Frequently Asked Questions

• Who works on gifSlap?
• gifSlap was developed from 2013-2018 by Don Hanson, and then was made open source. All contributors are listed here.
• When did gifSlap start?
• gifSlap started in 2013, and first became publicly available in March 2015.
• When will it be out of beta?
• Depends on contributions from the community. Maybe never! If you want to contribute to the code take a look at the readme file in the repository.
• What kind of MIDI controller should I use?
• Read the gifSlap guide section on Choosing a MIDI Controller. In short, you should get something with a lot of knobs and buttons.
• My MIDI controller is not working!
• Check out the documentation on Using MIDI. gifSlap is programmed to connect to the first available MIDI controller. Make sure there are no other MIDI controllers plugged in to you computer and restart the software.
• gifSlap is lagging. What can I do?
• 1. If you have multiple monitors or a projector attached to your computer as a monitor, move the control deck onto a separate monitor from the performance window. This will improve your framerate.
  2. Open up Activity Monitor (mac) or Task Manager (windows) and see what is using your system resources. It helps to turn off all other applications including background applications like Dropbox. If you are performing you should even turn off wifi.
  3. If your screen has a high resolution you can zoom in using the control deck to reduce the overall amount of pixels being processed. When working with projectors, it's usually good to match the projector's native resolution and adjust the zoom from there inside gifSlap. If you're not using a projector you can also zoom your computer's native resolution.
  4. Some gifs are abnormally slow and should just be avoided. This has to do with the compression (or lack thereof) on the GIF. These troublesome GIFs will be easy to spot when you switch to them and the framerate drops drastically.
  5. Turn off Gamepad if it is not in use.
  6. Combine fewer effects simultaneously. Some effects are very intensive. Each of the following are processor hungry and should be used carefully:
  • Wind - This moves every GIF on the page, so the more GIFs there are the slower it gets. Reduce the max image amount before using wid.
  • Max Image Amount - Sometimes it's ok to turn it up all the way, but most of the time having an excessive amount of images slows down the program.
  • Scale & Height/Width - If there are a lot of large images, the program slows down. Keep image scale and Height / Width down to a reasonable size.
  • Border Image - This control doubles the amount of GIFs on the screen since each GIF now has another GIF as its border. Keep the Max Image Amount down when using border images.