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The Portatron Black Friday deal is 30% off, $69, until Nov 27, 2026, on Robotic Bean's 4-track cassette tape loop synthesizer plugin for your DAW.
Portatron turns your DAW into a four-track tape machine built around loops. You play looping samples against the transport or trigger them from a MIDI keyboard, then run them through lofi cassette character and built-in effects.
The maker pitches it as a way to breathe new life into your samples and capture the vibe of a classic cassette recorder.
Version 2.0 adds three things:
There are three playback modes. Drone runs along with your DAW transport, semi-synced loops restart every 1, 2 or 4 bars, and a monophonic Mellotron-style mode lets you play the tape from a MIDI keyboard.
The cassette sound is adjustable. Tape Speed runs from 0 to 200%, and you also get Noise, Dropouts, Wobble and start/stop Lag. Pick Normal or Chrome tape, then turn up Drive for tape-style saturation.
Each of the four tracks has its own Drive, EQ, Level and Pan. Delay and reverb sends sit on top, and there are multitrack and effects audio outputs for routing into your own bus setup.
Yes. Portatron takes whatever audio you route into it and prints it to its tape channels, with the number of simultaneous recording channels (as many as four) set by what your DAW supports.
Arming, monitoring and recording all happen inside the plugin. The maker says it keeps up even when your DAW's transport jumps around mid-take, and every take is saved to disk as its own file, so recording over a track doesn't lose the earlier pass.
The Tape Editor lets you resize, move, loop, repitch, fade and reverse samples. Three locators, Return To Zero and Auto-RTZ triggers (On Key or On Bar) help you move around the tape.
The included library holds hundreds of pre-recorded samples. Expect instruments like piano, vibraphone, vocals and synths, plus unusual sources such as hydrophones and shortwave radio.
Samples from different tracks share the same tape effects, which is how you get a cohesive lofi soundscape out of mixed sources.
Portapacks are downloadable sound bank collections of tape loops and samples. The manager shows what's installed, downloads free Portapacks in a click, and can point Portatron at folders on an external drive.
Yes. The Portatron Black Friday deal takes 30% off Robotic Bean's tape loop synthesizer, bringing it to $69. The offer ends Nov 27, 2026.
Portatron includes four sample playback tracks, a library of hundreds of pre-recorded samples with patches, a Tape Editor, built-in EQ, delay and reverb, and the Portapack manager for adding downloadable sound bank expansions.
Yes, as of version 2.0. You can feed any audio signal in and record onto up to all four tape tracks at once, depending on your DAW. Each take is automatically saved to disk as its own file.
You get Tape Speed (0 to 200%), Noise, Dropouts, Wobble and start/stop Lag. Choose Normal or Chrome tape types, and use Drive for tape-style saturation. Each track also has its own EQ, Level and Pan.
Prices and end dates are checked at publishing time and can change, so confirm them at the store before you buy.