Cryptid Audio has announced the release of the first batch of its boutique audio plugins designed to bring analog warmth, a modern interface, and displays that tell the truth.
Aura is a front-of-mix channel strip which delivers a parametric EQ, opto + FET compression, dynamic resonance taming, and analog saturation.
Most spectrum analyzers show you what’s loud. The aura shows you what’s alive — the sustained, in-tune core of a note glows warm amber, while noise and transient energy stay dim and cool. It’s a different kind of information: not just how much energy sits at a frequency, but whether that energy is musical. And because the EQ curve and the aura are drawn from the exact same code that processes your audio, what you see is precisely what you hear. The picture can’t lie. (We once caught our own display disagreeing with the filter by 1.3 dB — we fixed it and added a test that fails the build if it ever comes back.)
Nessie is a lo-fi analog effect built to survive a lead vocal.
It keeps a clean core and wraps the character around it, so the grit lands on the body of the sound and the noise falls away from the transients. Tube or tape colour (oversampled so it doesn’t turn brittle), wow and flutter modelled from record eccentricity and capstan flutter plus a slow random wander so the drift never exactly repeats, crackle and hiss that duck under the program, rotary and auto-pan, bit-crush, and a de-harsh stage.
Mothman combines a space echo and aura reverb.
Tape repeats with wow, flutter and age feeding a reverb tail built to stay clear: sustained, musical repeats linger while noisy ones fade at the same feedback setting, and the tail swells on held notes while the noise wash falls away. Plus a faint tail carrying a ghost of recent notes across the rests, and an octave-down weight that arrives on a held low note but stays quiet on chords and transients.
All three are available as a VST3 plugin for Windows (Mac in development), with intro pricing starting from $29 USD. Free 14-day trial versions are available to try the plugins.
More information: Cryptid Audio
