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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

The 20,000 Hz podcast provided a full history of this, discussing various samples along the way:

https://www.20k.org/episodes/loudnesswars

It's pretty standard for that podcast, which features lots of stories about sound and sound engineering. There's another interesting article on creating the most silent possible room, and how eerie it feels to be in it. https://www.20k.org/episodes/silence

Another on how restaurants got louder and louder over time, that deep bass sound that's taken over film, another on scientific experiments trying to measure if the Stradivarius is as great a violin as everyone insists, another on the tangled history of the iconic Price is Right theme song... so many really.

Great podcast, lots of range given the topic.

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This sounds interesting and I will listen to it, but for a podcast about sound engineering, I really resent that their website doesn't provide an option to download the bare mp3/m4a. I had to use Inspector.

No subscribe via RSS option either, only Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. This is becoming depressingly common.

It does, but it's buried in the player.

Download: In the player click "share" and then click the "down arrow" icon.

RSS feed: In the player click "subscribe" and then click the RSS icon (it's the first one)

Thank you. Wow. Why the heck would you put the download link in the Share menu?!?

This is a standard iOS pattern. Agreed that it's all but intuitive but that's how iOS is these days.

And, to complete the circle, the iOS way is the audio engineers like. Even these days, audio engineers are tied to Apple - definitely macOS, but increasingly iOS as well.

Pro Tools is a large part of the industry market and that’s multi-platform.

What do you mean by “audio engineers are tied to apple”?

It's way more likely to be ableton, reaper or logic now.

It's very dependent on application niche. Movie and game composers are more likely to use Cubase or Nuendo. Very big pop studios (includes rock, country, rap, etc) are likely to use ProTools. Smaller home studios are likely to use Logic or Cubase. EDM artists may be using Ableton Live, Reaper, Logic, BitWig, Cubase, or sometimes ProTools.

There really is no "industry standard" now. PT was the standard maybe ten years ago, and still has traction in studios where artists need to move their sessions to another facility. But Avid pissed off everyone by overcharging for buggy software, so there's a lot more diversity now.

> Avid pissed off everyone by overcharging for buggy software, so there's a lot more diversity now.

Huh, it will be interesting to see if Adobe ends up in a similar position ten years from now as a result of their pricing strategy. In the graphic design space, which I'm more familiar with, it feels like there's very slow but still real migration away from Creative Suite.

StudioOne has gained a ton of popularity in home and small studios over the past half decade as well.

The DAW market has very healthy competition right now!

Logic on macOS is the pro-audio industry standard.

No, it's not.

The only thing in the pro audio industry that is close to being an industry "standard" is the continued use of Pro Tools as the preferred tracking software. Even that is starting to fade outside of the coastal cities.

They are not tied to apple, but it is often the preferred OS.

I haven't used MacOS/OSX in a couple years, but at least back then it was in my opinion by miles the best out of the box experience for audio related things.

E.g it took me hours on Windows 10 to have a basic setup with reliably low latency, without clicks, noises, dropouts and generally getting the OS out of my way (e.g. automatic rebooting for updates is kinda suboptimal if you plan to use your laptop for live music). Never had anywhere near the same level of issues on macs.

Sure you can make it work on Windows or Linux, but if this were my main job, I'd need very specific reasons or strong personal os preferences outside audio to not pick an Apple.

Movie composers are often Windows, not Mac. Even after the new MacPro It's much easier and cheaper to put together a monster PC with no-compromise specs for loading huge sample libraries and running huge mixes.

Also, these people have people to do tech support, setup, and configuration for them - often onsite - so mostly their systems "just work."

Not sure if it's still the case but for many years Apple's Core Audio was a big draw for people running audio software due to it's stability, performance and compatibility with various devices. I've used Windows with ASIO drivers for many years and always found it a bit buggy with occasional random drop-outs that can only be fixed by reinstalling the drivers. Pulse Audio on Linux can be even more of a nightmare to get working with your equipment, but I've heard it's improving recently.

That’s a good point. In my experience in studios (from around 5 years ago) windows is just about as prevalent as OS X at this point. I’m sure whatever niche you’re in does affect this however.

Apple had the money to buy "Logic" from a German company called "Emagic", and scrap their Windows version. Logic then soon became industry standard.

Voilà.

Logic isn't the industry standard though. PT has long been thought of as the industry standard, although that's changed recently with Cubase/Ableton Live/FL/Logic becoming massively popular as well. Really depends on genre/application (EDM, acoustic, film/game/media, etc).

Part of this I think is related to very low latency on iOS. IIRC Android had severe problems with it. Maybe still has?

Yes, OSX and iOS both perform better than Android when it comes to round-trip latency. Core Audio in general was a real godsend to audio folks for many years, and was a compelling reason to stay in the Apple ecosystem.

That relationship and trust has soured considerably since then, but until there's a new "Apple" in town for audio folks, I don't invision ship-hopping for quite a while. It is an utter disgrace getting Windows 10 to work well as a studio PC, and most audio engineers simply won't or can't use the vastly superior FOSS pro audio software out there today.

I see where you're coming from, but to me that's a bit different.

1. iOS heavily deemphasizes the concept of a filesystem. So when I download something, what I'm really doing is "sharing" that media with another app.

2. I associate iOS's box-and-arrow icon with more than just "sharing". This player doesn't have an icon, you literally have to click text that reads "share".

It's perfectly possible the people who designed this player thought they were referencing iOS, but IMO they very much missed the mark. (Not to imply that iOS's method is particularly good UX either!)

That makes sense, I’m with you. But I always felt that Share was sufficient for any externally targeted location. I’ll have to look at this thing, though. Haha.

Also, Perfecting Sound Forever (book) by Greg Milner. I believe he was interviewed for that podcast. It’s a truly fantastic read which goes in depth in the history of recorded sound and has a ton of information on the loudness wars.

That episode in particular was so outstanding. They really did a great job of mixing in the samples to make you hear what they were talking about. I loved the Stradivarius one too! They’ve been knocking it out of the park lately.

It's a great podcast! I can also recommend the episode on the THX sound.

https://www.20k.org/episodes/thxdeepnote

Came here to post this. One of my favorite podcasts! Highly recommended

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