Fuse Audio Labs has discounted Flywheel, its excellent reel-to-reel tape emulation plugin, to just $18.24 until August 31st (regular price $71.74) at Plugin Boutique.
In my opinion, Fuse Audio Labs plugins are criminally underrated. They consistently offer high-end plugins (especially if you’re into different flavors of retro saturation) at very fair prices, especially during sales like this one.
Flywheel is a perfect example: one of the best-sounding tape sims out there, now going for under 20 bucks.
Rather than emulating a specific tape machine, Flywheel blends the best characteristics of multiple reel-to-reel units into a streamlined interface.
It captures all the magnetic charm of analog tape. You get saturation, head bump, hysteresis, high-frequency roll-off, and tape transport effects, all without bogging you down with complexity.
It’s a super hands-on plugin, and I love that in a tape sim.
You get two tape formulas (I and II), two speeds (15 and 30 IPS), a record gain that auto-compensates volume, and a hysteresis control that adds some very tasteful high-frequency character.
It also includes wow and flutter controls (if you want a sprinkle of that lo-fi tape feel), switchable crosstalk and hiss, plus tape stop/start animations and optional oversampling.
I especially love how Fuse approached the design here. The plugin has minimal controls but doesn’t lack tone-shaping potential. The zero-latency mode makes it great for tracking, and CPU usage is light enough to use it across every channel.
It works great for various scenarios, such as adding glue to your drum bus, warmth to your mix bus, saturation and instability to digital synths, and much more.
If you’re after a heavy-handed “lo-fi” tape sim, this isn’t that. Flywheel leans more into subtlety and polish like glue, depth, and a touch of analog magic. Yes, it can do lo-fi too, but only as a spice, not as the main course.
The added VU calibration options make it easy to dial in the right amount of saturation, and even though there’s no obvious preset loader in the GUI, there are several useful factory presets to get you started.
The plugin is available in VST2, VST3, AU, and AAX formats for Windows 7 and up (32/64-bit) and macOS 10.12 and newer (Intel & Apple Silicon).
If you’ve been meaning to add a reliable, great-sounding tape plugin to your arsenal, Flywheel at $18.24 is an easy recommendation, but only until the end of August.
Get the deal: Flywheel ($18.24 until August 31st)
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Last Updated on August 29, 2025 by Tomislav Zlatic.
