The Kiss Of Shame (Magnetic Tape Saturator)

size 226 MB

The Kiss of Shame – Tape Desecration Processor

Recently I was donated the source code to The Kiss of Shame, a magnetic tape emulation plug-in from 2014, originally developed by Eros Marcello and friends. The plug-in was never finished or released, but Eros has graciously allowed it to become open source. As part of my plug-in archeology project, I’ve been hacking away at the code to get it up and running again. In this blog post I’ll explain in detail how this plug-in works.

The Kiss of Shame was one of the first analog tape degradation simulations. Quoting from a LinkedIn post by the original author:

It’s the worlds first (and to my knowledge) only tape / analog circuitry emulation plugin that realistically models the effects of magnetic particle instability, lubricant loss, substrate deformation, drift, scrape-flutter, print-through and reel expansion/contraction into a suite of FX processing tools for sound design and music production. We were also the first to leverage machine learning to account for the vast nonlinearities inherent in magnetic tape and analog circuitry.

I don’t know how much of that actually got implemented — I’m not an expert on reel-to-reel tape recorders — but it’s an interesting plug-in nonetheless.

Installation instructions

Mac
The Mac version of the plug-in is signed and notarized.

Download KissOfShame-Mac.zip from the Releases page.
In your Downloads folder, double-click KissOfShame-Mac.zip to unzip the file.
Copy KissOfShame.component to the folder /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components
Copy KissOfShame.vst3 to the folder /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3
In your DAW, look for Infernal Love > The Kiss of Shame. You can insert this plug-in on a mono or stereo track.
If the AU version of the plug-in is not visible in your DAW, open Applications/Utilities/Terminal. Type the following and press the enter key:

killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrar
Then restart your DAW. Now the plug-in should be visible. If not, reboot your computer.

Windows
Download KissOfShame-Windows.zip from the Releases page.
In your Downloads folder, right-click KissOfShame-Windows.zip and choose Extract All… to unzip the file.
Copy KissOfShame.vst3 to the folder C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3
In your DAW, look for Infernal Love > The Kiss of Shame. You can insert this plug-in on a mono or stereo track.