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. 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.
It's not a compressor and it's not an LFO. It's 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 shapes its own audio with it — the sustained pad (TARGET) starts pumping in time, smoothed by your Attack and Release.
| 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 installer is not yet signed with an Apple Developer ID, so macOS will block it on first open with messages like "cannot be opened because it is from an unidentified developer" or "could not verify [the file] is free of malware".
.pkg in Finder →
Open
Until the bundle is Developer-ID signed, Logic's hardened runtime can refuse to load the unsigned AU. As a workaround, ad-hoc sign it and clear the AU cache from Terminal:
sudo codesign --force --deep --sign - /Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components/GrooveTransfer.component
killall -9 AudioComponentRegistrarthen reopen Logic and rescan.
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.