Pick a peer, pick a role, and watch the groove flow — the scope shows the envelope you broadcast or receive, live.
GrooveTransfer extracts the rhythmic groove of one track — the transient envelope that makes it feel the way it does — and stamps it onto another by riding that track's volume in time with it. The kick pumps the bass, the drums make the pad breathe, the vocal ducks its own delay. Instances pair by name over shared memory: no MIDI, no sidechain routing, no cables in your DAW.
Pick a peer, pick a role, and watch the groove flow — the scope shows the envelope you broadcast or receive, live.
Sidechain compression borrows another track's energy — but it needs a bus, and it only ducks. GrooveTransfer moves the whole rhythmic envelope: put a Sender on the track whose feel you want, a Receiver on the track you want to move, pair them by name, and the receiver rides its own dynamics to the sender's groove.
Under the hood it's one honest move: an automatic volume ride. The receiver keeps 100% of its own sound — GrooveTransfer simply moves its level up and down (up to ±24 dB, as smoothly or as snappily as you set it), like a fader ridden in perfect time with the source's hits. Not a compressor, not an LFO — the feel of one track, played by another.
The Sender's envelope follower traces the drums' transients (SOURCE below). That groove envelope is broadcast over shared memory, and the Receiver uses it to ride the volume of its own audio — the sustained pad (TARGET) starts pumping in time, smoothed by your Attack and Release. The pad still sounds exactly like your pad; it just moves like the drums.
| Specification | Details |
|---|---|
| Plugin Formats | VST3 (Windows, Linux, macOS) — AU (macOS) — CLAP (Windows, Linux, macOS) |
| Platforms | Windows 10/11 (64-bit) — Linux x86-64 — macOS 11+ Intel/Apple Silicon (universal) |
| Engine | Fast/slow envelope follower pair extracting the transient groove, broadcast at a reduced control rate (4 kHz) — negligible CPU per pair |
| Multi-instance | Sender / Receiver / Both roles over Boost.Interprocess shared memory — up to 16 instances, auto-discovered, paired by name |
| Controls | Sensitivity, Attack (0.1–100 ms), Release (5–2000 ms), Mix (−24…+24 dB), Role |
| Parameters | Automatable in VST3, AU and CLAP hosts |
| Framework | Built with iPlug2 — open-source C++ audio plugin framework |
| Price | Free — full version, no license key, no account, no time limit. |
GrooveTransfer is completely free — the full plugin, not a demo. No sign-up, no license key, no watermark, no muting.
The Windows installer is not code-signed, so SmartScreen may say the publisher is unknown, and a brand-new installer occasionally trips an antivirus heuristic. Neither is a detection — it is a reputation score that every unsigned release starts from zero.
C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3\
and
C:\Program Files\Common Files\CLAP\
In these two hosts the resize grip in the bottom-right corner of the plugin does nothing — resize the plugin window from its edge instead, the way you would any other window. This is deliberate: in v1.1.0 and earlier, dragging that grip could crash Cubase with a memory access violation, and the request it made to the host is what caused it. There is no safe version of that request, so as of v1.1.1 it is not made at all. Every other host keeps the grip.
Nothing to do. Since v1.1.0 the disk image, the installer and all three plugin bundles are signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, with the ticket stapled into the files so it works offline. The publisher shows as Tony Cuny — the legal name behind Xeni Audio, which is what Apple puts on the certificate. Logic loads the AU with no workaround.
If GrooveTransfer earns a place in your sessions, the rest of the XeniAudio range is one click away — McPlugins, SpectralMediator and PhantomTrack all speak the same shared-memory language.