Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with glitch

Up, up, down, down...

LSK — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:58:02 -0800

Having an issue with a dance mat on PC - down button works, but left + down and right + down don't. I'm using Red Octane's Ignition 3.0 dance mat (for Dance Dance Revolution games) on Windows Vista using the USB plug. While all individual buttons operate properly, if I press left and down at the same time, or right and down at the same time, only left or right (respectively) is read by the computer. Is this an issue with the hardware itself or is it something that can be addressed within the OS?

It should be noted that this isn't the more common opposite-axes issue; left + right works properly, as does up + down.

That boy needs therapy

benzenedream — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 10:34:19 -0800

What are some of your favorite obscure electronic music singles? I'm looking for the kind of stuff where an otherwise unremarkable or unrecognized artist managed to release one perfect song. I am not interested in one-hit wonders as Wikipedia defines it -- I don't care if the song was ever popular or a club hit, just that it's good and interesting. Songs that creep onto your playlists despite not knowing or liking anything else by the same band are what I'm looking for, perhaps an excellent remix that managed to redeem a weak song. I tend towards artists such as Negativland, Lionrock, Aphex Twin, Prefuse 73, Amon Tobin, Girl Talk, DNTEL, Autechre, Avalanches, Jason Forrest, etc. but am looking for stuff far off the Pandora similarity radar.

DEATHMATCH: Tenori-on Vs Monome

Juliet Banana — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:08:56 -0800

Which is a better musical instrument: the Tenori-on or the Monome? So, to a lay person (me!) they look like the same thing; buttons and LEDs. Most people either are in love with one or the other, or think they're absolutely different, apples and oranges.

The Tenori-on is made by Yamaha, sells for $999, and is probably best known as that weird lite-brite thing Little Boots uses. It can generate it's own sounds and the software it pairs with is not configurable by the user.

The Monome devices are made by Monome and vary between $500-$1,400, providing you can snatch one when they become available or find one on ebay, or put it together yourself. It does not produce sound on it's own; it's simply a controller for software. Many user-produced software exists for it, and you can write your own.

I'm asking this for my boyfriend, who does a fair amount of DJing live and bedroom-recording of music that sounds like if glitchy robots could beatbox. He mostly uses Ableton Live, and is learning Max/MSP. If I got any information wrong in this question, it's because I'm not a DJ, just a club kid; feel free to correct me harshly.

Does the Monome make sense if you're not a programmer and Max/MSP looks like some scary moonman software you'd have to be Venetian Snares to understand?

Which is better for playing live?

Which is a better deal for the money?

What's on your personal wishlist? If you bought one, do you regret not buying the other?

How could a digital camera break like this? Is it worth fixing?

Nelson — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:50:31 -0800

How could a digital camera break like this? Is it worth fixing? My partner's little Canon Elph S500 has broken in an odd way, resulting in distorted pictures with lots of horizontal black lines and a striking absence of green. There's a lot of vertical blurring, too, and the weird thing is it's uneven. The image is equally distorted in the live preview as the stored JPGs, so it seems to be the sensor, not the processing / compressing / storing part that's broken. FWIW the camera hadn't been used in a few months and had been in a moving box for awhile, so could possibly have been jostled.

I know a fair amount about how digital cameras work, but for the life of me I can't figure out how it broke this way. Any guesses?

Also, is it worth repairing? I found some online site that promises a repair for $135. Brad new similar cameras with more features are about $350. But I hate feeling so wasteful with a relatively new piece of equipment.

Recommend me some good glitch!

grateful — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:10:00 -0800

I think I love glitch, but I know absolutely nothing about it. What albums / bands should I start with?

Fixing a WMV glitch with PowerPoint 2007 in Windows

kingfisher, his musclebound cat — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 17:49:07 -0800

I am embedding WMVs in a PowerPoint. They play well from slide-to-slide on a Mac, but when played back on PC, each video begins with a glitch. The files aren't too long, but there isn't much there other than WMV files. PowerPoint is used to sequence and control playback. It's the tool of choice so others can make changes to the file if they need to. So, sticking with PowerPoint: what can I try to eliminate the glitch with WMV playback on PCs.
(This is PowerPoint 2007 on XP, but the problem also occurs in Windows 7. The WMV files are in the same folder as the PPT.)

St-st-st-st-ut-ut-tut-tut-tut-errrrrrrrrr

phrontist — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 11:10:46 -0800

I'm looking for music that features really good stutter processing of vocal sounds (any really good stuttering of other sounds is welcome too, but I'm especially interested in vocals). Benchmark tracks would be Trentemoller's Moan, Modeselektor's 2000007, Funkstörung's Fat Camp Feva, Ellen Allien's Sehnsucht, and Look at Me by Villeneuve. Bonus question: Someone once told me there was an autechre track where they start with a kick drum and glitch it until it reaches audio rates, then play a melody... what is that called?

G-Chat G-Litch?

RingerChopChop — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 09:59:14 -0800

A friend and I were Gchatting and accidentally stumbled upon a useless but cool linking glitch. Is it really a glitch? Check it out! Okay, so in Gchat, if you type any sequence of letters and then a period, and then one letter, and then another period, and then two more letters, Gchat automatically turns it into a link. For example:

abc.d.ef

Sometimes it links to real websites, sometimes it links to nowhere. We discovered this when I randomly messaged her something about "will.i.am" and it showed up as a link to a fan website. It doesn't work with numbers. What's going on here? Does anybody know? Is it a glitch or is it somehow useful to people smarter than ourselves?

Please exorcise my iMac.

zardoz — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:26:23 -0800

My aluminum iMac (running Leopard 10.5) is sporadically possessed by Satan. At least, that's the only thing I can think of. So I've been having glitches with my iMac that aren't easy to explain, but I'll give it a try. These symptoms happen across several different programs, as well as system windows, and they all seem to be related, at least in that I notice them when I use the mouse to navigate around.

In no particular order:

1) When I try to move a window (FF, Finder, iTunes), and left-click and hold at the top of a window, the window will minimize instead of move.

2) In iTunes, if I want to select an audio track or podcast to move to my mp3 player, instead of just highlighting, the track will start playing. Also, while holding down the Apple key, I can't select multiple tracks.

Also in iTunes, if I click on a category (podcasts, music) on the left-hand side, a new iTunes window pops up out of nowhere, and the category I clicked doesn't even select.

3) If I want to select text in my FF browser, the highlighted text is schizophrenic and will only highlight sort of random bits of text. This is hard to describe, but for example if I click on a word, it should show a flashing cursor inbetween letters, but maybe a whole word, a couple of words, a whole line, a whole paragraph highlights with one click.

4) When playing videos in VLC, the advance forward button will actually rewind the video to the beginning.

5) When I click a drop-down menu, say the volume bar at the top of the screen, instead of the slider appearing, it just flashes a second and disappears. I discovered a solution to this is to click multiple times, then it will at some point appear and stay, which is driving me nutty.

6) There are some more that I can't think of but I hope you get the gist.

This happened briefly a few months ago, but after a simple reboot seemed to go away on its own. This time it's much more pervasive. All the problems I listed above I can kind of "sneak up on" it, click very slowly and deliberately, but it's highly annoying. I have all the current updates from Apple.

So what's wrong? Might I have a virus? I thought that was almost impossible for a Mac. Thanks for reading this whole thing; if you have any ideas how to fix this I'd be grateful.

Is an Apple keyboard on a PC supposed to be glitchy?

qvtqht — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:53:45 -0800

I have strange issues with my keyboard and mouse in Picasa: shortcuts with modifier keys don't work. Other keyboard and mouse glitches also occur in other applications. Windows Vista; Apple aluminum keyboard; Microsoft Habu mouse. Most of the time, the shortcuts with modifier keys, like Ctrl+A, don't work in Picasa. Also, selecting multiple photos with Shift+click doesn't work either. They work occasionally, but not usually. Things like the spacebar for starring a photo and the arrow keys for navigating still work.

Another glitch, which may be unrelated to the first, is that the tools do not seem to work most of the time in Photoshop. Regardless of which tool I select, clicking on the image doesn't do anything. In Photoshop, shortcuts with modifier keys work fine.

- Vista Home Premium SP1 on your average crappy HP desktop/tower
- Apple aluminum keyboard (I suspect this is the main problem here)
- Microsoft/Razer Habu mouse
- Picasa 2.7
- Photoshop CS3

All I want to do is play Beautiful Katamari

msali — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 15:47:12 -0800

Does anybody have any idea why an Xbox 360 would all of a sudden stop recognizing Xbox 360 games, thereby rendering it a useless chunk of white plastic? Yesterday the damn thing worked just fine. Halo 3 was played, a good time was had by all. Today I went out and actually bought my VERY OWN GAME - first one ever - because the men in my house are having such a fine time with the new machine. Did I mention it's new? Just bought it on the first of this month, and up to this point, worked like a charm. Until today. Now it won't play Xbox 360 games, but mysteriously, will still play regular old Xbox games. I've already called Microsoft and spoken to one of their friendly reps, who is sending out a box for me to ship my brand new machine to the Xbox hospital. But I'm trouble shooting in the meantime. What gives? The dude at Microsoft had never heard of this before.

Time Glitch

cometwendy — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 12:13:57 -0800

How can a digital clock run fast? I have two of these digital clocks, exactly the same, and one has started to run fast. I've set it twice in three days...After about 24 hours it's an hour and a half ahead. ??? I'm already disoriented from daylight savings. What's up?

Stop-Start Computing

SansPoint — Mon, 06 Aug 2007 19:39:16 -0800

What would make an old Windows computer stop accepting input for short periods of time (2-3 minutes)? My housemate has an old Compaq PC running Windows XP. Lately, it's started pausing for 2-3 minute intervals, not accepting any input. The keyboard buffer isn't overflowing: it's even mouse input that stops dead. It also seems to just seize up.

I'm going to run Memtest86+ on it, but I can't imagine anything that would cause it to exhibit these symptoms. He has Antivirus and Spyware software, though any Windows worms would hit my Mac mini first, which is the DMZ host.

I'm a bit out of practice with Windows. Help?

Please be a pawn in my music search!

thisjax — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 01:03:45 -0800

It's a minimalist album, the title of which is a chess move...it exists, right? Last year, someone recommended what they thought was an amazing minimalist (but possibly leaning towards electronica) album to me, but I can't remember the name and need some help finding it. All I can recall is:
-The composer's name is probably something Eastern European sounding
-The album title is a chess move, like A1-B2 (but not that one specifically; as much fun as it would be for me to try Googling as many legal chess moves as I can think of...)

Does this sketchy description pique anyone's music-fu?

Every video DVD I burn has audio/video glitches.

robbie01 — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 01:08:40 -0800

I cannot, for the life of me, burn a DVD on my MacPro of an 8.5 minute video without 2-4 video/audio glitches. Details of everything I've tried within. I have an 8:40 QuickTime video exported from a slideshow application that I'm trying to burn to DVD for playback on regular DVD players. The content of the video is slow-placed, Ken Burns style portraits of people shot against a white background.

I've burned through (pardon the pun) upwards of 10 DVDs trying to make a perfect master (that can be duped later). No matter what I do, the resulting DVD has at *least* two (and often more) deal-breaking video/audio glitches, every time in different places on the disc.

At first I thought it was my source movie, so I tried exporting with many different codecs, frame rates, data rates, resolutions, etc. But the resulting native QuickTime movie plays perfectly on the Mac, whether the movie is 100MB (average compression) or 25GB (No Compression).

I attempted using iDVD several times to burn an auto-playing DVD (no Theme) and got glitches. I even blew $100 on Toast for the Mac thinking iDVD's burning was the culprit, but get the same type of glitches.

Then I thought it might be the media I'm burning to, but my IT department says my single-layer Imation DVD-Rs are of good quality.

Then I figured the most likely explanation was I was trying to burn too fast at my recorder's fastest speed (8x, SuperDrive on a 3.0Ghz quad MacPro with 5GB of RAM) and so I tried slower speeds like 4x, 2x, and then all the way down to 1x. Still get glitches.

I tried Roxio's Toast 7 Titanium and changing the encoding from Custom (which I had maxed out to 9.0 Mbps with Dolby Digital audio @ 192 kps) down to Automatic to let the computer decide the best encoding for the content on-the-fly. Still glitches.

I tried quitting all other applications (e-mail autochecking, web browsers) and JUST having the DVD burn, didn't help.

I'm attempting to play the burned DVD on a consumer-grade Panasonic player, and the glitches manifest as 1-2 frames of skipped audio with simultaneous stuttering video and/or very bad splotches of graphic anomolies. Particularly bad glitches cause the audio to waver/stutter for the remainder of the video.

To make sure it wasn't my Panasonic player, I put the burned DVD *back* in the MacPro, and the Mac's DVD drive fails even worse at the glitch points (which are different on every DVD), and slows playback down to about 3fps as it makes its way past the glitch points.

I've never had any problems burning data DVDs, and admittedly I haven't burned (any) video DVDs before, but this seems like a pretty pedestrian task, especially for a measly 8.5 minute video being burned on a beast of a Mac. I'm fairly computer/tech literate and have tried just about everything I can think of, so I'm interested in hearing about any other approaches I can try.

I also have a PC available with a DVD writer and Nero software, but the Mac is a lot friendlier to set up an auto-playing DVD (I got tired of trying to figure it out on the PC) and at this point I really don't want to purchase *another* non-refundable DVD burning package on the PC (like Toast or Easy DVD Creator) just to try to get a glitch-free disc, when my Mac should be more than capable of the task.

Strange middle button behavior in Firefox and Opera

signal — Sat, 27 Aug 2005 11:15:49 -0800

When I try to use the middle mouse button (scroll wheel) in Firefox and Opera to open a link in a background tab it will sometimes "jump" down a few lines, not clicking the correct link and sometimes clicking a wrong one, and then jumping back to the first position as soon as I let go of the button. This is unbelievably annoying. The mouse is a "Genius NetScroll+Eye PS/2".

Do DVDs come in bad batches?

xyzzy — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 14:42:01 -0800

DVD Troubles: For Christmas I received a DVD box set of an 80's tv miniseries that I loved as a young teenager. The second and third two-sided DVDs showed as "bad" in my DVD player. With much sadness, I packed it up and returned the item to Amazon, requesting an exchange.

Today I received the replacement set. I eagerly popped the second DVD into the DVD player so I could finish my miniseries marathon. But it is yet again showing as "bad." I tried this DVD in two players (one cheap, one midlevel), both with the same result. There are no hairs, scratches, fingerprints, or dust. So what is going on, and what should I do?

Modify Windows Explorer behaviour in renaming savefiles

quam — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 06:16:51 -0800

Saving a file on Windows XP, I use Explorer to select the folder I wish to save to. When I navigate the directories, clicking on an appropriate folder I occassionally move the cursor over filenames. As I mouseover filenames, Explorer replaces the default name of the file I wish to save with the name of the file I mouseover. Can I modify Explorer to prevent this filename replacement? For example, if I download "foo.exe" Windows opens an Explorer dialog to select the location of the folder to save "foo.exe." If I mouseover "bar.jpg" while navigating directories, Explorer changes the name of "foo.exe" to "bar.jpg." I wish to save the file as it is originally named or how I wish to name it.

This is an annoyance and I have longed searched for a setting/modification to eliminate this behavior with no luck.