haywirez

I really like this post, especially the interactive grid with labels. A quick tip so it's easier for people to share and link to it: please add some Open Graph meta tags to the page so it looks nice[0].

Anyone who's interested on the subject, I can recommend two books I found useful.

[1] Winifred Phillips: A Composer's Guide to Game Music

[2] Michael Sweet: Writing Interactive Music for Video Games

The first one is a bit heavier on freelance/business advice. Both go quite in depth with tips on how to work with game dev companies, but about half of the texts relate to actual composition techniques.

[0]: https://neilpatel.com/blog/open-graph-meta-tags/

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Composers-Guide-Game-Music-Press/dp/0...

[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Writing-Interactive-Addison-Wesley-De...

There are endless resources, but the most important thing is to pursue the playful goal-free explorative learning part of it first. Just discover relationships between pitches and sounds yourself. (It’s not the same, as pitch is a perceived quality.) Also worth to study Debussy scores and check harmonic constructs note-by-note, later.

Sorry about that, I will get around fixing it.

(It’s quite an UX headache. Maybe only the middle 2/3s should hijack or the embed needs a bit of extra padding?)

Edit: for now, it only zooms with shift pressed

I wrote this upon realizing that two more or less random historical events ended up determining the entirety of my life’s course so far — the fall of the Iron Curtain and the rise of the Internet. These two have their hand in everything that’s dear to me, from the music I love, the relationships I have and the things that enabled me to do what I do. It all makes sense, but I’m still puzzled and in awe.

Great experience with WireGuard so far, but does anyone know a simpler way to use it over networks where UDP is blocked (e.g. university Wi-Fi)? I've only found this comment[1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17847008

It has a fair tinge of typical Polish-style pessimistic humor.

Is there a known approach that attempts to separate all distinct sounds (timbres rather than pitch) in a track? Specifically targeted at electronic music, not standard acoustic ensembles.

All that’s missing is the ability to control these settings through the API - same with Letsencrypt certs / auto ssl.

I think this doesn't go far enough, there should be a ban on starting before 10 am. During high school I recall frequently falling asleep around 3-4 am and having the alarm go off at 6:30.

Super happy to see this effort and eager to check the code out soon!

As someone who relies on a lot of Zapier-style API connections, I’d love to hear more about how people approach it - how you go about managing env vars (keys/token), abstracting similar service procedures (oauth, webhooks) and generally monitoring 3rd party API endpoints for keeping the connections healthy? Any advice from Zapier / IFTTT veterans?

Edit: the n8n docs seem good and also address most of my questions [1]

[1] https://docs.n8n.io/#/nodes

Berlin is still a great place to live, but dev salaries are low and seem to stuck at a ceiling of about €70-75K/y gross for senior/lead positions (there are exceptions, but even this is a hard sell to get). For a long time this was "justified" by the allegedly low cost of living. This is not true anymore, the city is rapidly getting more expensive (housing) and the leverage has all but vanished. Senior devs who are moving here, please smash the ceiling and ask for more (you deserve it).

The only ethical pay-per-view system I can think of would be to stream directly from the production source (production house, artist), some sort of a paid RSS-like feed.

Ableton is a different ballgame if you have the Push interface. Other than that Reaper needs a mention, it is the best DAW[1] in terms of functionality and power. Truly for power-users and not necessarily as a musical idea starter.

[1] http://reaper.fm/

I’m looking for some API or scraping source to add it as a metric to my music app, anyone came across one?

How well can you cache the worker responses on CF? Can you prevent spinning one up & therefore incurring costs after the first given unique URL request is handled? Looking into now.sh for a similar use case (audio), but pondering how to handle caching in a bulletproof way as I'm afraid of sudden exploding costs with "serverless" lambdas...

It’s cheap but it’s proving unacceptably slow for me - sometimes I see 2.5s TTFB for accessing tiny audio files in my region (Berlin, EU). Server uploads are also quite unreliable, had to write a lot of custom retry logic to handle 503 errors (~30% probability when uploading in batch).

Great for it’s intended use (backups), but I’ll be switching to an S3 compatible alternative soon - eyeing Digital Ocean Spaces or Wasabi...

I’ve been thinking a lot about how the UX of cassettes and vinyl encouraged an immeasurably deeper immersion and exploration of music. My walkman would keep playing as the battery died, playing the music slower and slower still for about 20-25 minutes. This was fun and made it easier to figure out how electronic drum patterns and sounds were put together. To say that had an impact on my own productions later would be an understatement. Also it didn’t matter that I had one album or mix on the tape, I would happily listen to it hundreds of times. Didn’t need infinite scrolling libraries of compositions...

I've been there too! What a night!

The best part was when he grabbed the mike and said something to the effect of "this is my 909, I take it everywhere I go" and the crowd went crazy.

I got to hang out at the venue before and after the show through some record label connections. They put a special Funktion One sound system in just for that night (total, unnecessary overkill for the small venue). During soundcheck, I was standing alone next to Jeff in the middle of the dancefloor looking at the decor and listening. I was too scared to strike up a conversation, just didn't even know what to say.

It's not that hard to learn to mix well with turntables, especially if you have a background in music production or instruments. It's a logarithmic curve, I think you can get there in ~2 months, putting in some time daily. Compared to learning how to play any musical instrument well, it's rather trivial.

It's probably harder to get good at handling the mixer, levels and EQ as DJ software abstracts this away with auto-gain (again if you have no solid experience in sound engineering). Learning how to choose good cue points (phrasing) will again take some time if you have no idea about musical composition, but it can be simplified (usually 16-32 bars, outro -> intro, breakdown -> buildup). On top of that, add 'harmonic mixing'.

The thing is, if you don't put in the time to learn beatmatching by ear and hands, you likely won't learn how to listen attentively. Even if you auto-match the tempos based on BPM, you'll get ugly phase mismatches on the kicks and snares/claps that will sound bad and you won't even be able to notice how a small nudge could make it all gel much better.

Another tendency is to simply mix and switch tracks too fast because you have nothing else to do, the software makes it instant. The audience always takes a longer time to get into a track than you.

But in the end, I've seen no correlation between skill and event lineups.

Source: 15+ years of experience

What you describe is exactly what I'm building - https://songsling.io

Didn't want to explicitly promote it here in the thread, but I'm building it to serve as a general music-content engine for artists (also for my own music, let's be honest) that will let you upload composition parts and the player will put them together on the fly. It already has interactivity built in where you can serve a different version of a track based on changing inputs you connect from your Internet presence etc. Plus, you can DJ with it, it supports smoothly changing playback speeds. It needs to happen.

Coincidentally working on this right now...

Sure, maybe now that there's not a lot of fish left in the oceans anyways, you could start convincing the almighty VCs to pay for an army of solar powered submarine drone servers that host IPFS nodes with Starlink satellite uplinks randomly scattered in international waters...good luck engineering the < 1 second time-to-play on those videos!

For musicians and devs, it's a good hint that Markov chains are "good enough" for most interesting music applications, ML/AI doesn't typically yield better results. Happy to see this on the front page!

A good thread explaining the next steps: https://twitter.com/why0hy/status/1110514962366189568

TL;DR summary: The directive will have to be implemented in national legislations, a ~2 year long process. There are a bunch of contradictory laws and regulations to be reconciled. Your app or platform can probably ignore the new rules as they're too unclear and unenforceable - but do join trade associations that can provide good, reliable legal support.

[Edit] here's another article from EFF explaining the next steps:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/03/eus-parliament-signs-d...

This is US-only, I presume?

Correct - this proposal is coming from the EPP, the largest party in the EU parliament. Predictably, most of their MEPs will just blindly vote for it along party lines. Language barriers are crucial in terms of their constituency universe (plus the older demographic skew). Their voters don't read Reddit, Twitter or anything in English and this issue is nowhere near their radars.

I'm worried about influencing outcomes in the EU due to language barriers, especially on boring and "unsexy" issues like Internet regulation. It'd be important for the EU to be able to vote for representatives regardless of your primary jurisdiction.

Even if I manage to convince most of the representatives from my region, they will be outvoted by the French who had a big hand in passing the proposal forward the last time... It's like they reside in a completely different universe, with no hope of meaningful communication.

Edit: adding a link to this false-positive emulator script[0] as an example of how stupid the proposal is.

[0]: https://twitter.com/AlecMuffett/status/1015594170424193024

This debate has been going on in music biz circles for at least 5 years or more[0], with zero results. I've also heard the comical excuse of calculating the proceeds this way as being "too difficult" in terms of data processing...

0: https://medium.com/cuepoint/how-to-make-streaming-royalties-...

Increasingly, the opportunity to use an emoji is the only reason I bother to communicate online at all ‍️

Just want to say that Michael Benson's Space Odyssey[0], the oral history of making the movie, was the best book I've read this year. Kubrick somehow, through a lot of luck, determination, and frankly a hefty dose of delusional thinking, managed to gather the best minds of a generation to work on what basically amounted to a crazy art project. The book does a good job of impressing that for a lot of people involved it became the apex of their professional and personal lives. In the end, they made something that truly mattered and changed culture. I left the book wishing I got to experience something as intense as that. Most of what we do doesn't matter.

[0] https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Space-Odyssey/Michael...