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Comment by louthy | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what to make of it. It clearly does what it says on the tin, and from that point of view it’s impressive; but personally it’s a deeply undesirable effect. Maybe it’s bringing back PTSD of performing on Groovetech radio, streamed over RealPlayer! :D

I guess im not the audience as I prefer analogue distortion, but I also like the sound of low bit rate digital artefacts (bit crushing and the sound of old samplers) - however unlike those distortion effects this produces quite tricky resonances that I wouldn’t want to apply to audio sources in a track (because then I’d need to spend time EQing them out to make it sit well in a mix), so I’m not sure of the use case?

Bravo on the name though! (and for making it open-source)

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Quoting Brian Eno: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart"

I remember first seeing that quote on a Kotaku article, where they had unfortunately misinterpreted "the crap sound of 8-bit" as referring to retro videogame music made on 8-bit CPUs, rather than (what he was actually referring to) 8-bit audio[0].

[0] i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_bit_depth

Funnily enough, to get the "crap sound of 8-bit" you usually needed a 16-bit computer (the Amiga). But that's nothing compared to the "crap sound of 1-bit", i.e. playing sampled sound using the PC speaker. I still remember thinking "how is this even possible?!" when I first heard it...

Yeah, it's amazing what you can do with just a 1-bit pulse. You can even do multiple instruments[0] or win the loudness war[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV9PfEFw78I

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_ANEQu5Lto

I think this is to a degree a generational thing. I guess between 15 and 25 we are imprinted with what lo-fi means to us.

My prediction is that after low quality compression we will see good, but noticeable auto-tune as a retro effect. I don't mean the early, late 90s overdone Cher-like auto-tune, but the one that's used seriously for pitch correction but is still noticeable.

After that, I think, bad vocal synths are a good candidate. To my old ears many are right there in uncanny valley - too human for a synth, but not human enough not to be creepy.

> streamed over RealPlayer!

does it keep pausing/stuttering while displaying "buffering"? in my neck of the woods, it was hard to buffer enough data that played long enough to hear how shitty it sounded.

Xing encodes from Napster, baby!

I used to record broadcast radio to a SLP VHS tape. Just imagine how that sounded!

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