robhack

How does it compare to SmarTTY? (other than its awesome name!)

The question is then, why is it that with all the technology/automation we got hasn't life gotten cheaper?

Yeah, please do try this also. Everyone is different. Personally, When I try just going to bed early, I just end up fully conscious for hours in my bed not falling asleep. (edit: and yes I tried with using f.lux, not using a computer screen, reading on a passive Kindle, just listening to music beforehand).

You're right, I should have written it as « sounds like fairy tales to me ». Everybody's different, and I just felt this way because that's the kind of suggestions I often read while I had trouble waking up and made some research, and it obviously didn't work for me.. That said: please, do try as many things as possible and see what works for you, start with the easy stuff.

I've tried so many things, and most of the things I read here in the comments sounds like fairy tales (just do it, go to bed earlier, ..). I'll spare you the details (I should make a blog post about it), but here's what worked for me:

- get a dawn simulation device (doesn't work on its own, but still helps waking up more gently) // the more powerful/lumen, the better

- likewise for audio: volume going up slowly (I use AlarmDroid), for this, use a gentle non-continuous sound (knock knock, pause, knock knock, pause) the idea is that a continuous sound is too much annoying, forces you to go turn it off asap and go back to sleep. You may use a more brutal sound for your real wake-up time (so, at the end of the dawn simulation), the idea is that you'll have a gentle alarm beforehand and hopefully fear the brutal alarm and just get into a habit of getting up before the brutal alarm.

- best for the end: padlock your alarm in a solid case, and put the key in your mailbox the night before (hopefully not too close to your bedroom, in my case, I may meet neighbors, so it forces me to fully clothes on). A key-less alarm at the other side of the rooms does NOT work and you will just get up, shut it down and go back to sleep.

- bonus : use a very bright light (at least 5000+ lumen) on a programmable plug for the end of the dawn simulation (or just get a really powerful dawn simulation one, not sure if that exists though)

edit: added bonus

edit2: everyone is different, I just wanted to add my part to the overall list of ideas, please check out all the other comments, different stuff works for different people! (the coffee one sounds interesting, I would have tried it if I was a coffee drinker)

edit3: This should be common sense, but please don't use this as a way to sleep less. I use this because even when I sleep a fair amount (9+ hours for multiple days, I still struggle to wake up).

Hard to say, I feel it helped a little, as in, when I'm playing with my teacher (without MeloCraft), I more often get the feeling « oh, that doesn't quite sound right, I should move my fingers a little bit ». But that's N=1 and I didn't do any meaningful before/after tests.

That said, even if the tool doesn't help for the musical earing directly, it can still help to correct the position of your fingers, and that's very important for muscle memory. So instead of training for hours on the wrong finger position because I don't have a musical ear, I can correct myself and properly train my muscle memory correctly.

Well, you're very lucky to have a relative pitch, I think you can still train for it as an adult, but it may require more time and still might not be possible for everyone. Don't take my word for it thought, I don't recall any solid research on the subject.

That's odd, can I ask what version of Windows you're running? How much RAM you got?

I only tested it on Win7 and had a friend test it on Win8 and Win10.

I'm sorry you feel this way, as brudgers wrote, there is still a small link at the bottom to download without subscribing.

Getting some subscribers is very important to me because I make this tool in my free time, and the only way I can justify spending more time on it is if I have some users who care about the tool. If I shall burn in hell for this, then so be it.

I’m on Windows so I can’t test this one, but seeing from the screenshots, it does not seem to be aimed at musical notes and musicians.

I don't aim to be the best at frequency analysis. My goal is to help beginner musicians to get more confidence about their pitch accuracy.

I only took a quick look for now, but this doesn't seem to give you musical note names? MeloCraft is mainly aimed at musicians, not really for general-purpose spectrogram analysis.

Also, no Windows binaries available? I understand it's open-source, but that's not very user-friendly imo.

It's FFT-based. Then I do some basic computation to try and guess the « best » peak, taking the harmonics into account. Still need lots of work and I suck at math.

That's very smart, thanks for the suggestion, it also shouldn't be too hard to add (:

Just-intonation and other tunings will be my top priority, there was a lot of demand for it in the violonist reddit.

Hello, I made this tool when I started learning the violin and wanted to correct my pitch despite not having a musical ear. I figured it might be useful to other people (:

Is there a way to download all the instrument samples from the University of Iowa in a single archive file?

That's interesting, do you have any links you could point me to in order to learn more about this? For instance, let's say we're in C Major.

Tune1 = C D F A G C

Tune2 = C F D A G C

How can you tell which (if any) is wrong or not and how?

It does indeed fourier analysis to find the notes. But I'm sorry to disappoint you, it does no progression analysis, so it's useless for this particular exercise (it's only handy to see the notes when you don't have an absolute pitch earing).

Well, for one, you could not know the tunes and think it's all random chromatic scale piano playing and thus all played « correctly ».

I'm confused, are we supposed to tell whether it matches any Major/Minor diatonic scale?

This sounds more like a melodic/scale test, not a pitch test, I was excepting it would ask something more like whether the instrument is well-tuned or whether a fretless instrument plays correctly.

For the curious, I've analyzed the first 5 songs with a program I'm developing, using the default C Major scale, here's the result : http://imgur.com/a/yx2H9 (I guess you could do it with something like Melodyne too).

EDIT: nevermind, this is just a cultural/memory test. You are supposed to know the tunes in advance and see if there is any « diff » with what you hear, melody-wise.

EDIT2: 21/26, I only knew more or less half of the songs, and knew well like a third. I Guess I have either poor culture or poor hear (or a little bit of both, we'll never know).

I'm confused, does it support Vista? The PortAudio comparison made me believe it doesn't, as this is written in PortAudio's pros : « Supports older versions of Windows than Windows 7. » [1]

[1] https://github.com/andrewrk/libsoundio/wiki/libsoundio-vs-Po...

Looks very interesting, I might switch from PortAudio to this for my project. But I think I'll wait a bit though, I'm not quite ready to give up on WinXP/Vista support yet.

I've been on a TrulyErgonomic for the past 3 years, and on a TypeMatrix before that (using the Bépo layout, a french dvorak), and while I've been happy with both of them, I would advise to check the ErgoDox, Axios, and Keyboardio nowadays before buying one (they are splitted and have more keys on the thumb).

France.

Interesting.. I mainly use a bicycle for commuting/shopping, however, the left turns almost always scare me, to the point where I'm thinking of using pedestrian crosswalk instead. Better safe than sorry..

I did 37 too. I'm not officially autistic, but I think I have some of the traits, or maybe it's just that I'm a big introvert.

Not everything has to be about ROI, especially when it comes to art, in my opinion. For example, I might want to write a fiction book even though I know I won't sell any, just because it's something that inspires me and want to have done in my life.

You could also mitigate the ROI by learning both the guitar to get your quick ROI boost, while learning the cello when you want to get serious (not that you can't get serious on the guitar, but you might like the cello better and want to get serious on it instead).

1997 but still relevant today, nice! (well, except maybe the very last part about tapes and not being able to adjust tempo).

While this is pretty much a goldmine of information, one thing I would advise of being careful about is about this « My practice hours are divided about equally between works from the standard cello literature and highly focused mechanical exercises ».

While I'm sure it's the the best solution if your only goal is to get better, it is not a format I would suggest for everyone. I for one would have been so bored if I had to to this that I probably would have quit. What I'm doing is about 1/3 practicing scores with sheets, 1/3 mechanical exercises and scales and 1/3 improvisation and just fun (which is very important to me for keeping the motivation to go on, and I guess it could apply to other people). Just for the record, I started playing violin at 24, a bit over one year ago (first instrument), so obviously I can only say that as a total newbie, just keep in mind though (:

Thanks, you might be right. I don't have trouble getting along though, I have trouble approaching and connecting. I can work on the approaching, but the connecting is problematic because of the whole getting bored of anything stuff. Hard to make any meaningful relationships when you don't give a ;;; about pretty much anything.

I can definitely imagine that if I had been a farmer in middle-age I could have been happier, because I wouldn't have time to get bored, and I would be doing something useful.

In our modern world however, really useful stuff is done by robots or a tiny part of the population. Thus you have to find meaning on your own and that can be quite difficult.

Well I can definitely count as being happy as a children, and quite often depressed as an adult. But material deprivation doesn't explain that, at all. As a child/teenager I could be happy just playing around (outside/legos/video games). Now I'm just like "what's the point?" or generally getting bored really fast about pretty much anything and just wondering about the meaninglessness of life.

Same here, but I'm 25 and the tool guessed 20,21,27,27. I guess the average is correct-ish. In my case, the old guesses are when there is bright light or when my head is slightly turned. The younger guesses are with regular room brightness 100% front face.