Cathodemer

YOUR INPUT CONTROLS YOUR OUTPUT <3<3<3 MY INTRODUCTION TO VJ AND MORE KNOBS. TIMES STOPS AND THE OPTIONS ARE LIMITLESS! THANK YOU FOR MAKING THIS AMAZING TOOL ;)

Had the software for many years now. Ever since I got it, it has been very buggy. It crashes regularly, the user interface is sluggish. When you move the controls your mouse moves quite a lot farther to make the control move a little bit, very janky. Very bad user interface overall. It runs really slow and jumpy even on modern Zen 3 and newer systems with high end GPUs, it just stutters and consumes tonnes of resources and doesn't work well at all then usually crashes randomly. The developer rarely ever puts out updates and has basically abandoned the program. Today I was talking with Qwen AI about it and Qwen offered to help me write a video synth. It took 2 hours and we wrote a video synth that has all of the features of the main synthesizer in Cathodemer so far, but with a much better UI in python and PySide6 + OpenGL. It runs at any resolution with slick graphics and speed, no slowdowns at all, and it only uses 5% of my GPU, and almost none of my CPU. I am going to implement some of the other features Cathodemer has, and a tonne of post processing shaders, OBS Studio integration etc. So I basically replaced Cathodemer with a better solution using AI to code it in a few hours time, which is what I'd recommend others do as well rather than wasting money on this abandonware. Personally, I'm just going to keep mucking around in python with AI as that route has become more fruitful. I don't have the Arabesque, MIDI, audio support or anything like that, but Qwen will probably have that written by tomorrow afternoon at this rate. I welcome our AI overlords.

Fascinating, powerful environment for creative video work!!! As others have noted, the interface can be pretty hard to work with... but if you can get over that hump, it's great.

The UI is pretty laggy and there's basically no documentation but that only means that the experimentation you're forced to use is all that much more rewarding. This thing is great fun and controllable with MIDI if you can get it set up, but it's easy to hook the output into OBS and use for streaming, which is how I've used it.

so much fun, i use this program and run an HDMI --> AV cable into a retro crt TV i got and do live visuals for raves :D so cheap for how much function there is only problem is it crashes a lot on my ♥♥♥♥♥♥ laptop if Im not careful with how i use it, so i usually will run it at the lowest resolution

Incredibly confusing and obtuse to figure out but super rewarding if you're patient and tinker around with it, absolutely love it

A bit of a learning curve, but there really is not anything else out there that I can think of that does what this software does. Yes, it crashes a bit when I am messing with some settings and have a lot of sources used, but overall for creating interesting visuals for music I write and create, this does exactly the job. It has also helped me learn a bit about video synthesis in general. I would overall recommend this for anyone interested in video art, visual effects or anything of that nature.

A complex tool with a lot to fiddle with. One of the best purchases I've made in a while.

amo

It doesn't really work well with Mac Silicon - no matter what, you get lines of multicolored pixels on the output (like an X-Y axis). For the price, if you're on Intel Mac/Windows I think it's a nice app. Not well documented but it's easy enough to figure out what you're doing and get something interesting going. Seemed to get slower in responsiveness the longer you work on one project but still usable.