TACK PLUGIN

The plugins

Each format holds the same five plugins.

Tack

The whole kit: three drums, snare, cymbal, closed and open hi-hat, and the FX bus. It has seven stereo outputs, Main and one each for the three drums, snare, cymbal and hi-hat.

Tack Drum

One drum voice.

Tack Snare

The snare.

Tack Cymbal

The cymbal.

Tack Hi-hat

The closed and open hi-hat.

Every sound parameter on the device's front panel is a plugin parameter, 227 in Tack, and the host can automate and modulate them. The single-voice plugins play chromatically on any channel, or at the voice's tuned pitch when their Chromatic switch is off.

Sample rate and latency

The engine always runs at 44,140 Hz, the LXR-02's own rate, as its clock can't make 44.1 kHz exactly. Its filters, envelopes, delay and reverb are set in samples at that rate, so running it faster or slower would change the sound. Tack resamples its output to the host's rate instead, even when that is 44.1 kHz, so a kit sounds the same at any project rate.

That costs a constant 5.8 ms of latency, which Tack reports so the host can compensate. A note or a parameter change lands within 0.73 ms of its place, as the engine computes envelopes and LFOs once per 64-sample block, like the device does.

The resampler is libsamplerate at medium quality. What it adds is about 97 dB below the signal, far too quiet to hear, and in a 44.1 kHz project it rolls off gently above about 20 kHz. The aliasing you can hear in Tack comes from the engine's own oscillators and distortion, the same as on the LXR-02, and resampling neither adds to it nor removes it.

Running the engine at the host's rate would change the kits. Envelopes and LFOs step a fixed amount each sample, the transients are recordings 50 ms long at 44.1 kHz, and the delay and reverb count their lengths in samples. At 96 kHz the oscillators would also alias differently, and that aliasing is part of how the kits sound.

Kits

Tack loads .SND kit files. Put folders of kits in the kit folder, where each folder is a pack. No kits come with Tack.

Linux

~/.local/share/Tack/Kits/

macOS and Windows

Documents/Tack/Kits

Save writes a .SND file to the User pack. A single-voice plugin saves a kit with only its voice in it, and Tack's browser marks such files with the kind of voice. Picking one replaces only that voice of the open kit.

The die makes a small random change to the open tab's voice, and Shift-click changes every voice. Each click goes on from the last, and the arrow beside it retraces the same steps to where you started. Volume, pan, routing, modulation targets, filter type and the FX stay as they are. A single-voice plugin's die changes its voice.

Installing

Download the zip for your platform from the latest release: Linux x86-64, Windows x86-64 or macOS, for Apple silicon and Intel alike. Each holds Tack.clap and Tack.vst3, and on macOS also Tack.component. Copy them to your plugin folders: ~/.clap and ~/.vst3 on Linux, C:\Program Files\Common Files\CLAP and VST3 on Windows, and ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/CLAP, VST3 and Components on macOS.

The macOS build is not signed, so macOS blocks it as downloaded. After copying, clear the download flag in Terminal: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins.

Building

To build Tack from source instead, you need CMake 3.21 or newer, Ninja, a C and C++ compiler and the OpenGL and X11 development files.

cmake -S host -B build/host -G Ninja
cmake --build build/host
cmake --build build/host --target install_tack

The last command copies Tack.clap to ~/.clap and Tack.vst3 to ~/.vst3. The repository has the commands for Windows and macOS.