Audio software
High Bias
A 1970s cassette deck, built in a browser tab, doing real DSP.
- Role
- Sole author — audio engine, DSP, interface and site
- Period
- 2026
- Status
- Live
The problem
Tape emulation is sold as a plugin you load inside a digital audio workstation. If what you actually want is to run a browser tab or a file through a tape path, that means installing a DAW, routing system audio into it through a virtual device, and buying a plugin — a lot of machinery for an effect. And most tape plugins are a knob panel: the controls that made a real deck sound the way it did, speed and bias, usually are not there at all.
The approach
High Bias is the deck itself, in a tab. Capture a tab or drop a file, and the audio runs through a modelled tape path into an equaliser and an effects rack. The controls are real DSP rather than chrome: tape speed moves both the high-frequency rolloff and the head-bump frequency and depth, because faster tape genuinely stores more top end and puts the bump lower; bias is a 5 kHz high shelf with Type II at 0 dB, because that is what the deck is aligned to. The machine is drawn as a hi-fi system standing in a room — the physics is modelled too, so the VU needles are damped second-order systems to the ANSI C16.5 spec and the supply reel visibly speeds up as it empties.
What it does
A modelled tape path
Four tape speeds (1⅞ to 15 ips), three bias types (ferric, chrome, metal) and ±24% varispeed with the shift shown in semitones as well as percent — because on tape, speed and pitch are one control.
Eleven-band equaliser
Peaking filters between the input trim and the meter tap, so the needles show what you did rather than what arrived. Bypass neutralises the band instead of unwiring it.
Twelve-slot reorderable effects rack
Saturation, flutter, bass, reverb, delay, chorus, flanger, phaser, distortion, compressor, hiss and width — all plain Web Audio. Slot order is data, so the chain can be dragged into any order, and the rewire fades out for 12 ms and back so a reorder does not click.
Instruments that behave like instruments
Needle VU meters on a voltage-linear scale, a CRT scope, and speaker cones driven by a 160 Hz-lowpassed envelope — a real driver follows the bass envelope, not the waveform.
Record what you heard
Recording taps the output gain, after the tape path, EQ and effects but before the speaker trims, so muting a cabinet never changes the capture.
Nothing leaves the browser
Capture, processing and recording all run locally through the Web Audio API. There is no account, no upload and no server-side processing.
Outcome
Shipped as a complete machine — deck, equaliser, effects processor, speaker cabinets and four lighting scenes — with a tape library, a mobile layout and a test suite covering the ballistics, tape physics and effect definitions.