Needlepoint - Vinyl Simulator

This did tickle me, because the idea of a bunch of analysts/programmers sat around a table wondering how best to undo the last 40 years of progress into pristine audio signal propagation through a signal chain, does that to me. I generally was pretty sniffy about the whole business of contaminating a 44.1kHz 24-bit digital signal, with glitchy scratchiness but I have come around a bit. I was brought up on Hovis bread and then they sliced it…it was a shock at first. Mum previously let the wolf divide it for us. So a lot of my time has been spent trying desperately NOT to bounce a track anywhere, because of the degradation implicit in doing so (on a 4-track cassette, that’s 1.5mm width of magnetic tape per track). Now with pristine being the norm, I have begun to look at the likes of MixBox CS’s single offering for vinyl-sounding crackles, and I quite liked that on a track with trumpet on. It kind of fitted. So this has a lot more adjustment and the amount of dust can be set, and the speed of the rotating vinyl being slowed down, and as the only comparison I have is MixBox’s I would just say this has a lot more variation. So let’s say that this app can be used as a much wider effect, than the other one I tried, which had a perfectly brilliant but focused effect range. I have no great revelations to offer, but I can confirm the Audio Unit seems to work fine in GarageBand on my Apple iPad Pro M1, and it’s five stars, even though they may find areas to improve, it’s pretty amazing at what it does. I have no complaints or criticisms at all, but would merely point out the menu system for choosing your flavour of sound degradation, is a four-layer deep pathway. This will NOT matter, once you know your way around, but it slows you down when you literally just want to rattle through the offerings - but in fairness, there’s an up/down (right-left actually) arrow setup, so probably this might permit exactly the bullet-time tour I initially wanted. Really good, funny how something old is something new. Tip: it tends to be the case, these Fx are ‘always on’ so it just needs a bit of automation of track gain, once you are happy with the sound itself, to introduce the sound effect, and tail it off. Then, when I set the cursor/vertical play trigger-line to the left margin, the sound goes quiet for convenience.

I’d recommend this purchase any day, it does its job and well. But it strains my ipad pro 2019 cpu considerably more than other fx plugins, I do hope the devs are working on that. It’s not the best lofi/vinyl/mood effect I’ve tried when you include desktop ones, but its close enough thst I might even pick it over others there, because the interface is the best I’ve used, the shaping options really help you pinpoint exactly what you want… Actually, no, it may just be the best at vinyl noise, bar none. I don’t think it beats U-He Satin (desktop only) at flutter n’ wow, but again, so close that I might pick needlepoint if I was also going for vinyl noise. So yeah, if you’ve got your basic set of ipad plugins, this should be close to the top of your list of spice rack plugins.