- Product: drft
- Developer: Sample Roll
- Type: VHS / CRT circuit-bend FX
- Version: 1.1.3
- Format: VST3
- Requirements: Windows 10 or later
drft is a VHS / CRT circuit-bend effect you put in your chain. Six character knobs – burn, drift, bend, dropout, wash, noise – run your audio through a dying tape machine, while a CRT on the panel shows the same damage on a picture: your video, a GIF, a live camera, or one of 23 built-in generators you can blend with your footage. Dropouts tear picture and sound together, feed lets the picture push back into the audio, and REC exports what you see and hear as a real MP4 in 16:9, 9:16 or ultrawide.
Tape wow, head burn, tracking wash, dropouts and snow – six knobs of damage on whatever you run through it, over a CRT that shows you every bit of what it does.
A picture behind the sound
Drop a video, a GIF or a still onto the tube and it plays through the same circuit as your audio. Or go live: any camera your machine can see – a webcam, a capture card, or on a Mac your iPhone over Continuity Camera – point it at your hands, your desk, the room, and that becomes the picture.
Six knobs of character
BURN scorches it hot, DRIFT lets the tape wander and leaves a blurred echo smearing behind the picture, BEND warps and skews, DROPOUT punches holes in the take, WASH softens everything to mush, NOISE buries it in snow. Sound and picture ride the same knobs – turn one and you hear it and see it move together.
When it drops, it drops everywhere
Dropouts are wired straight across the machine: the instant one punches a hole in the audio, the picture tears with it. Not a visualizer guessing along – one event, heard and seen.
23 generators when you have no footage
The FIELD page makes its own picture: 23 generators – flow, plasma, tunnel, kaleido, aurora, caustic, cells, mandala and more – shaped by hue, zoom, glow, tint and flow, with FOLLOW setting how hard they ride your audio. Then blend them: the BLEND fader luma-keys the generator against your video or your live camera, so your footage comes through the pattern instead of replacing it.
Break the television, not the tape
The CIRCUIT page is six knobs that damage the set itself – and it runs on whatever is already on the tube, so it bends your footage and your camera the same way it bends the generators. The deflection coil pins and bows the raster. The colour reference dies, so the picture stops knowing what colour anything is and reads brightness as hue instead. INJECT puts your waveform into the video line, where bass draws slow curves down the screen and hats comb it into ripples. One DEPTH fader rides all of it at once.
A canvas that remembers what you played
PAINT is the FIELD page’s other half, and a different instrument entirely. Nothing is generated fresh each frame – a buffer is redrawn into itself, turning and drifting and fading, while the transients in your track stamp new marks on top. What you played a few seconds ago is still up there, smeared and rotated away from what you are playing now. Six kinds of mark, including ink marbling that pushes the whole picture outward into nested contours.
The picture plays the sound
feed reads the frame – how bright, how busy, how broken – and pushes it back into the audio. A hot white flash leans on the sound; a dead channel goes quiet. Run a music video through it and the mix starts breathing with the footage.
Press REC, keep the take
The REC key captures the tube and the sound together and writes a real MP4 – the export re-renders every frame through the same pipeline, so the file matches what you watched. Frame it 16:9, vertical 9:16 for phones and reels, or ultrawide, and cut circuit-bent music videos straight out of the plugin.
The rest of the chassis
Tape speed
Slow the whole machine down. Pitch, picture and damage all follow, like a deck running on a dying motor.
Dice
One click re-rolls the character knobs into a new broken machine. Keep rolling until you find the one.
Presets
A factory bank of broken machines, plus your own saves – user presets live in a plain folder on disk.
Bass mono
All the wobble and smear stays up top – the low end folds to mono so the bottom never goes seasick.
Video sync
The tube locks to your host transport, so the picture scrubs, loops and lands exactly with the session.
Aspect
16:9, vertical 9:16 for phones, or ultrawide – the tube reframes and the export follows it.