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…

In other news, I must apologise for the lack of updates to my own website. Although I have been working on a lot of different things over the past few months, there hasn’t been much that warrants a full post yet, in my opinion. Either way, I will try to be a little more active in the future by posting more bits and pieces to the site.

If you like sound-mangling plug-ins, they don’t get much more creative than Kieran Foster’s Glitch. Originally developed to ease the creation of glitchy electronic beats, Glitch is a freeware, PC-only download that has evolved over several years into a comprehensive and versatile tool that can transform synths, audio tracks and loops in a host of ways, from subtle to extreme.

At its heart is a tempo-sync’ed step sequencer offering up to 64 steps, which lets you drag and drop any of the nine available effects at any point in the sequence, so you can program in different treatments for each phrase of your song, or even change them beat by beat. Available effects are TapeStop, Modulator, Retrigger, Shuffler, Reverser, Crusher, Gater, Delay and Stretcher, and you can place these anywhere into the sequence manually, let Glitch choose random effects for you, or use a combination of the two approaches. The random effect selections are determined from song position plus a seed value, so once you get an effect ‘randomness’ that suits your song, the same effects will play at the same point during each playback, making the results far more predictable and musical.

You hear the results in real time as you alter parameters, and can quickly transform a simple synthesized riff or vanilla drum-loop into an evolving tour de force. Glitch is also easy enough to use to be a great live performance tool, especially as it can replace a clutch of separate effect plug-ins that would otherwise require individual mute automation to drop in and out. The effect parameters can also be automated in your sequencer or mapped to MIDI hardware controllers via a MIDI learn function, for yet more sophistication.

Despite its long gestation period, Kieran still regards the current version of Glitch as a ‘rough prototype’, and is hoping that it will eventually evolve into a commercial product. However, even at this stage it’s capable of some truly impressive results. This is a great tool for kick-starting new ideas, and good fun into the bargain!

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul08/articles/pcnotes_0708.htm#4

This is just a quick demo video I made to show off some of the features of my Glitch VST plug-in. I let a simple breakbeat sample play on loop while I go through and tweak various parameters in real time. It’s difficult to see all the details thanks to YouTube’s low res video, but hopefully you get the idea.