64 bit replacement for Livecut

[zenke]

I am still searching! I am no programmer. It would be amazing if one of you brillient guys ported Livecut to 64Bit

[Andreya_Autumn]

I am still searching! I am no programmer. It would be amazing if one of you brillient guys ported Livecut to 64Bit

Hello!

I've been in the same boat as you. I've kept LiveCut around all these years, even having tried all the other well known glitchers. Because it did some things just right, that none of the others did (while great in their own way).

The fact is LiveCut is open source, and a few Github users have managed to get it to build on modern systems. However, it still doesn't work correctly, so I'm afraid you'd be dissapointed with these versions. Here's the repo if you want to try it anyway (you need to build it yourself though): https://github.com/scheffle/Livecut

[Andreya_Autumn]

On the other hand, you can try the *only* modern plug that ticks the right boxes for me:
https://bomshankamachin.es/plugins/chrisGlitch

It will probably be super obvious to OP why I'm recommending this as a replacement. For anyone else that doesn't know:

The thing that made LiveCut so good was that it worked automatically on input audio.
Also notable, LiveCut was primarily a beat slicer, unlike some other glitchers which are primarily FX sequencers. (Those can be cool, but it's a very different thing.)

This was super useful for all those times you wanted random glitch/jungle cuts, but exactly what the cuts were didn't matter that much.
Example: put a simple hi-hat phrase hard left and a different one hard right. Boring and static right? Put a LiveCut on each one; much more interesting. Those glitchy hats + a kick and snare = done. Making all those cuts by hand would've taken ten years and the result would've not even been any better.
Other example: Put a break through it, record the output and just leave it playing for a while. Guaranteed it's gonna spit out some good ideas somewhere, which you would've never thought of if you were cutting that shit up by hand.

I had Stutter Edit for a while. It's very good, both as a beat slicer and an FX sequencer.
I never really felt like it replaces LiveCut though, because it requires way more user input. When I wanna get my beat slicing that specific I'm just gonna make the cuts by hand anyway.
BreakTweaker is great too, but again a very different thing.
I tried dBlue Glitch too. Very good as well, but also primarily an FX sequencer. I have many ways of Sequencing FX already.


So enter ChrisGlitch. It's a beat slicer, and it just does its thing. No user input needed once the right parameters are dialed in, other than an On/Off button which can be automated. It's still being developed and works on modern machines. There's Mac and Windows versions, IDK about Linux.

The main differences:

ChrisGlitch does straight cuts only, none of the speedup or slowdown ramps that LiveCut did, unfortunately. I've written to the devs and asked if they wanna put those in and they said they're thinking about it.

LiveCut was "trained" on Jungle breaks, and worked best with that kind of input material. It could output very musical phrasing when in that zone. The downside was that it kinda fluked other material sometimes. And I never got it to work well in other time sigs than 4/4. ChrisGlitch doesn't quite nail that Jungle thing like LiveCut did, but on the other hand will work well in any time signature and any input material.

LiveCut had two effects (bitcrush and comb filtering). ChrisGlitch has none. I hope it stays that way TBH. I'd rather have a great automatic beat slicer which does that thing well, then Sequence FX in with other plugs if needed.

[dave dove]

that’s exactly how i used livecut…
will check chrisglitch out

[Andreya_Autumn]

Great!

[Widowsky]

On the other hand, you can try the *only* modern plug that ticks the right boxes for me:
https://bomshankamachin.es/plugins/chrisGlitch

It will probably be super obvious to OP why I'm recommending this as a replacement. For anyone else that doesn't know:

The thing that made LiveCut so good was that it worked automatically on input audio.
Also notable, LiveCut was primarily a beat slicer, unlike some other glitchers which are primarily FX sequencers. (Those can be cool, but it's a very different thing.)

This was super useful for all those times you wanted random glitch/jungle cuts, but exactly what the cuts were didn't matter that much.
Example: put a simple hi-hat phrase hard left and a different one hard right. Boring and static right? Put a LiveCut on each one; much more interesting. Those glitchy hats + a kick and snare = done. Making all those cuts by hand would've taken ten years and the result would've not even been any better.
Other example: Put a break through it, record the output and just leave it playing for a while. Guaranteed it's gonna spit out some good ideas somewhere, which you would've never thought of if you were cutting that shit up by hand.

I had Stutter Edit for a while. It's very good, both as a beat slicer and an FX sequencer.
I never really felt like it replaces LiveCut though, because it requires way more user input. When I wanna get my beat slicing that specific I'm just gonna make the cuts by hand anyway.
BreakTweaker is great too, but again a very different thing.
I tried dBlue Glitch too. Very good as well, but also primarily an FX sequencer. I have many ways of Sequencing FX already.


So enter ChrisGlitch. It's a beat slicer, and it just does its thing. No user input needed once the right parameters are dialed in, other than an On/Off button which can be automated. It's still being developed and works on modern machines. There's Mac and Windows versions, IDK about Linux.

The main differences:

ChrisGlitch does straight cuts only, none of the speedup or slowdown ramps that LiveCut did, unfortunately. I've written to the devs and asked if they wanna put those in and they said they're thinking about it.

LiveCut was "trained" on Jungle breaks, and worked best with that kind of input material. It could output very musical phrasing when in that zone. The downside was that it kinda fluked other material sometimes. And I never got it to work well in other time sigs than 4/4. ChrisGlitch doesn't quite nail that Jungle thing like LiveCut did, but on the other hand will work well in any time signature and any input material.

LiveCut had two effects (bitcrush and comb filtering). ChrisGlitch has none. I hope it stays that way TBH. I'd rather have a great automatic beat slicer which does that thing well, then Sequence FX in with other plugs if needed.

Great write-up, very useful, thank you Andreya!

I have used LiveCut extensively in the past, as well as many other plugins from the Smartelectronix posse. Despite better interfaces and sound quality, today's plugins are blunt and boring in comparison.

Regarding LiveCut, it seems to work well enough via 32 Lives on pre-M1 macOSes (I'm on High Sierra), though I haven't produced a track with it in that config yet and don't know how reliable it is (I will sooner than later).

[Andreya_Autumn]

Yeah, I used it with Reaper's native 32-bit bridge, up until getting an M1 machine which can't run 32-bit no matter what.

I've made tracks with it that way, and it did work. It would occassionally output silence instead of unprocessed audio between the blocks. That problem would get way worse when trying to run it in non-4/4. It seems to happen most in CutProc1 and Squarepusher styles, Warpcut was relatively unaffected.
My memory is that this wasn't a problem back around the time it was released, so maybe the bridging played a part in this issue.

There are two branches of LiveCut on Github. I built and tried both. The first has a different interface, lacking some parameters, but seems to run ok otherwise. It still has the intermittent silence problem that the bridged original had, also with Warpcut working a bit better.
The other is the branch I linked above. It has the original interface and all the parameters show up as they should, but audio processing does not work right at all. It's very glitchy, and not in the intended musical way. It sounds kinda double-tracked, like a short delay. Maybe there's unprocessed sound coming through with incorrect delay compensation happening or something.

I see Scheffle has made some more commits to the latter since I last tried though. I guess I'll build it again and see if something's changed. Will report back! EDIT: Built it again, the sound is still weird. :/

[martiu]

On the other hand, you can try the *only* modern plug that ticks the right boxes for me:
https://bomshankamachin.es/plugins/chrisGlitch

It will probably be super obvious to OP why I'm recommending this as a replacement. For anyone else that doesn't know:

The thing that made LiveCut so good was that it worked automatically on input audio.
Also notable, LiveCut was primarily a beat slicer, unlike some other glitchers which are primarily FX sequencers. (Those can be cool, but it's a very different thing.)

This was super useful for all those times you wanted random glitch/jungle cuts, but exactly what the cuts were didn't matter that much.
Example: put a simple hi-hat phrase hard left and a different one hard right. Boring and static right? Put a LiveCut on each one; much more interesting. Those glitchy hats + a kick and snare = done. Making all those cuts by hand would've taken ten years and the result would've not even been any better.
Other example: Put a break through it, record the output and just leave it playing for a while. Guaranteed it's gonna spit out some good ideas somewhere, which you would've never thought of if you were cutting that shit up by hand.

I had Stutter Edit for a while. It's very good, both as a beat slicer and an FX sequencer.
I never really felt like it replaces LiveCut though, because it requires way more user input. When I wanna get my beat slicing that specific I'm just gonna make the cuts by hand anyway.
BreakTweaker is great too, but again a very different thing.
I tried dBlue Glitch too. Very good as well, but also primarily an FX sequencer. I have many ways of Sequencing FX already.


So enter ChrisGlitch. It's a beat slicer, and it just does its thing. No user input needed once the right parameters are dialed in, other than an On/Off button which can be automated. It's still being developed and works on modern machines. There's Mac and Windows versions, IDK about Linux.

The main differences:

ChrisGlitch does straight cuts only, none of the speedup or slowdown ramps that LiveCut did, unfortunately. I've written to the devs and asked if they wanna put those in and they said they're thinking about it.

LiveCut was "trained" on Jungle breaks, and worked best with that kind of input material. It could output very musical phrasing when in that zone. The downside was that it kinda fluked other material sometimes. And I never got it to work well in other time sigs than 4/4. ChrisGlitch doesn't quite nail that Jungle thing like LiveCut did, but on the other hand will work well in any time signature and any input material.

LiveCut had two effects (bitcrush and comb filtering). ChrisGlitch has none. I hope it stays that way TBH. I'd rather have a great automatic beat slicer which does that thing well, then Sequence FX in with other plugs if needed.

Great post, i may try it on some amen breaks shuffles to ad some spice as i make stuff with breaks, rare but it happens sometimes

[panspOrmia]

Supatrigga and LiveCut are inimitable.
Still use them both, and will continue using them until I exit stage left..

[Andreya_Autumn]

Update! Learned today that the best current version of LiveCut is this one: https://github.com/eventual-recluse/Livecut-GUI

You need to be able to build it yourself, no binaries yet. But these may come!

It seems this fork was already updated back in march in fact. I just hadn't realized when I wrote above that Eventual-Recluse had made this updated GUI, since it's a separate fork.

Anyway, I got this to build pretty quick on an M1 mac. The GUI works fine, and I'm getting the same results I used to get on the bridged 32-bit version. Pretty fun!

[sinkmusic]

This would be great to have it readily available as a VST2/3 and CLAP as well

[martiu]

Update! Learned today that the best current version of LiveCut is this one: https://github.com/eventual-recluse/Livecut-GUI

You need to be able to build it yourself, no binaries yet. But these may come!

It seems this fork was already updated back in march in fact. I just hadn't realized when I wrote above that Eventual-Recluse had made this updated GUI, since it's a separate fork.

Anyway, I got this to build pretty quick on an M1 mac. The GUI works fine, and I'm getting the same results I used to get on the bridged 32-bit version. Pretty fun!

please make 64 bit windows version, thanks

[Widowsky]

Could someone point me to a good tutorial for building from a Github (or any) repo?

I've never done this before.

Thanks!

[Andreya_Autumn]

please make 64 bit windows version, thanks

I'd love to help, but don't even own a windows machine to test with. The code that's on the repo I linked may very well build in a 64-bit windows environment too though. Anyone that feels like it should try it out!

[Andreya_Autumn]

Could someone point me to a good tutorial for building from a Github (or any) repo?

I've never done this before.

Thanks!

It's not that hard! I'm a complete noob at everything programming myself, and was able to work it out from googling around a little bit.

On Mac, you're gonna need ProJUCEr and XCode. The latter was the most annoying part of the setup, since Xcode is like lots of GB's in size, and for some reason appears as being even bigger while being downloaded (something something file systems being complicated).

Once those things were installed it was easy to start messing around with stuff.

On Windows/Linux, I've no idea. But I expect it's similar.