Transit

A phone line, a '90s game console, AM radio, a flaky voice chat, a cassette. Five devices and six macros (Amount, Tone, Noise, Dropouts, Mix, Output) instead of two hundred knobs.

The Console is the one I went deepest on. The sound chip in those consoles squeezed samples into 4-bit ADPCM, and every block of 28 samples picks one of five predictor filters. I copied that part closely: Transit's encoder uses the same five and tries each one on every block. I treat aliasing two opposite ways. The phone's log curve threw off a thin fizz I never asked for, so that one stage runs 4x oversampled. The console's crunchy fold-back I left alone. That grit is the reason to pick it.

Radio does the opposite of what radios were built to do. Automatic volume control followed the station and ignored the music. Turn Transit's Noise up and the static follows your track, flooding the gaps between notes and backing off under them.

The look came after 11 HTML prototypes and three finalists. A dark departure board with glowing LEDs lost, because dark plus glow is what a lot of plugins already look like. The white printed timetable won.