23DSP has released Time Terrarium, a delay plug-in for Windows, macOS and Linux in VST3, AU and LV2 formats. It places four kinds of echo in the four corners of a glass, and an orb in the middle decides which of them the incoming signal feeds.
Each corner, called a habitat, holds one of eight species of echo, and each species has a single Character control:
- Moss, a tape delay, with Age for wow, flutter, saturation and darker repeats.
- Water, a ping-pong delay, with Current for how strongly the repeats swirl and smear.
- Crystal, a shimmer delay, with Interval for an octave up, a fifth up, an octave and a fifth up, or an octave down.
- Ash, a reverse delay, with Grain for how short the reversed fragments are.
- Frost, in which each repeat is diffused further than the last, with Melt for how far.
- Dust, a granular delay, with Scatter for how far the grains spread in time and across the stereo field.
- Pebble, bouncing taps that alternate left and right, with Bounce for how quickly they accelerate.
- Wind, a filter swept through the repeats, with Gust for how far and how fast it moves.
A habitat is replanted by clicking its name, and two habitats are swapped by dragging one name onto the other corner.
The orb can be placed by hand, or set moving on one of four orbits (Circle, Figure 8, Pendulum and Drift) lasting from half a bar to sixteen bars. With Sync on and the host playing, the orbit follows the host’s bar position. Migrate passes each repeat on to the neighbouring habitat, clockwise or counter-clockwise; with the default planting, a single note returns as tape, then ping-pong, then shimmer, then reverse. Pattern gives each habitat its own multiple of the echo time: Unison, Dotted, Triplet, Cascade or Golden.
Seal closes the glass. No new input enters, and the echoes already inside keep circulating and migrating at a steady level until it is opened again.
Other features include:
- Time synced from 1/32 to one bar, or free up to four seconds, with Feedback and Tone.
- Bloom, a reverb fed by the echoes.
- Duck, which lowers the echoes while the input is playing.
- Width from mono to 200%.
- Low Cut and High Cut acting on the echoes and the reverb only, leaving the dry signal untouched.
- A lane per habitat showing the repeats a single note would produce with the current settings.
- Thirty presets in six categories, and Roll, which generates a random starting point while keeping Mix and Output.
Price: €19. It runs on Windows (64-bit, VST3), macOS 11 and later (Intel and Apple Silicon, VST3 and AU, as a signed and notarised installer) and Linux (x64, VST3 and LV2). The current version is 0.9.0-rc1, a release candidate.
Audio demos, screenshots and the download are available from the product page: https://23dsp.com/products/time-terrarium/
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