But I think that's all part of the experience, and not necessarily a bad thing. For some users it may stay that way forever. Permut8's playfully dated interface is a homage to a 1960s computer, the PDP8, and is utterly bewildering initially. All manner of pitch-shifts, beat repeats, stutters, granular glitches and howling, teeth-gnashing aliasing can ensue, so the inclusion of an onboard limiter/clipper and variable low/high-pass filter was a wise choice, as much to tame down the more extreme treatments as to allow subtle shaping. They often cause the position to jump around, oscillate backwards and forwards, or to cycle through the entire buffer at a different rate from that at which your live input is feeding it - all tempo-sync'ed if you like.

But the real fun is delivered in the form of two 'Instruction' generators which, individually or together, determine at what position within the buffer the delayed signal is sourced. The wet signal is processed at 12-bit resolution, with a variable sample rate of anything between 0 and 352 kHz, so character can arise from digital word-length degradation alone. Among them are Sweden-based SonicCharge, whose Permut8 is a delay plug-in - but not as we know it, Captain. While many plug-in developers busy themselves with yet more vintage EQ or compressor emulations, others, thank goodness, continue to dream up novel and interesting processors that are harder to pigeonhole.

Sonic charge