Baby Audio’s HyperWarp lets you draw half-time and tape-stops onto any loop
Baby Audio’s new granular plugin turns a drawn curve into stutters, half-time edits and tape-stops, at a $49 intro price through Black Friday.
Baby Audio has released HyperWarp, a granular effect where you draw what time does to your audio. Sketch a curve and a loop, a stem or a full mix stutters, drops into half-time or grinds to a tape-stop. It runs as a plugin inside any major DAW.
It costs $49 until Black Friday, then $99. Output’s Portal brought granular effects to a wider crowd in 2019 at $149, so even the list price undercuts it.
Granular processing has long been the domain of people willing to spend an evening tweaking grain size and scatter. HyperWarp starts from a graph instead. A horizontal line plays the audio at normal speed. Angle the line down and it slows; angle it up and it speeds up, either tape-style or with pitch and tempo independent. Draw stair-steps and you get stutters and glitches. Hold shift for right-angle steps, which give the cleanest glitches. Lines can also send the playhead backwards for reversed sections.
The playhead follows your host tempo until the graph tells it otherwise. Underneath, the audio is broken into grains and rebuilt on the fly along your shape, which suits edits, intros and transitions.
Under the graph sit global controls for Resolution, Pitch (quantized or free), Scatter and Feedback. On top of those, seven color-coded profiles change how the engine behaves, each with four macro knobs. They include Flange Warp, Clean Warp, Degrade Warp, Filter Spam, Fauxcoder and Lo-Fizzly. Clean Warp is the tidy one, with pitch-independent speed. Degrade Warp is a downsampling flavor for lo-fi damage. Lo-Fizzly goes after radio-style degradation, with Degrade, Dirt, Radio and Rate options.
Peter Kirn at CDM, who spent time with it and built a free preset bank, says the profiles make it feel like a multi-effect even though it all runs on one engine. His routine is to draw a groove he likes in Flange Warp or Clean Warp, then switch profiles to hear how the same shape sounds in each. If you don’t want to draw, there are preset graph shapes, random stepped or curved envelopes, a randomize-everything button and more than 190 presets. Hit randomize and lock what you like.
One limit: there is no internal modulation beyond the profile macros. If you want movement, you’ll modulate those macros from your DAW. Kirn used Ableton Live’s modulators, and Bitwig Studio and Cubase have good ones too.
The engine comes from lead developer Joel Keohane’s granular work, which also powers Baby Audio’s Grainferno synth. HyperWarp shares that engine, though it isn’t Grainferno with an audio input. Every profile is built from in-engine parameters rather than post-effects. Baby Audio says human engineers and designers built it, without AI.
HyperWarp ships as VST, VST3, AU and AAX for macOS 10.13 and later, including Apple Silicon, and Windows 10 and later. Baby Audio’s site lists a free trial, and CDM’s preset bank and audio examples are free if you want to hear it first.
