Boutique Audio Plugins — VST3 / AU

Tools that sound
like something
actually
happened.

Character audio plugins for sound that needs a little wear.

Built slowly somewhere in Northern Italy. Released when ready.

Plugins

Not the cleanest. Not the most obedient. Not designed to disappear in the mix.

PA PortaTwin
PORTATWIN

Cassette channel strip. From clean analog warmth to full tape destruction.

VST3 · AU · macOS · Free / Pay what you want
PA PortaTwin panel
PA PortaTwin
Tascam Porta Two

The Tascam Porta Two was not a precision instrument.

Released in 1985, it was a four-track cassette recorder built for bedrooms, not studios. Its preamp clipped early and unapologetically. Its transport wobbled. Its tape hissed. People made records on it anyway — and those records sound like nothing else.

PortaTwin models the full signal chain: the way the preamp colors and saturates at different input levels, the pitch drift of an aging transport, the bandwidth loss and hiss of worn tape. It works as a subtle analog glue or as a deliberate lo-fi tool. Everything in between is fair game.

Signal path

Input HPF 10Hz PREAMP GAIN (CLEAN / HOT)

[HOT] IC1A TANH EQ LOW 100Hz / EQ HIGH 6.5kHz LP ~12kHz IC2A TANH

[CLEAN] EQ LOW 100Hz / EQ HIGH 6.5kHz SOFT CLIP

[TAPE] TAPE SAT (B-H curve) HEAD BUMP ~200Hz WOW/FLUTTER HISS DBX

VU OUTPUT LEVEL (log) GHOST azimuth 65→90% DC BLOCKER

Sections
Preamp

Input gain with selectable character. CLEAN is transparent with a soft clip ceiling. HOT runs two tanh stages modeled on the LM833 op-amp, with the EQ shelves placed between them — so the tone shaping happens inside the saturation, not after. Shelves tuned at 100 Hz and 6.5 kHz, ±10 dB. Switching between modes is completely inaudible — a 10 ms crossfade prevents any click.

Tape

B-H curve saturation with bias interaction and head bump around 200 Hz. Multi-LFO pitch modulation — wow at 0.85 Hz, flutter at 4.8, 6.3, and 8.1 Hz. Wear controls hiss level and progressive high-frequency loss. DBX reduces noise aggressively when signal drops. Speed changes everything.

Output

Logarithmic output fader, –60 to +12 dB. Ghost applies a progressive stereo azimuth split — starting at 65/35 and widening to 90/10 as you push it — then fades in print-through echo at the top of its range. The sound of a tape that remembered the previous session. Auto Gain compensates for level changes from preamp and tape.

Suggested settings
Subtle Analog
CLEAN · INPUT noon
DRIVE 20% · GHOST off

Warmth and gentle saturation. The kind you notice when it's not there.

Classic Lo-Fi
HOT · INPUT 70% · DRIVE 50%
FLUTTER 30% · AGE 40% · 1⅞ips

The sound of a tape that has been used.

Ghost Tape
CLEAN · DRIVE 30% · GHOST 60%
AGE 20% · DBX on

Azimuth smear and faint echo of the previous session bleeding through.

Full Destruction
HOT · everything maxed
SPEED 1⅞ips · GHOST full

Not for the faint of heart.

PA PortaTwin
Get it

Free to download. Pay what you want if you use it.
macOS — Apple Silicon and Intel. VST3 + AU.

The installer is currently unsigned. macOS will ask you to allow it manually once — instructions are in the package.

About

Pointless Audio makes tools with a point of view. Not the most accurate emulation, not the most feature-complete plugin — just software that pushes audio somewhere interesting and stays out of the way while doing it.

The name is not a joke. Pointless means without a point to prove. It also means exactly what it sounds like, depending on the day.

Studio