OctoTrack Studio

OctoTrack Studio is a digital Portastudio: an honest 8-track tape machine for your Mac.

Remember how records got made on a 4-track? You armed a track, hit RECORD, and committed. No undo history, no version anxiety, no "Save changes?" dialog. OctoTrack brings that way of working back — with the handful of luxuries tape never gave you.

REAL TAPE RECORDING
Recording is destructive, on purpose. When you record over something, it's gone — so every take is a performance, not a draft. Faders, EQ and pan stay exactly where your hand left them, like a real console. There is nothing to save because everything is already on tape.

THE LUXURIES TAPE NEVER HAD
One level of take undo lets you flip between the new take and the one before it — audition both, keep the winner. And Revert to Opened rolls the whole project back to the moment you sat down. That's the entire safety net. It's enough.

BOUNCE IT DOWN. MAKE IT ETERNAL.
Export your mix to a file, faster than real time — or record a performance mix live, riding the faders while it prints. Once bounced, the mix is eternal: the file never changes, no matter what you do to the tape afterwards.

PING-PONG WITHOUT THE HISS
The sacred 4-track move: bounce tracks 1–8 down to the 7-8 pair and free six tracks for new parts. On real tape every generation added noise — here the tape is digital, so ping-pong as many generations as the song needs. Nothing degrades — not even the TAPE knob prints on a ping-pong.

SOUNDS LIKE TAPE. NOT JUST WORKS LIKE IT.
One amber TAPE knob next to the master fader adds gentle tape saturation to the whole mix: nearly clean at working level, with the character showing up on the peaks, highs first — the way real tape rounds a hot signal. It prints on your exports; at zero the path is bit-exact dry. The console itself stays dry.

A CLICK WORTH FOLLOWING
The metronome speaks six voices — beep, sticks, hi-hat, cowbell, woodblock, side-stick — all synthesized inside the machine, none of them ever leaking into a bounce. Set a count-in and RECORD gives you up to four clicks before the tape rolls. Print Click to Track puts it on tape only when you ask.

TRADE TAPES LIKE IT'S 1985
Share Tape packs the whole project — takes, mix, locks, stereo pairs — into a single .octotape file: the digital version of handing a friend a cassette. On their Mac, Insert Tape drops it straight into the machine. And when the mix is done, Export Track Sheet prints the session as a studio track sheet — plus a fold-and-cut cassette J-card with your track list.

HANDS ON THE FADERS
Plug in a Mackie Control (MCU-mode) surface and it just works: faders, mute/solo/arm, SELECT, pan and transport, with LED feedback — no setup, no mapping, hot-plug included. No surface? Any footswitch that types a key gives you hands-free punch-in.

THE DETAILS
• 8 tracks, 48 kHz, punch in/out with seamless splices
• Tape-style varispeed (PITCH) — it even prints on export, chipmunk solos included
• Tape character (TAPE) — prints on exports, never on a ping-pong
• 3-band EQ, pan and true VU meters (0 VU = −18 dBFS) per track
• Stereo pairs: import a stereo file and mix it as one wide channel
• Metronome with six click sounds and a 1–4 click count-in
• Import any audio file your Mac can read; export WAV (24-bit) or AAC
• Share the whole project as one .octotape file
• Track sheet & cassette J-card as a PDF
• Mackie Control support, plug-and-play
• Built-in guide, right in the Help menu

WHAT OCTOTRACK IS NOT
A DAW. There is no timeline editing, no automation, no plugins or effect racks, no unlimited undo. The console is dry on purpose — EQ, pan and level; your sound comes from the source. OctoTrack is for the moment you want to stop arranging regions and start playing music.

FREE TRIAL, ONE PRICE
Download free and use everything for 14 days. A single in-app purchase unlocks OctoTrack forever — no subscription, no accounts. The app collects no data: no analytics, no tracking, and your recordings never leave your Mac.