Tape Deck

What it sounds like

The play button on a portable cassette player: a deep, hollow clunk, then a small plastic latch catching a fraction later. It has real low end and a boxy case around it. The release is a higher, lighter click of the button coming back up.

Good for

• Audio and video editing with a tactile transport feel
• Long sessions where a weighty click keeps you anchored
• Recordings that want to sound like hardware

How it is made

A burst of white noise around 900 Hz, a sine that drops from 160 to 95 Hz over 40 ms for the clunk, and a brighter noise tick at 2.8 kHz arriving 18 ms later for the latch. A body tuned low, at about 450 and 780 Hz, is the plastic case.

Every qliqr sound is synthesised from a small text recipe, so the version you hear here is the same one the Mac app plays, with natural variation so no two presses are identical.