A bit late with a reply, I recently ended up getting Portatron for $24 with the extra $5 off as it’s more than just a plugin to make stuff sound bad-er-er.

It doesn’t do anything you can’t replicate with lofi tape plugins a sampler and a DAW but it makes it much easier to do some things.

For example you can load four layers of different length loops and then play them all like a monophonic Mellotron. It’s instant boards of Canada stuff.

You can obviously also do the thing where you put four chords into it and use the faders to switch between them but you can then also play any combination of those tracks simultaneously with a MIDI keyboard. They are not modal so you can do all those things simultaneously — start by fading between chords then transpose them all via MIDI. And when you trigger different notes you can make the tape return to zero Mellotron style or you can transpose it mid loop. The way it transposes is the part that’s hardest to recreate. The retriggering function is dead easy but to transpose mid loop and to be able to place a sample anywhere within a loop makes for lots of creative potential that’s much harder with a traditional sampler.

Add to that slowing and speeding up the tape (which is effectively what playing by midi does) from 0% to 200% (I think) with tape lag and all the other features such as being able to independently or globally reverse the tape head.

If you map the controls to a midi controller it just lets you jam all that stuff live. If you were to use four independent sampler tracks or audio tracks in your DAW you could no doubt recreate most of what Portatron can do but with less immediacy and jammability. Which is a word.

What you create would be fairy easy to recreate without it but I think it makes actually coming up with those ideas and sounds easier.

Recreating is usually easier than creating.

For $24 I reckon it’s worth it for the fun factor alone. Its very much an instrument rather than just an effect.