Universal Audio has released the UAD Empirical Labs FATSO Tape Simulator as a native plug-in for macOS and Windows, developed in collaboration with Dave Derr, the Empirical Labs founder who designed the original hardware.
The FATSO — Full Analog Tape Simulator and Optimizer — is one of the few genuinely odd boxes to have become studio furniture. It is not a compressor with a tape mode bolted on; it is a unit whose whole premise is that the artefacts of analogue tape, the soft clipping and the harmonic smear and the transient rounding, are the product rather than the cost. UA’s copy lists AC/DC, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden records; Synth and Software’s announcement also reaches back to Willie Nelson and Bonnie Raitt.
What ships
Two plug-ins, matching the hardware variants:
- FATSO Jr — the classic configuration
- FATSO Sr — deeper compression control and added features
Four compression modes carry over: Buss, G.P., Tracking and Spank. Buss and G.P. are the glue settings, Tracking is the per-source one, and Spank is the mode that exists because somebody wanted drums to sound wrong in a specific way.
The plug-in version adds parameters the 1998 rackmount does not have:
- Sidechain filtering
- Variable transformer saturation
- Deeper compression parameters than the front panel exposed
That is the usual pattern for a hardware emulation that has been given room to grow, and it is the usual trade: you get controls the original never had, and you lose the constraint that made the original’s defaults good.
Native is the actual news
UA’s plug-in business ran for two decades on a bargain: the plug-ins were excellent and they required UA’s own DSP, which meant an Apollo interface or a UAD accelerator card. The native library undid that bargain, and the FATSO release is a data point on how far the undoing has gone — this is a flagship emulation arriving in a form that needs no UA hardware at all.
The pricing makes the point sharper. The native FATSO is $79 introductory, down from $149, through 31 December 2026. Existing owners of the Apollo DSP version can cross-grade to native for $2.99.
Three dollars is not a discount. It is UA conceding that customers who already paid for the FATSO once should not pay again because the delivery mechanism changed, and it is the most interesting number in the announcement. It is also included in UAD Spark Studio, UA’s subscription to the full native library — which remains the company’s preferred answer to the question of how you own any of this.
Who it is for
If you have been running the DSP FATSO on an Apollo and resenting the tether, the decision is already made at $2.99. If you have never owned one: the FATSO’s value is that it does one narrow thing — making digital audio behave slightly worse in the way tape behaved worse — with more authority than a general-purpose saturator, and it has a reputation built over nearly thirty years of records rather than over a marketing cycle.
The usual caution applies to all of this. UA says these are “the only authentic plug-in emulations” of the hardware, which is a claim about licensing and Derr’s involvement rather than a measurement. Whether the emulation is good is a question your own ears answer on your own material, and UA offers demos for exactly that reason.
Sources
- Empirical Labs FATSO Tape Simulator — Universal Audio product page
- UA Releases Empirical Labs FATSO Tape Simulator Plug-Ins — Synth and Software
- Native FATSO tutorial — Universal Audio on YouTube
- Empirical Labs