Looking like it was created on an early version of Classic Mac OS, Aberrant DSP’s Digitalis is an audio degradation and glitch plugin that promises to be “your personal vehicle through an endless digital wasteland”.
If that sounds a bit dystopian and bleak, allow us to reassure you that this could actually be a good thing, particularly if you want to take sonic inspiration from “bad converters, unearthed CDs, weak internet connections, and catastrophic errors”.
If you’re still not sold, then you can probably stop reading now, but if that kind of destructive processing does appeal, allow us to give you a little more detail.
The Digitalis interface is divided into sections, starting with the Data Manipulation window on the left. This offers a spectral filtering paintbox, pitch controls (pitchshifting, formant shifting and pitch quantisation) and a telecommunications section for adding lossy audio effects.
To the right of this is the Corruption section, which contains downsampling and bitcrushing effects, and can emulate the sound of data loss and corruption on old digital media. The Time window gives you a repeater section, plus rhythm glitch and pitch glitch controls.
You can reorder Digitalis’s sections if you wish, adjusting the signal flow in the process, and down below them there’s a 16-step sequencer with four effect slots. 98 presets are included for instant degradation.
Digitalis follows previous Aberrant DSP releases SketchCassette and ShapeShifter, both of which have similarly quirky interfaces.
Find out more on the Aberrant DSP website. Digitalis runs on PC and Mac in VST/AU formats and is available now for the introductory price of $20 (regular price $30). You can also download a demo.
