Cthugha is a

music visualization Music visualization or music visualisation, a feature found in electronic music visualizers and media player software, generates animated imagery based on a piece of music. The imagery is usually generated and rendered in real time and in a way ...

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer program ...

. It was written in the mid-1990s by Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt, originally for the PC, and was later

ported In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally desi ...

to other platforms. It was freely distributed.

History

Cthugha was started by Australian coder Kevin "Zaph" Burfitt in September 1993 under

DOS DOS is shorthand for the MS-DOS and IBM PC DOS family of operating systems. DOS may also refer to: Computing * Data over signalling (DoS), multiplexing data onto a signalling channel * Denial-of-service attack (DoS), an attack on a communicat ...

for the PC, but not released to the public until version 2.0 in March 1994. It wasn't until release 5.1p in October 1994 that popularity of the program took off; this coinciding with the relatively new availability of cheap sound-cards for PCs, such as the

Soundblaster Sound Blaster is a family of sound cards designed by Singaporean technology company Creative Technology (known in the US as Creative Labs). Sound Blaster sound cards were the de facto standard for consumer audio on the IBM PC compatible system pl ...

. Cthugha was released for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, w ...

("Cthugha-L") in May 1995, and for the

Macintosh The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and software en ...

("MaCthugha") in January 1996 Cthugha was used as the

video wall A video wall is a special multi-monitor setup that consists of multiple computer monitors, video projectors, or television sets tiled together contiguously or overlapped in order to form one large screen. Typical display technologies include L ...

background for the

Australian Australian(s) may refer to: Australia * Australia, a country * Australians, citizens of the Commonwealth of Australia ** European Australians ** Anglo-Celtic Australians, Australians descended principally from British colonists ** Aboriginal A ...

children's TV game show Challenger, hosted by Zoe Sheridan during the late 90s. Burfitt stopped work on Cthugha in January 2001, and there were various attempts by others to carry on the project, but by that time there were so many clones of the software that there was little enthusiasm. Cthugha may have been the forerunner – either in inspiration, or possibly even as

source-code In computing, source code, or simply code, is any collection of code, with or without comments, written using a human-readable programming language, usually as plain text. The source code of a program is specially designed to facilitate the w ...

– of the numerous and varied " visualisation" plugins for

mp3 MP3 (formally MPEG-1 Audio Layer III or MPEG-2 Audio Layer III) is a coding format for digital audio developed largely by the Fraunhofer Society in Germany, with support from other digital scientists in the United States and elsewhere. Origin ...

players and media players on many computer architectures. In 1998, it was ported to the

Winamp Winamp is a media player for Microsoft Windows originally developed by Justin Frankel and Dmitry Boldyrev by their company Nullsoft, which they later sold to AOL in 1999 for $80 million. It was then acquired by Radionomy in 2014. Sinc ...

music player.

Usage

''Cthugha'' uses a

sound card A sound card (also known as an audio card) is an internal expansion card that provides input and output of audio signals to and from a computer under the control of computer programs. The term ''sound card'' is also applied to external audio ...

's CD, line or microphone input.

Reaction

The oscilloscope patterns of ''Cthugha'' have been described as "weird"Australian PC Review, October 1994 and "hypnotic".HotWired 3.03 (page 156), March 1995

References

{{Reflist, 30em

External links

The Official Cthugha pageCthugha development page
1994 software Freeware Audio software Music visualization software

History

Usage

Reaction

See also

References

External links