Haze

Name: Haze
Price: 49 USD
Author: Unfiltered Audio

by Unfiltered Audio · Multi-FX · Buffer time-stretch effect

Not rated yet

Haze is a real-time buffer effect from Unfiltered Audio that repeats, freezes and stretches incoming audio in Tape, Granular or Spectral mode, turning short phrases into slow-moving textures.

$49 at launch (regular $69); the installer works as a demo.

Best for: Sound Design, Keys & Synths, Guitars. Genres: Ambient & Cinematic, Electronic & EDM, Lo-Fi.

Keywords: tape, spectral, granular, freeze, lo-fi, samples & loops, sound design, electric guitar, randomize, simple, wide, ambience, cinematic, creative, eerie, FFT-based, mixing, phaser, pads, stutter, thin, vocals, wobble.

What it does

Haze is Unfiltered Audio's "liquid audio buffer": it records incoming audio in real time, with no added latency, and lets you repeat, slow down and dissect it. It can freeze about half a minute of sound and move around inside it while the input keeps running. The developer built it around two gestures from his own music-making: finding a loop you want to go on forever, then phasing, obscuring and stretching it.

Tape Mode: behaves like magnetic tape, so pitch drops as time slows, with age, wow, noise, bias and dropout controls for hiss and oxidation.
Granular Mode: splits the buffer into particles that keep the original pitch and timbre or spread across the stereo field; Scatter and Erode thin and scramble the cloud.
Spectral Mode: stretches in the frequency domain and adds harmony or dissonance, with Smear (blends neighbouring bins), Blur (a spectral reverb), Whspr (breathy noise per bin) and MP3 (watery lossy-codec artefacts).
Buffer and speed: buffer size sets how often the buffer resets, which keeps stretched material on the beat; speed repitches in Tape Mode and keeps pitch in the other two.
Press and Sample Rate: a Press knob pushes amplitudes towards an "impressionist texture", and Sample Rate is a plugin-wide control.
Export and recall: frozen buffers can be exported as audio files, or saved with projects and presets to share.
Randomize and themes: full-plugin randomisation with safety locks, hand-made colour themes and a theme importer.

Haze was released in October 2026 and reuses technology from Unfiltered's other plugins: Sandman Pro's looping buffer, SpecOps' spectral effects, lo-fi-af's tape and Silo's granulation. The installer doubles as a demo. Version 1.1 is planned with a partner tool and a buffer browser.

Source: Unfiltered Audio product page

When to use it

Haze is the pick when you want to catch a phrase and stretch it into an ambient smear, rather than chop it rhythmically. Unlike Effectrix2 or Stutter Edit 2, it doesn't sequence repeats and stutters to the grid; it slows and freezes material in one of three stretch modes. Compared with Graindad, its granular mode is simpler, but Haze adds tape-style repitching and spectral blurring in the same plugin. Within Unfiltered's own range it combines parts of Silo, SpecOps and lo-fi-af, but each of those goes deeper in its own field.

Best for: drones and pads from short samples, frozen vocal or guitar textures, slowed-tape transitions and sound design beds.
Genres: ambient, cinematic, experimental electronic and lo-fi.
Look elsewhere if: you want deep granular control (Silo, Graindad), modulated spectral processing (SpecOps), detailed tape emulation (lo-fi-af), or tempo-synced glitch sequencing (Effectrix2).
Tip: use the buffer size to keep stretched material in time with the track; DataBroth recommends a fast rate and medium grain size in Granular Mode for grain clouds.

What producers say

The first review treats it as a simple, enjoyable smearing and time-stretch effect rather than a deep sound-design workstation.

DataBroth called it "a time stretch algorithm in effect form" and "a fun effect" for ambient soundscapes, enjoying the Scatter and Erode controls and the variety of spectral options.
Criticisms: DataBroth found the granular mode on the simple side with settings only in percentages, missed modulation in the spectral mode, and called Tape Mode "pretty standard stuff".

DataBroth review

Where to buy

Unfiltered Audio: $49 (regular $69)

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