DIAL

Stop reaching for a bitcrusher and a lowpass every time you want something to sound old. DIAL is not a lofi filter - it is a radio. Six purpose-built processors run as one chain, every one of them modelling something that actually happens between a transmitter and a speaker.

Built for Mac & Windows, DIAL treats your audio like a broadcast rather than a signal to degrade. The tuner has real stations you lock onto or drift away from. The hiss swells the further off-station you go and settles when you find the signal. The crackle never ticks like a metronome. Several of these stages would make no sense in a normal channel strip - that is the point.

Imagine parking the needle on a station and hearing your loop come through clean, drifting a hair off and watching it sink into the static, holding SEARCH to hop the whole band at random, flipping to AM so everything collapses into narrow gritty mono, then picking a different radio entirely and having the sound - and the whole interface - change with it.

Features

6 Processors, One Signal Path:

• Tuner, Interference, Tone, Reception, Rattle, Output
• A fixed, physically ordered chain - noise enters before the band filter, exactly like a real receiver
• Every block has its own bypass that genuinely stops it processing
• Master Mix and Output on the footer
• One plugin in, a finished broadcast out

A Tuning Dial With Real Stations:

• Seven stations across the band, marked by the tall ticks on the scale
• Park the needle on one and the signal is clear; drift between them and only a ghost bleeds through the noise
• Drag the needle directly in the dial window, or spin the big Tune knob
• Live frequency readout, signal-strength bars and a passband display that all react as you tune
• The reception curve is drawn above the scale, so you can see where the signal lives before you hear it

Hold To Search:

• A momentary button, not a toggle - hold it and the dial hops at random six times a second
• Release and the needle glides back to your Tune setting over 50ms
• Automate the button instead of the knob and you get a natural sweep with a glide back, not a mechanical ramp
• Built for transitions, fills, intros and pre-drop moments

AM And FM Are Genuinely Different Radios:

• AM: 300Hz to 3.4kHz, extra drive, folded to mono - the narrow gritty broadcast
• FM: 60Hz to 15kHz, cleaner and fully stereo - the late-night station
• The band switch crossfades rather than jumping, so you can automate it mid-phrase without a click
• AM's mono fold and narrow passband make an instant telephone or intercom effect

Four Radios, Four Sounds, Four Looks:

• Warm Tube - 1940s walnut tube console. Soft, rounded, naturally saturated
• Transistor - 1960s ivory pocket set. Brighter top end, cleaner drive
• Shortwave - field receiver with a lit amber dial. Thin, distant, pushed hard
• Cheap Speaker - 1970s tangerine plastic. Small, boxy, heavily driven
• Each model changes the voicing, the band bias and the drive - and re-skins the entire interface to match the radio it is built from
• A single automatable parameter, so you can switch radios mid-track

Interference That Never Repeats Itself:

• Noise: a broadband hiss floor that swells as you drift off-station and settles when you lock on
• Crackle: irregular pops with random spacing and random level - a rate-driven clock with randomised drops, not a metronome
• Morse: tone pips bleeding in from the station next door, with randomised dot and dash lengths
• Every random source in the plugin is independently seeded, so nothing moves in lockstep with anything else
• Interference is added before the Tone stage, so the band filter and the radio model shape the noise exactly like they shape your audio

Reception That Makes The Signal Breathe:

• Drift: slow analogue tuning wander around your Tune position - park on a station and let it slowly lose you
• Dropout: sets both the depth and the speed of random signal fading
• Blend: decides how much of that fading you actually hear
• The random movement is a proper sample-and-hold with glide, not filtered noise - so it is genuinely audible rather than a barely-there wobble

Tone That Colours Instead Of Just Getting Louder:

• Saturation is gain-compensated - measured to stay within about 1dB across the entire range
• More drive means more harmonics on the peaks, not a hotter signal fooling you into thinking it sounds better
• Low Cut and High Cut trim each radio's natural band up or down from its default
• Switching models or bands is smoothed, so neither one clicks under automation

A Speaker That Rattles:

• Two slightly detuned wobbles beating against each other, the way a loose cabinet panel actually behaves
• Rate from 1 to 40Hz, with a Depth control that never fully mutes the signal
• Applied last in the chain, because physically it happens at the speaker after everything else
• The speaker grille in the interface shakes with it, and freezes the moment you bypass the block

Bypass That Actually Saves CPU:

• Every block lives in its own processing node
• Switching a block off genuinely stops it computing - it is not mixed to zero and left running
• Bypassed blocks grey out their own knobs, so the state is never ambiguous
• Run all six, or run two, and your CPU meter will know the difference

64 Presets, 8 Categories:

• 64 factory presets, hand-tuned - no filler and no near-duplicates
• Eight categories: Clean Broadcast, Warm Lofi, Late Night AM, Shortwave, Broken Signal, Kitchen Radio, Textures, and FX & Transitions
• From Studio Feed and Amber Dial to Numbers Station, Signal Collapse and Transmission End
• Presets that should sit on a station are tuned exactly to one; presets that should sound half-lost are deliberately placed between them
• Every preset stores its bypass states too, so blocks that are not contributing are switched fully off

An Interface You Can Actually Read:

• The dial window, tuner and all four knob groups visible at once - no tabs to hunt through
• Hover any control for a plain-English description at the bottom of the window
• Drag a knob to change it, double-click to reset it
• Hover shows the value in place of the label, so nothing is cluttered until you need it
• Resizable, with a corner handle and Ctrl-click to snap back to 100%
• Zero latency - no lookahead anywhere in the chain, so you can track and perform through it live
• Every sound control is host-automatable, including the Model and the tuning dial itself