Every Plug-in You Own. One Pedalboard: Meet Taurus

Guitarists have never had access to more ways to shape their sound. A single laptop or tablet can now hold dozens of amp simulators, delays, reverbs, compressors, modulation effects, and instruments. Over time, most guitarists build a collection around the plug-ins they know, trust, and have already spent time learning.

However: owning the right plug-ins and actually turning them into a playable rig are two different things.

Traditional digital audio workstations (DAWs) are built around recording and production. Many all-in-one guitar apps, meanwhile, want you to build your sound inside their own ecosystem. What if you already have the sounds you want — and simply need a better way to bring them together?

That is the idea behind Taurus, a new Audio Unit host. Its premise is simple: turn your plugins into a pedalboard.

What Taurus Is — and Isn’t

Taurus isn’t an amp simulator trying to sell you proprietary sounds. Instead, it’s a powerful, elegant host and router app for macOS, iPad, and iPhone that does exactly one thing perfectly: it turns your scattered plugin collection into a real pedalboard experience.

Taurus is evolving fast. The next major update will also introduce native NAM (Neural Amp Modeler) profile support, an IR loader for cabinet simulations, and an integrated 4-track looper — giving you even more flexibility right inside the board.

At its core, Taurus is about taking back control of your sound. Whether you are using industry-standard effects or niche boutique digital delays, Taurus acts as the ultimate pedalboard chassis. You bring your own plugins — the AUv3 (Mac and iPad) and AUv2 (Mac only) instruments and effects you already own and love — and Taurus chains them together.

• A guitarist-friendly alternative to complex routing environments like AUM, Loopy Pro, Drambo, or Audiobus.

Your Sound, Without Another Ecosystem

Taurus doesn’t come with a library of proprietary effects or amp models. In fact, it doesn’t make the sound at all — it runs yours.

Users can drop their effects, instruments, and generators onto the board and connect them into a signal chain. They can build a straightforward serial setup, or split the signal into parallel paths and merge them again for more complex rigs such as wet/dry setups or dual processing chains.

Each block represents an actual plug-in, and users can access the controls they already know rather than learning a new effects ecosystem. Taurus can lay parameters out as pedal-style controls, while Plugin UI lets the user work with the plug-in’s original interface directly on the board.

The result sits somewhere between the familiarity of a physical pedalboard and the flexibility of a software rig.

Why You Need It

Taurus was designed to solve real problems for three specific types of creators:

• The gigging musician: Taurus allows guitarists and bassists to replace a bulky physical pedalboard with the iPad you already own. With an interface explicitly built for live performance, you can trust your digital rig on stage.
• The home-studio producer: If you already have a vast AUv3 plugin collection for Logic Pro or GarageBand, Taurus gives you a dedicated space to arrange, experiment, and build complex signal chains without opening a heavy DAW.
• The multi-device Mac user: You can build and refine your tones on your Mac during rehearsal, and take that exact same board to the gig on your iPad or iPhone.

From the Studio to the Stage

That distinction matters because Taurus is not designed only for building a signal chain. It’s designed for actually playing it.

Live View: For guitarists and bassists performing with an iPad, Live View turns the board into a full-screen performance interface, making every pedal large enough to hit comfortably with a finger. Guitarists can also hide the surrounding controls and leave only the pedals visible, creating a clean, distraction-free setup built for playing rather than navigating software.

Beyond Live View, Scenes can capture the state of the board and let you switch sounds while playing. Individual blocks can be bypassed, tempo can be tapped in, and boosts can be activated without rebuilding the rig.

There is also a chromatic tuner built directly into every board. When activated, the tuner automatically mutes the output, allowing users to tune silently between songs.

These are small details until the stage. Then, they become the difference between software that can run a guitar rig and software that was actually designed to be used as one.

One Rig, Wherever You Play

A digital rig also creates a new possibility that a physical pedalboard cannot easily offer: the same setup can move with the user.

Flawless iCloud sync: Boards created in Taurus can live in iCloud and follow the user between Mac and iPad. That means users can build or refine a rig on their Mac and use the same board on an iPad when it is time to rehearse or perform.

The boards continue working fully offline and sync again when a connection becomes available. And if the same board is edited on two devices, Taurus keeps both versions rather than silently overwriting one.

For home-studio producers, this provides a single place to organize an existing Audio Unit collection into serial and parallel chains. For live guitarists, it can turn an iPad into the center of a portable software rig. And for guitarists moving between both environments, it removes the need to recreate the same setup every time the device changes.

Built for Guitarists Who Already Know Their Sound

Taurus is ultimately based on a simple assumption: you may not need more effects.

You may already have the compressor you like, the drive you always reach for, the delay whose controls have become second nature, or the amp simulation that has been part of your recordings for years. What is missing is a layer that brings all of them together.

Instead of asking guitarists to abandon those tools for another closed collection, Taurus treats the plug-in library they have already built as the starting point.

Availability

Taurus is available for macOS 15 or later and iPadOS 18 or later. You can try the complete app free for seven days, with no features locked during the trial. After that, Taurus is available for $4.99/month, $24.99/year, or through the currently discounted Lifetime Early Bird offer for $30 (instead of the regular $90).

Explore Taurus at playtaurus.com or download it from the App Store. It’s currently available for iPad and Mac, with iPhone support coming in the next update.