Browser tape deck · Free · No install
High Bias is a 1970s cassette deck that runs in your browser. Capture any tab or drop a file, then push it through a modelled tape path, eleven bands of equalisation and a rack of twelve effects you can reorder. The needles, the reels and the speaker cones all move because the audio moves them.
Press TAB to capture another browser tab — a music player, a video, a stream — or drop an audio file straight onto the cassette. TONE plays a 1 kHz reference for lining the meters up.
Choose a speed and a bias type the way you would loading a real deck, then trim the varispeed. These are filters and playback rate, not labels: every one of them changes what you hear.
Switch in what you want from the twelve-slot rack, drag the slots into the order you want them, and ride the eleven equaliser bands. Press RECORD to keep the result.
Speed moves the high-frequency roll-off and the low-end head bump together — faster tape holds more top end and puts the bump lower. Bias is a shelf at 5 kHz, with Type II sitting at 0 dB because that is what the deck is aligned to.
Eleven bands at ±12 dB, with 6 starting curves. Bypass neutralises the filters rather than unwiring them, so switching it never interrupts the audio.
Flat · Tape · Warm · Air · Vocal · Loud
Twelve slots in signal order, each with its own mix control. Drag a slot to move it — the order is the signal path, so saturation before distortion is a measurably different sound from distortion before saturation.
The VU needles are a damped second-order movement built to the ANSI C16.5 spec — 99% deflection in 300 ms with a little overshoot — and the scale is linear in voltage, not decibels, which is why −20 sits so far to the left. 0 VU is aligned to −18 dBFS.
Every stage runs locally through the Web Audio API — the tape path, the equaliser, the rack, the meters. Files you drop in are read by the browser and nothing else. There is no account, no upload and no server-side processing, because there is no server doing any of the work. Recording writes a file straight back to you.
Yes, completely. There is no account, no trial and no paid tier. It runs in your browser and there is nothing to install.
No. Every stage — the tape path, the equaliser, the effects rack and the meters — runs locally through the Web Audio API. Audio never leaves your machine, and files you drop in are never sent anywhere.
Dropping an audio file works in any modern browser. Capturing sound from another tab needs a desktop Chromium browser — Chrome, Edge, Brave or Opera — because tab audio capture is a Chromium-only capability. Safari and Firefox can play files but cannot share tab audio.
Yes. The record key captures the processed output exactly as you are hearing it — tape path, equaliser, effects and limiter included — and hands you the file when you stop. The cabinet level controls sit after the recording tap, so muting a speaker never changes the recording.
It does, wherever a nonlinear or time-varying effect is involved: saturation before distortion is a measurably different sound from distortion before saturation. Purely linear blocks — bass boost, stereo width, reverb, delay — produce identical output in any order. Drag a slot by its dotted handle to reorder it.
They are real filtering, not decoration. Speed moves both the high-frequency roll-off and the low-end head bump — faster tape holds more top end and puts the bump lower. Bias is a high-shelf at 5 kHz, with Type II at 0 dB because that is what the deck is aligned to. Varispeed changes playback rate by up to ±24%, so speed and pitch move together the way they do on tape.
EqualStream is an equaliser and visualiser: it shows you the sound. High Bias is a tape machine: it colours the sound. They share an audio foundation but the goals are opposite — one is transparent, the other deliberately is not.