andrewzah

"It is totally detectable."

Good application of it is not, no. When we hear obvious autotune vocals, it's a deliberate aesthetic choice.

I believe what you're talking about is how modern production is about producing "perfect" song recordings, and mapping everything to a click track/beat grid. Now that is totally noticeable compared to music made a few decades ago. I do agree that it makes music sound sterile. This is separate to autotune/melodyne being used.

"I bet some time from now, could be as little as a decade, maybe two, we will look back at all this and chuckle."

Maybe the main industry studios will, but music in general isn't determined by what those folks are doing. There are more indie publishers than ever, and so on.

Well, one thing to note is that humans spend more time processing audio than video. Bad audio is immediately noticeable and aggravating, compared to spotty video with clear audio.

I -guess- CNNs can look at e.g. reduced frequency range recordings (like phone calls), and attempt to reconstruct them. However this seems like an arduous mountain to climb, as people's voices are unique. So are their environments and signal chains. I really doubt that something that generalized would work very well at reconstructing a specific person's voice and recording.

This also gets into the problem that it would be constructing a new reality, not recreating it.

Autotune and melodyne are just standard now. Good usage is not really detectable. What people forget to note is that you still need to know how to sing in the first place. Autotune plugins can only do so much...

These plugins really exist to save time for large studios, not make bad musicians better. Time is money for studios, so they don't want to waste it on multiple retakes when someone can be close enough to make small fixes with melodyne. For session work, market effects still pressure people to, well, not make mistakes like that. A great singer is still going to be in higher demand than a decent one, because then the studios don't have to spend much time at all fixing their vocals.

Also, -noticeable- autotune can be desired. It's a musical choice. In that sense it's no different than using a vocoder, etc. I personally do not like it but that's the beauty of music; there's something for everyone.

As someone who worked as an audio engineer, solving problems before they can occur saves so much time and headache. There's no reason to faff about with software or complexity-inducing algorithms when the whole problem can be fixed by toggling one switch.

Technically you could accomplish the same thing by applying a parametric eq to the master buss, but then you're no longer software agnostic.

It's like photography; sure one can post-process photos in photoshop. But getting everything right before taking the picture, at a hardware level, simplifies things for everyone involved.

What sound cards support direct XLR input?

In nearly every case, a dedicated usb interface is going to have better quality ADC and mic preamps. High-quality sound cards are not prioritized by consumers, so they remain rather poor quality in most laptops and pcs. Even something like a focusrite scarlett is going to improve the signal chain immensely (plus you get the added bonus of a decent DAC as well).

It depends on how close the speaker is. Getting that close creates a large proximity effect. The rolloff filter starts at 1k actually but is around -10db at 150hz [0]. I wouldn't use it unless one is close to eating the microphone.

[0]: (Page 4) https://media.sweetwater.com/store/media/u87ai_u87.pdf

MP3s generally have a shelf around 16-18khz. The rest of the audible spectrum data is impossible to retrieve if it doesn't exist. This is why transcoding from a lossy->lossless format is a bad idea.

Not everything is magically fixable. That would involve creating elements that didn't exist at recording time or were removed by an encoder.

Dictionaries are not end all authoritative sources. They often do not keep up with slang. As a native English speaker I can say that "pimp" has both that usage and the usage coined from "pimp my ride". I don't have hard numbers on that usage of pimp, but I believe that it's entered the public lexicon at least for my generation. I don't think anyone my age would be confused by that usage.

You are technically correct, and also wrong at the same time by insisting that the way people actually use words in real life is "wrong" because the dictionary says so. If people use "pimp" in that manner, then it is correct.

As others have mentioned, keeping the mic closer to you and turning down the gain helps.

You can also run the mic through a signal chain and use a noise gate. So audio only gets sent when it reaches a certain threshold. On linux you can do this with pulseeffects if you're using pulseaudio.

The other hack is just mute yourself. I use a shortcut to do that when I'm typing and not actually talking.

This is not true. USB microphones do not have as high quality as XLR microphones connected to a usb interface. In general, USB mics have a lower signal to noise ratio (SNR) and a higher noise floor.

Does this matter for gaming or calls? Not really, as it will definitely sound better than crappy laptop or headphone mics. But there is a marked difference. The AT2020 usb mic doesn't even go up to 20khz. Not to mention the A-D conversion from a dedicated unit and the mic preamp are going to be better than the onboard electronics of a usb mic.

"Has anyone had good experiences with microphones on Linux"

I've not had any issues with external mics and usb interfaces. Onboard mics aren't really that good to begin with; you'll want to get some sort of external lavalier mic, or a condenser or cardioid dynamic. Onboard mics and other omnidirectional mics aren't great because they pick up sounds from all over. A cardioid polar pattern helps a lot with cutting down on sound.

It is dismissive to say that natives "miss the meaning". They do not. Pimp has multiple usages, as do a lot of words. It is very easy in English to create new nouns/verbs or new usages of existing ones and happens all the time.

As usual, the context is crucial for figuring out which usage it is.

I don't disagree with you, people value different things. However most of the US is designed in this suburb style where it's just miles and miles of houses with grocery stores and food being at least 5-15 mins away via -car-. Chicago, NY, and Boston have decent metro lines but none of our public transit comes even close to e.g. Korea or Japan in terms of efficiency, comprehensiveness, and cleanliness.

The only option for the majority of the US is to have a car. And I hate that.

edit: also regarding cars: I can't relax fully because I'm operating a vehicle in a space shared by other people, who are potentially distracted, operating potentially deadly vehicles that kill or seriously injure many Americans each year, and I can't read a book, etc, because my hands are tied up. This would be fine if I had other choices, but I realistically don't.

I suppose I should clarify that I'm talking about suburbs in the US. They're not designed for humans, but for cars. And public transportation is largely a joke outside of a few cities.

> I do live in the suburbs, and it's not all bad. It's easy to get in my car and drive a mile down the road and get a coffee from McDonald's, what's not to love?

[U.S.] Suburbs become unpalatable once you live somewhere that actually cares about public transit and designed the city accordingly. E.g. Seoul. With mixed residential and commercial businesses, one never has to walk more than 5 minutes to get groceries, if that. Trains and busses will take you anywhere you want. Of course, you can still have a car, but it simply is obviated unless you have a specific need to move furniture, etc.

After having experienced that, I absolutely detest having to hop in my car to drive and get groceries, etc, because there is -nothing- but houses in my suburb area. It makes me rather depressed knowing what people are missing out on, what life is capable of being like. A well-run, comprehensive train and bus system like that will probably never happen in the US.

edit: I am speaking specifically about suburbs in the US. I don't think other countries design suburbs nearly as car-centric and isolated as the U.S. does.

> just like they allowed Overwatch to take from TF2's player base back in 2016

Overwatch isn't really taking TF2's crowd though. On the surface they're similar, but mechanically they are worlds apart. Overwatch is highly polished; TF2 is downright clunky by comparison. But it allows custom servers and player scripting/mods. Blizzard is far too tight-fisted for that to realistically happen for Overwatch. TF2 also has all kinds of interesting movement mechanics due to the source engine, that overwatch just really doesn't have. Overwatch's format of merely 6-person teams means you can't really goof around like you can with TF2's 12 and 16-person teams.

I'm sure a lot of players checked out overwatch but didn't stop playing TF2 as they're simply very different games. TF2 also did release major updates albeit infrequently until the jungle inferno update back in ~2017. Now it's just radio silence apart from small seasonal updates.

I'm not as familiar with CS (only played a few dozen cs:go matches), but just from playing both that and valorant I feel like it's going to be a similar situation. Valorant is more polished but it just plays wildly different due to the player abilities.

Valve is neglectful regarding these games (look at how DotA 2 is treated by comparison), but I doubt trying to compete would've helped very much.

While valve is indeed quite neglectful, the reason they're "behind" on anticheats is because they don't run extremely invasive ones like EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) or Vanguard (what Valorant uses). These operate exactly like malware/rootkits that you just have to trust. Blegh. Even if I wanted to run those (I do not), they don't work on linux anyways.

So I'll stick to cs:go and tf2 community servers, thanks.

YMMV but after 3-4 weeks of dvorak, I actually did have difficulties when using qwerty. I gave up dvorak because I don't want to have to modify every keyboard/system I'm on, as opposed to just sitting down at a terminal and getting work done.

> I don't see what the point is in fighting for Taylor Swift's right to make millions from making music if the average person can't make a living.

This is a strawman argument. Obviously I would like to see -all- artists get paid a living wage at least for their work. The fact that life isn't fair and TS makes millions isn't my fault, and is not what I'm specifically advocating here.

They may have some fans, but not a lot of money. The label steps in to give money to fund creating a new album, creating music videos (these can easily run up to millions of dollars), issuing new LP pressings, doing concerts, advertising them, etc.

> randomly penalizing music enjoyers with ruinous fines and lawsuits

That's a weird spelling of "people who want to listen to music -without- paying for it". Napster started a conversation about IP and copyright, but I for one am glad it is dead.

DCMA is monumentally stupid in its -implementation-, but the idea is not a bad one. There need to be protections for people who make a living by creating music, art, etc. Yes, that means repercussions for people who reproduce digital content and redistribute it without a license. I think that we can all agree that how these things are currently enforced via the DCMA is rather bad, though.

What I'm saying is, we need to pay people for their work. This includes artists making music that you want "to enjoy". In 2021 there isn't really an excuse, with spotify/apple music/etc existing for streaming, and things like bandcamp for outright buying cds/lps, and discogs for the secondary/used market.

People also make the choice to cling onto famous peoples' words. They could just as well not do that.

> That kind of influence is an enormous privilege, one that nearly everyone that has it has had to chase aggressively their entire careers if not lives.

I don't think RMS did that, and I don't think "nearly everyone that has it has had to chase [it]". Some people do, and others just... become (in)famous in their respective fields. Imagine just wanting to be good at basketball, getting some of level of fame, and then just hearing "shut up and dribble", etc.

> there are many famous people who've figured out how to self actualize their lives without attracting attention

And how does one go about this without e.g. not saying anything at all? Discussing politics or societal ills is -always- going to irk some people. It's really not fair to say that, because someone now has some level of reach, that they have to basically say nothing at all. Why is there no personal responsibility or accountability? I'm going to assume the controversial stance here that people just don't raise children right, to not dwell on peoples' words just because they're "famous". And that is a larger societal issue than celebrities simply having opinions as a human being.

> Do you think he is such a phenomenal genius that keeping him is worth ten good people quitting or not joining in the first place?

There are no numbers here, so this is literally impossible to debate. You can say X, I can say Y, and it's all completely subjective.

I personally don't think that he's driving away people like people claim. RMS is involved with the gnu project, fsf, and free software (now renamed open source), but those projects are each far bigger than he is.

> What if he's not so brilliant after all and you're allowing one "genius" to cost you equivalent or even superior "geniuses" with less abrasive personalities?

Again, this is impossible to debate in good faith. There are infinite hypothetical alternate realities, what good does it do for any of us to muse over them? Maybe a "super genius" exists and is being held back by RMS' continued existence. Maybe not.

"How dare people have opinions on politics or society on their personal web blogs". How is this any different than telling celebrities to pipe down, as if people aren't human anymore once they become famous?

These days, most games run fine out of the box with proton. As the parent comment stated, it's mostly games that rely on invasive anti-cheats that don't work. For example, PUBG, Due Process, Valorant, etc... aka competitive multiplayer games.

If one really wants to they can dual-boot with windows, but I've found the better option is to just play games that do run well on linux, like tf2, etc.

I don't agree with this conclusion. The original could have added ~7 lines of css and made it about 100x more readable, while still making the same point.

Language researchers will definitely have use for it.

The same goes for HN, really. /s

What bothers me is using facebook tracking scripts in the first page, particularly for internal customer pages. Of course I'm not happy with them working with facebook at all.

Other services doing worse things is not an excuse. I don't want to go with amazon either, hence my question here.