Due to various stressful things going on in my RealLife™ over the past couple of years, it has been far too long since I was last able to work on Glitch, but I’m happy to announce that I’ve finally been able to spend some more time with it recently. At the moment I’m close to finishing a complete rewrite of the plug-in core itself, and although it will not have any major new feature additions (yet), it will be based on VST 2.4 and should be much more stable and efficient. More on that good stuff later!

In the meantime, I wanted to release this minor updated version 1.3.05 which fixes a few things that people have brought to my attention. The main issue was Glitch’s parameters not showing up correctly in Ableton Live 8’s configure mode, making it difficult (impossible?) to easily create custom mappings. I’ve tested this new version in the latest Live 8.1.1 demo and I can say that it seems to be working fine now (and that Live’s configure mode is pretty nifty!). This update should also take care of an annoying bug where the mouse cursor would sometimes get stuck in an invisible state after tweaking parameters in Glitch’s interface, which seems to have been an issue with the actual DIB Controls components I’ve been using for the knobs, buttons, etc.

Anyway… Speaking on a more personal level, it’s been awesome working on Glitch again after being away from it for so long, but the only reason I’ve been able to do so is because for the first time in years I’m not working a full-time job. As soon as I’ve released the rewrite that I’m currently working on, I would love to immediately focus on creating the next major version of the plug-in, and to continue developing some of the ideas that I’ve had for brand new features and effects. The reality is that life is not quite that simple, and in fact my financial resources are unfortunately very limited these days, so it’s difficult to say how much more time I can dedicate to Glitch as a freeware project. I do plan to begin selling some other plug-in ideas in the near future and hopefully generate some revenue that way, but it may be a little while before I can get that up and running.

For now, if you do use Glitch regularly and consider it to be a useful tool, and you want to see it survive as a project and be improved in the future, then please consider making a donation to show your support. Any amount is hugely appreciated, and could literally mean the difference between me being forced to put development on hold again, or being able to spend another month or two of solid coding and making a lot of important progress with it. I love audio development, and I really want to continue working on this thing and making it more badass, but I simply cannot do it without your support!

You can grab Glitch v1.3.05 from the usual place…

A quick test render from a weird graphics algorithm I’ve been coding in Flash Actionscript 3.

Since Flash’s video export is rather unreliable, I used Stroep’s ImageSaver class to save each rendered frame to individual PNG images, and then compiled the frames into a video using AviDemux2.

ImageSaver: http://blog.stroep.nl/2008/08/as3-imagesaver-class-v10/

AviDemux: http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

A selection of images from my recent vacation in Toronto. Photographed with a Canon G9 and fine-tuned in Paint Shop Pro X2.

Various random images from the past.

A collection of time-lapse scenes that I shot while on vacation in Toronto recently, photographed using my Canon G9, with help from CHDK and an intervalometer script. I used VirtualDub to process the 3,000+ photos into actual video. The music is an untitled track that I started back in 2007, but never got around to finishing.

Here is a rad new video by my annoyingly prolific buddy Steve Mason – one half of the notorious (and delicious!) duo known as Original Recipe. The graphics are generated in realtime using Touch and driven by FFT analysis of the audio input. The audio in question is “Workin’ The Middle”, a tantalising preview from their upcoming album Nigiri, Please, due to be released this autumn… or, this fall, if you’re one of those people.

Workin’ The Middle from Steve Mason on Vimeo.

Today, I decided to experiment with some time-lapse photography using my Canon G9 camera. Even though I just quickly pointed the camera out of my (dirty) bedroom window, I really like how it turned out. I’m definitely going to have to explore this technique some more and find other interesting things to capture! This video spans approximately 40 minutes in real time.

Time-lapse Sunset from Kieran Foster on Vimeo.

I’ve been tweaking a few things on the site, moving some pages around, etc., so I apologise if you encountered any broken links!

Glitch has been moved into a new VST Plug-ins section. In there you will also find some smaller plug-ins that were created a while ago but never officially released, namely: Crusher, Stretch, and TapeStop. These were created mainly as proofs of concept, but a few people picked up on them and found them to be useful, so I just thought I’d make them publically available again.

Finally, due to the requests made by various people, I have added a PayPal donate button to the site. If you have enjoyed using Glitch or any of my other plug-ins, and you would like to help support their future development, a donation would be hugely appreciated!

This morning, I was surprised by a FedEx delivery guy knocking at my front door. Not expecting any packages myself, I assumed it would be something for one of my housemates, but, lo and behold, the package – a large, heavy box – was in fact addressed to me. “What could this mysterious package be?”, I wondered…

Continue reading… »