vegadw

Related: Human sensitivity to "unwanted" noise is impressive. There's a lot of professionally released music out there where the noise floor is high enough to be annoying. Similarly our reaction to lossy codecs not quite preserving quality is usually visceral if we know the track well.

I think some of the lock in is because MIDI (1.0, at least) just isn't good enough. I have an Ableton Push (Obviously locked to Ableton ... (mostly, there is 3rd party BitWig support)), Osmose (weird MPE+ standard), and a lot of pedals and effects which have their own, sort crappy apps for controlling them. (TC Plethora x3, Blackstar Dual Distortion, TD-3, etc.). Sys-ex is so strange to use that nobody want's to deal with it either.

The other half is because pretty much every DAW has some non-standard plugin/scripting system: Ableton with Max, Reaper with rJS, Bitwig with The Grid, etc. If I moved away from Ableton, I'd lose my M4L plugins/patches.

Standards for opening projcets cross Daws will help, I think, but the biggest 2 things that will motivate change is MIDI 1.0's slow death so that more is possible without strange, custom systems and CLAP, again for more-or-less the same reasons.

A fee, be it $5 or $1 doubling each year, doesn't work well for a variety of reasons.

1. Big players can afford protection even when a product isn't profitable - Disney may lock things up to claim a catalog even if most, independently, isn't worth much.

2. What defines a work? For a TV series, is it the entire show, each season, or each episode?

3. Some works exist in much higher quantity. Ie, photography vs video games. A photographer would have to increase their prices dramatically to retain copyright for even a short period.

I am all for copyright reform, but this option doesn't work. I'm a much bigger fan of the idea of everything being public domain PERIOD with the arts being publicly funded - Ben Jordan has a great video defending this idea I can't link to easily while at work.

I've been going down the rabbit hole of using all physically modeled synths instead of sample based VSTs so that I can fully take advantage of MPE controls instead of trying to get samples to be expressive though arcane incantations of key twidding in Kontakt. I think it's probably the best option for doing things in a DAW right now, unfortunately.

> You reviewed three DAWs.

There's definitely more than 3 reviewed there? Sure, a lot of them still say [TODO] on getting a review, but then I don't want to review something I don't have a significant amount of 1-on-1 time with. Maybe you didn't realize there are click-able tabs?

Also, the way you phrased this came off as quite rude. There is someone on the other side of the screen, and you'd do well to consider that in the future.

> Re: MIDI - you can already "play between the notes" using either MTS or even just simple pitch bend [...]

Pitchbend is global to the track, if you play a chord and bend, all of the notes bend equally. With MPE it is possible to bend a single note, but then MPE isn't supported in every DAW (FL Studio doesn't have it) and my gripes with MTS are explained already: You're still working with only 127 possible notes so you limit your octave range. Worse, with all of the microtonal solutions, the UI will still typically look like a 12-tone piano. This is sort of okay for 24TET, but It's immensely confusing for anything else.

> DSP processors [...]

They really haven't been true for audio for a while now. Moore's law isn't dead, but definitionally "Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years" doesn't equate to all work loads seeing an improvement. Audio is a pretty latency sensitive, mostly strictly sequential workload. Making audio code that uses multiple cores often isn't even possible. Audio needs clock speed and IPC gains, which we have gotten, but that's not always enough. I have a 5900x and still hit limits. What would you recommend I do, get a Threadripper or Xeon so that I can have even more cores sit idle when making music? If anything, the extra cores have been a hindrance lately - on my 3900x I had before at high loads I had to pin the processes to one chiplet or I'd me more likely to get buffer underruns. It's not as if anyone is arguing that CPUs getting faster so quickly means that we don't need graphic cards.

UAD exists but then you're limited to their plugins and their accelerators are quite expensive for not being really all that powerful. I'm also not convinced that kind of accelerator is even the right approach. Field Programmable Analog Arrays, FPAAs, for example, could be setup with a DAC and ADC on either end. Or we could make DAWs/OSs capable of handling digitally connected analog "plugins" better - think effects like the Big Muff Pi Hardware Plugin [1] or Digitakt with Overbridge [2] (These are the only two examples I know of!). Using the word "Acceleration" was wrong, what I really meant is offloading. We need a way to offload the grunt work to something we can easily add more of or better fits the task. I think this is particularly true of distortions, as slamming the CPU with 4 or 8x oversampling to get a distortion to not sound awful hurts.

[1] https://www.ehx.com/products/big-muff-pi-hardware-plugin/ [2] https://www.elektron.se/us/overbridge

If you have the money I'd recommend a monome Norns or Teleype. You also may look into 100r Orca and Midinous both of which run fine on Windows and abstract out the pain of developing an Windows

I am a musician that mainly plays guitar and synths. I have a large eurorack, have tried nearly every MPE compatible synth & controller, and have a massive pedal board. I am also an embedded software engineer and have made audio plugins for VCV Rack. I have written blog posts [0] about MIDI to try to explain it to a technical-ish audience. I have written many, many more posts about why the way we interact with computers is ... sub-optiminal [1] and why new controllers are making it better [2]. I've also written a post reflecting on how AI Art tools like Stable Diffusion have/will affect artists [3] [4]. On my site, I have a list of DAWs and a simple Pro/Con view of each [5]. I have reviewed Emergent Drums, an AI drum-sample tool (and gave it a poor rating) [6]

All of that credential waving is to say, I think about this a lot. The software workflow is so bad that I have resorted to buying an insane amount of hardware, so, what makes it so bad? * Latency correction hell. - Only an issue for musicians not working entirely digitally * Limited I/O (albeit this wouldn't be an issue if I could get away with using less hardware) - You can't use more than 1 audio interface at a time in Windows * Interface navigation hell - VSTs all load as individual windows - There's often still issues with DPI scaling * DRM hell on those virtual instruments * Software stability hell - Not all DAWs sandbox plugins * Complex routings are often complicated - In audio-contexts, we often want to pipe signal around in branching - diverging & merging - paths, often with signals from unrelated chains changing things (ex: sidechain compression from a bass drum)

But I can almost forgive all of those issues. The real issue is and will continue to be MIDI. * 127 values for knobs? Really? That's quantization you can hear. * No good support for microtonal - Current hacks often break down realllllly bad with big scale. If you're in 31EDO, for example, you only get 4 octaves of range. * Clocking is a disaster, making swing, polyrhythms, etc. more of a mess than they need be.

Those are issues that legitimately limit the expressiveness of all music creation. You can't fine-tune a value in MIDI, you can't play between notes (barring MPE, which itself is a hack and not supported in all DAWs), and - combined with the latency problems above - it means *both* your traditional instrument (ie Guitar) and digital interfaced (MIDI) will have weird latency issues.

AI is not the solution and there's more than one problem. There are a few things which could help: * MIDI 2.0 / OSC / Literally anything with more resolution * Designing with more than just western music theory in mind (microtonal, swing/complex grooves, etc.) * A standardized framework for UI

I think VCV rack [7], albeit it absolutely isn't a general purpose DAW, does a good job of addressing many of these issues, but it can't handle more basic use cases either. Sequencing a long track in it is like pulling teeth and performance is quite bad due to processing everything as float's sample-by-sample, not as a buffer.

I do have some hope that change is coming. The Blockhead DAW [8] rightly has many musicians following this space excited for it's novel approach of treating audio in the timeline as a much more fluid source for quick modification rather than baked content you have to modify elsewhere.

There is, ultimately, an incredible amount of complexity that music software has to account for. I could muse(score) about why this is the case: it could audio having a temporal element, unlike a text editor or maybe just the inherit complexities that arise from trying to create with a medium where you have to consider such an extreme amount of information that caries with it cultural context and an ease of offense to the senses that no other medium suffers (Bad audio is much less tolerable than bad video).

No matter the case, it means that a DAW and the interacting with it needs to be very tightly integrated and intentionally designed with good standards while also being highly flexible. We nailed the flexibility, but totally dropped the ball on intentional design and standards that work for us. I don't think that can be un-done now, not without throwing away support for legitimately amazing tools.

While I'm risking going pure-tangent, I also want to mention that there being no good method for hardware acceleration is a limiting factor in the audio world, along with better standards for UI and data transport, we're in desperate need of an open hardware acceleration standard that's easy to use and not crazy expensive. I should be able to throw in a DSP card just like I can throw in a big GPU and have enough umpf in my system not be constantly worrying about freezing tracks or having audio underruns. This is an extra reason for having as much hardware as I do: A lot of DSP distortions eat CPU and sound really bad.

[0] https://opguides.info/music/midi/ [1] https://opguides.info/other/hci2/intro/ [2] https://opguides.info/music/instruments/#expressiveness-and-... [3] https://opguides.info/posts/aiartpanic/ [4] https://opguides.info/posts/ai2/ [5] https://opguides.info/music/software/daw/ [6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpq7g9CcGv4 [7] https://vcvrack.com [8] https://twitter.com/ColugoMusic

This post is overtly transphobic. Even if it contains some relevant context, I feel that promoting it is deeply unethical.

I suspect this is the case, but IMHO the practice should be illegal. If you accept returns for the purpose of price reduction you should just do the price reduction directly, both for the sake of the environmental cost and as a matter of treating consumers decently.

OP here. This is phrased beautifully and at least partially reflects my own views. I especially like how you said "It doesn't feel like I "made" the things I did, but that I "found" them".

This is a big part in why I enjoy vastly different kinds of music creation. When I work with a traditional DAW and build a track from scratch, I'm sculpting and crafting an artwork. When I work with modular synthesizers and generative compositional tools (AI or not) I feel like I'm navigating sonic landscapes to find interesting destinations.

AI art is the latter, and while it's fun, it's a different feeling during creation all together. In music, I can typically hear which the artist was doing in a given song. With Stable Diffusion and DallE, I don't know that I can as reliably. This is why the divide is so interesting to me. We have to radically different avenues, each with their own merits in how fulfilling they can be, to choose from which produce similar results.

I will admit, there is something to the reward of making something hand crafted that at least to the artist, adds value, even if that value isn't (typically) transferable to the end user.

> Right now, your music requires attribution and can't be used for commercial purposes.

Sure, but fair use still exists. If someone takes just a single drum hit, reverses it, and coats it in distortion and reverb, but some how I find out they did it, I can sue them. But I can sue over anything, that doesn't mean I'd win. I'm pretty confident they would, and would agree they should because it's fair use. I think training an AI model is fair use as well.

> Should visual artists have the same ability to choose the rights they reserve?

Yes, and within the bounds of fair use as musicians that I've stated above. If I photoshop out a single eye, let's call it 50x100 pixels of a 5000x5000 image, and use it to make a neat mash up art, I think that is transformative enough to be fair use. Similarly, I think the AI model is transformative enough.

In either case, there are limits. If someone makes a model fine tuned on my specific music, that's wrong. Similarly, if someone makes a model fine tuned on an artists specific work without their permission, that's wrong. Using an artist name (music or drawing) in a prompt is gray, but I personally think leans on being acceptable, especially if that artist is dead.

I'd be fine with it being used to train models. The music world is already extremely derivative and trendy. In western music anyway, we have 12 notes to go around and often only use a subset per song. Additionally, much of a song's structure is formulaic, even with music as experimental as my own. I've used AI tools for composition (though I've always had to modify their outputs), pretty much all musicians use samples, etc. If anything, I see the use of AI as a step towards having less reuse in music because of the ability for generes to bleed together.

This just made my night. Thank you so much!

OP here. This was a big struggle in writing this. Things changed so quickly that it's hard to keep up with what's possible.

Odd, I'm also a Comp Eng grad and my experience was exactly the same - including the cross campus bit. I went to University of Nebraska - Lincoln.

There was still definitely a fair amount of real cheating though. Especially during the online classes of COVID.

Most of the cheating I saw was from classes that had clearly had difficulty creep up year after year due to un-caught cheating though, and had truly awful professors. Chegg, I think, has really inflated the difficulty for the hosest people.

I think the most common cheating i actually saw in engineering was group work where only 1 person did anything. Hell, I have an example on my GitHub where my partner made one commit with one line of code which I then had to redo anyway.

The author, Jay Carlson, is a really rad guy. I've got a few stereoscopic camera boards of his floating around that I happened to run into and a few emails later I had them up and running!

I don't think it's fair to call him a random user. He's a regular of the forums with over 6k posts. Plus, it wasn't just this one user. On the forums, one of the admins directly made their opinion of how to handle new users clear, boiling down to let them experience trial by fire. Yes, Arch is and should be difficult. But that doesn't mean it should be made extra difficult by listing out incredibly esoteric options for each step and leaving the user to research every single one. That is ridiculous and will only get worse with time. You shouldn't have to research every weird fringe file system and a half dozen weird boot loader to find out that most people are using ext4 or btrFS and Systemd-boot or Grub. Just some pointing to good paths. It's one thing to RTFM, it's another to RTF all the Ms for everything ever, which I think you agree with by saying

> It should only link to pages that are absolutely necessary to be read and any further diving should happen from the linked pages

I know when I first installed arch in 2014 I used the beginner's guide, which was much easier to follow. And, yeah, I did have at least some experience with Ubuntu before that, but not very much. I'd largely disliked Linux up to that point because installing software was a major PITA (adding PPAs is still a PITA, and now we have the mess of Snap, Flatpack, AppImages, etc. on top of it) and after getting Arch actually working I found a system that made things convenient to the point of justifying the work, plus it let me customize the heck out of my system (i3wm, RT kernel for making music, etc.)

As I point out in the guide, just some guidance as to what paths are well worn. Presenting people with a list of every possible boot loader and file system, leaving them to research every option, isn't great. On top of that, the current guide doesn't even warn users to do a backup before doing Patitioning/FS stuff. I'm not saying to make a bunch of decisions for the user, I'm saying we should steer them to common answers and let them look up the more esoteric stuff with time.

OP here, > I feel like Arch used to be simpler to install, right?

It was! There used to be a beginner's guide that was much easier to follow than the current installation guide.

OP here. One goal: Make Arch's documentation for installation better so that more people trying Linux (if they pick Arch first) have a better experience. It seems that to do this, the entire project needs to have a cultural shift in the attitude towards newcomers.

I think it's the idea of a manual override being lost that people are unhappy about. Even in a fully self driving cars, I think people would express anger at having no way to override the car and steer themselves. I'm a huge proponet of slef driving (if we can get it right) but the driver needs to be able to have ultimate control over the car if wanted. The example here is going to a hospital even if slightly intoxicated and I know Ive heard escaping domestic violence; however, I thik it can be much more mundane than that- what if your car thinks you have a flat tire because a air pressure sensor has gone bad and so simply refuses to move until it reads more than 15 psi or something, despite being full in reality? What if your car sounds like it's about to suffer sudden extreme mechanical failure, but you're a mile from home and don't want to call a tow. The driver should always be able to tell the car the driver's intent. This is a matter of keeping the car useful, secure, safe, and respectful of the basic idea of object ownership. Failure to recognize this and implimenting nanny tech like this will always have the effect of making things less safe and pissing people off. It's just particularly bad when there's not even the benefit of total self driving to accompany it.

Despite this being old, it did allow me to do something I've wanted to for a while on this page : https://opguides.info/design/dacadc/ so I'm really glad it made it to the front page!

I independently came to the same result back in August, though I provide the commands used and with feedback from someone over at lobste.rs found dithering can be effective, just isn't usually worth it

https://opguides.info/posts/lowbandwidthimages/

I didn't actually see anything overtly homophobic/transphobic, though there's some border control posts he liked/retweeted that go a bit into the racist side. Not someone I'd want to hang out with, but I don't see anything like what was being said.

Still, what could possibly make anyone think posting a personal twitter handle for this was a good idea. That alone makes me question that he should have the role he does at GitHub.

Yeah, I've seen the movfuscator before. It's kinda funny to think it's only ~66% different than normal output (if you don't count the size inflation)

There's also https://hackaday.com/2020/11/23/a-cpu-less-computer-with-a-s... which is sorta related

Obviously most of this licence is awful, to the point where I could be convinced it's a troll. On the other hand, I don't fully disagree with some ideas of a moral license. I've even considered adding a line forbing any thing I make from being used for irl weapons/war as I don't think I could handle the weight of knowing code or hardware Ive designed was used to intentionally hurt someone. From the perspective, I can see how somebody that is a very devout Christian could want to use this licence. I think the idea of morality licenses deserve more thought than an outright dismissal. Of course, as other comments have pointed out, drawing that line will always be hard. If I already wanted to exclude being used for weapons/war, why not tack sexism, racism, use by opressive governments, being used to hinder free speech, etc. on there too? I suppose the easiest answer is to say that there's a threshold of ambiguity, that is while there might be edge cases in weapons/war, sexism and racism would be a lot harder to define- is porn sexism? Is talking about statistics about health data between races racism?

I suspect HN is pretty heavily left-learning atheist, which is leading us to immediately dismiss an otherwise not-crazy idea because of a particularly crazy example.

I suppose I'd like to know if there are some morality clauses that could be considered reasonable? Especially that of weapons/war.

I've tried Obsidian, but after getting used to the inline workflow of Typora I just can't use anything else, even if I'd love to have the graph feature that Obsidian provides.

Yeah, I'm a Computer and Electrical Engineering student from Nebraska.

I know the world gets continually better. Crime, infant fatality, hunger, etc. rates throughout history have gotten continually better. Socially, more and more previously marginalized groups are gaining rights. I don't expect to be in a utopia where everything is perfect or for the world to suddenly 'get it' and all wars to stop. I don't think the world is going to stop turning.

What I do think, is we've been setting ourselves up for greater and great inequality to exist in ways that mankind has never known, that we're destroying our environment, and that large businesses and governments both are able to carry out corruption and misinformation campaigns like the world has never seen, and that more and more the government is becoming a puppet of businesses with deep pockets. Maybe that has gotten better, but if nothing else it's as bad as it's always been, but now with light on it people still can't do anything about it.

I don't think our problems are nothing compared to those of the past. Let's look at 50 years ago- Do you think the racial progress that we had in the 60's and 70's could have happened today, in a world where social media platforms and the internet can be used to drag anybody down. The FBI had a wire tap on MLK and used the information they gained as blackmail, imagine if that were today. Today we're carrying the perfect spytool in our pockets and we either have the choice of join Facebook, Twitter, etc. or have limited contact with many people we care about. We're facing police that have been given military equipment but with none of the training. We face an impending climate disaster that has already caused the number of disasters requiring FEMA responses to skyrocket in the last decade. I think our problems are less personal, I think we have new tools that make everyday life better, but I think on a societal and global scale things are absolutely worse than they were 100 years ago.

We made tools that give each and every person access to untold information and communication with everyone else, so now we have a generation split between those that are under constant stress about how boned our planet is, about governments and large corporations being able to see and censor all that we say online, etc. but can't do anything about it and those that have given up and just accept the state of the world and use TikTok and Twitter and Facebook and go out to drink every night on the money they're getting from their student loans they'll never be able to repay, that probably have at least one mental illness because they're just repressing that fear.

Yeah. 20, 50, 100, 200 years ago we had different problems, but today, today our problems are 2019 having more mass shootings than days, in CO2 levels rising to over 400ppm, and teen suicide rates keep going up.

I'm 22. I'm right on the edge of what a lot of adults call a kid. I don't think schooling or my parents insulated me. I think they tried, but I think if anything they made it worse by not taking us seriously when we do see though it. By saying, 20, 50, 100 years ago things were worse.

I have this tool in the list here https://opinionatedguide.github.io/design/generative-art/ if anyone wants to see more things like it

I just went though what might be covid. I'm 22 and have a prior heart condition, and all week I felt like someoned had taken a baseball bat to my chest and was very tired. What was I doing during this time? Dealing with crammed in homework for 4 high level engineering classes that didn't keep up with the shortened length of this semester well. I think not experiencing dread and depressive symptoms in my situation would be weird.

Universities and Colleges right now are pretending to be accommodating, but the stress on students is outright dangerous right now.

Oh, and the cherry on top? My university is going to have a football game on campus the same day as many of us are taking on-campus finals. Brilliant.

So, I'm both depressed and pissed off. Running on fumes of rage? Motivated by the existential dread of my impending student loans for a semester of education worse that I could have gotten off of YouTube? I don't know man. I just want to not feel like death and have time (and the ability) to breathe.