to the latest technical specs.

That means it’s using the undersampling to deliver the same tone whether you’re at 44.1k or 96k or 192k. Though it uses delay buffers and samples along a time window, in the new version that’s consistent among sample rates. That also means it’s substantially more CPU-friendly at high rates, so you might be able to run twice or four times as many of ’em. It’s also using anti-aliasing filtering (that kicks in at high rates and isn’t ‘in circuit’ at low rates) to clean up its behavior still further. The end result is that the new Iron Oxide Classic has a way more organic, natural tone than the previous one did. These things (and running projects at 2X or 4X) really help get the analog vibe out of ITB digital gear. Since Iron Oxide Classic 2 is able to adapt to this stuff gracefully, that also means it’ll handle rendering at 2x or 4X sample rate should your workflow require working at 1X and then rendering out the final audio at a higher rate. Mind you, I design stuff so you’ll be able to work directly at the higher rate, but this should have you covered whatever your workflow.

I’ve got plenty more to do, you’ll see: Patreon is how I’m able to do this full time. I’m also committed to answering higher levels of Patreon support with increasingly cool and generous stuff given to the community: that’s going well, again, you’ll see. For now, if you like this plugin so much that you’d have bought it, use the Patreon, same if you’d have willingly paid an upgrade fee. We both know you don’t have to pay anything, and indeed I encourage people who are struggling to take care of themselves first and trust that I will be there if you start to thrive and have money to spend: for years now I have designed my Patreon so that it is ALL community generosity and there is not a thing that you can’t have, free, with my blessing. So it’s all good, and I appreciate the support, and I show my appreciation by continuing to advance the state of my plugins week after week :)