What is RC-20 Retro Color v2?
RC-20 Retro Color adds the character of old and imperfect gear to your sound: the crackle of vinyl, the hiss and wobble of tape, warm saturation, crunchy samplers and springy old reverbs. Version 2 adds the damage of the digital age too, from lossy compression to glitchy video calls.
Each module has a Big Knob that sets how much of it you get, a few controls for shaping it, and a Flux knob for organic movement. The Magnitude slider scales the whole plugin, taking you from untouched to full-blown mayhem with one move. New in v2, Echo is a feedback delay with RC-20 inside its loop, so every repeat can come back a little more wobbly, crushed or worn.
RC-20 works on anything, from a single drum hit to a whole mix. Use it as an insert effect on a track or bus. It runs as a VST3, AU or AAX plugin, and is installed with the XLN Online Installer. See our guides on installing and loading XLN products.
Hover over any control and a Help Tip at the bottom of RC-20 tells you what it does.
What’s new in v2
If you know the original RC-20, here’s what’s new.
- Echo: a feedback delay where Wobble, Distort, Digital, Space and Loss adds effects to the repeats, with tempo sync, Scrub, Ping/Pong, Duck and a granular Grains section.
- Varispeed: tape-style pitched-down playback to half, quarter or eighth speed, kept in time with your track.
- Loss: the new home of Magnetic. Magnetic mode keeps the tape wear, flutter and dropouts, and the new Codec mode adds MP3-style compression, packet loss and formant shifting.
- Space: the original reverb, now called Classic, plus 32 new spaces.
- Upgrades in every module: 17 new Noise types and a Pre/Post blend, tempo sync and Shape in Wobble, three new Distort types and Overload, Drive and Sputter in Digital, and Focus filters in more places.
- Module order: drag the modules into any order.
- A bigger Master section: Varispeed, Compress, Width In and Out, two new Tone modes, Clip and one-click level matching.
- Workflow: a new Preset Browser, module locks, Undo/Redo, Snapshots, Bypass and Oversampling.
Coming from RC-20 v1?
Your projects RC-20 v2 installs as a new separate plugin to the original. Projects you made with v1 keep using v1, so nothing in them changes.
Your presets All the original factory and artist presets are built into v2, in the Legacy RC-20 Presets collection. The first time you open v2, it offers to import the presets you saved in v1. You can also do it later from Menu › Import presets from previous version..., which appears when v1 is installed. Presets you’ve already imported are skipped, and name clashes get a unique name.
Converted presets Imported presets are converted to v2 automatically and will sound just like v1.
Nothing has been removed from v1 so you can still get all the same sounds you love in v2, plus a whole lot more.