iftah: 18 Devices Built for the Moment the Set Goes Live
Eighteen devices, 80,119 downloads, and one of them accounts for roughly three quarters of that total. That lopsidedness tells you something about iftah's catalogue, but not the most interesting thing. The interesting thing is what the other seventeen are: performance safety nets, measurement tools rebuilt for screen reader users, an educational patch about trigger voltages, and a synthesiser that imitates a bird.
The one everybody already has
STING by IFTAH sits at 62,177 downloads with a 5/5 rating and 66 comments, which puts it among the most-downloaded MIDI effects anyone has released for Live. The catalogue page is now marked discontinued — iftah replaced it with a second version — but the 1.8 build is still there and still being maintained, with the most recent update in July 2025 restoring backwards compatibility with pre-array Max versions.
Its changelog is the most informative part of the listing. Version 1.7 fixed an issue where changing offset affected multiple instances at once and improved density handling. Those two words — offset and density — plus the fact that it is a MIDI effect designed to feed a monophonic bass voice, tell you the shape of the thing. It generates. You put it in front of a synth and it produces note material you shape rather than draw.
If you already have Sting installed from years ago, check the version number in the device title bar. The 1.7 instance bug is the kind of thing that silently ruins a session with three copies of the same device across three tracks, and it has been fixed.
Devices that stop a live set from breaking
A cluster of iftah's work exists for one reason: things go wrong on stage. These are small, single-purpose, and almost suspiciously practical.
Dont stop me now disables Live's stop button by forcing the transport to continue whenever it is pressed. The device page is blunt about the use case — preventing mishaps in drunken live shows. Version 1.01 added an +Arm mode that forces Live to keep recording too, which makes it useful well beyond the club: any long-form capture session where an accidental spacebar would cost you a take.
Feel momentarily unmutes any muted notes in the currently playing MIDI clip. That is the whole device. In practice it turns clip editing into performance: write a busy pattern, mute the notes you do not want most of the time, and then hit Feel to drop the full version back in as a fill. One clip holds both the groove and the variation, and you never leave the arrangement. At 1,600 downloads and 5/5 it is badly under-used relative to how immediately it changes the way you build drum clips.
Big Time is a large floating h:m:s:ms time display. Nothing more. If you have ever squinted at Live's transport from two metres away during a soundcheck, or needed a clock visible while your hands are on a controller, that is the device.
rr for Roar — properly rr for roar — lets you play Roar's feedback note mode from MIDI notes. Drop it next to a Roar instance, pick your MIDI input from the dropdown, and the feedback pitch tracks what you play. iftah describes it as a stopgap until a native solution arrives. It is the kind of device that exists because somebody got annoyed at a specific limitation on a specific Tuesday.
Instruments: strings and acid
Pyr is a 12-voice microtonal string model, 10,929 downloads, 5/5, with Push 3 support added in 1.1. Like Sting, it has since been superseded — the page points to a successor called Pyra — but the 1.1 build is maintained as recently as April 2025 and remains a complete instrument. Microtonality plus a physical string model is a combination that rewards slow playing: long held notes, small tuning offsets, nothing percussive.
Slippery Slope is the newer instrument and the clearest statement of how iftah thinks about device ecosystems. It is a single-oscillator mono acid bassline voice, and the description is explicit that it is designed to let Sting "speak in its first language" — the two devices are built as a pair, generator and voice. Version 1.1 added microtonality support, working with both Ableton's tunings and Microtuner. It runs on Live 11.0.5 upward, which means Push Standalone users can take the whole chain with them.
If you are chasing 303 behaviour, this plus Sting is a two-device rig with no sample packs and no external gear. Worth comparing against other generative acid approaches like Aicd, which solves the pattern half of the problem very differently.
Metering, built to be accessible
The most recent strand of iftah's catalogue is analysis tools with full screen reader and keyboard control, usable by blind, visually impaired and sighted producers alike.
Scope for Flufs is a phase scope with a resizable display, 11 colour themes including colour-blindness options, selective frequency bands, zoom, and both linear and logarithmic modes. Field Spectrum goes further: an alternative spectral clip view and timeline for Live, aimed at field recordists, with fast analysis, a responsive display and the same 11-theme system.
Field recording generates long files where the useful material is sparse and visually identifiable. Live's own clip view is not built for scanning twenty minutes of forest for the one bird call. A dedicated spectral timeline is the right tool, and making it keyboard-navigable means the same workflow is open to people Live's stock interface shuts out.
Older in the same family, REW EQ imports filter settings from REW's .txt export and builds an EQ curve from them. It currently supports PK filters only. Use it to audition a room correction curve inside Live before committing it to hardware, or as the correction itself on your monitor path.
The curiosities
White Bellbird Generator additively synthesises the call of Procnias albus, the loudest bird call in the world at up to 125 decibels. It is rated 4/5 across 615 downloads. Take it as an additive synthesis study with an unusually specific target.
APT — All Possible Triggers — is explicitly educational, covering every analog trigger and gate type iftah is aware of, released to mark a CV Tools update that added new trigger types to CV Instrument. If you are patching Live into Eurorack and your envelopes are not firing, this is a reference you can hear.
Where to start
Three entry points depending on what you do:
- You perform. Install Feel and Dont stop me now today. Both are tiny, both change one specific thing, and neither needs learning.
- You want sound. Slippery Slope with Sting in front of it, then Pyr for something slower.
- You mix or record. Scope for Flufs on the master, REW EQ if you have an REW measurement sitting on your drive.
The through-line across all eighteen is that iftah builds for a named problem and stops when the problem is solved. Nothing here is a mega-device with forty parameters. Several are maintained years after release — Sting updated in 2025, Pyr updated in 2025 — and two have been openly retired in favour of successors rather than left to rot. For a comparably prolific but very differently shaped catalogue, see the dric spotlight; for newer instruments across the whole library, the current instrument roundup.