vegadw

Orca, Nestup, https://krasse.itch.io/wavebots-editor, https://github.com/hisschemoller/music-pattern-generator, https://github.com/chalkwalk/arps-euclidya

If you use Cardnial as a VST you can use any of hundreds of generative sequencers it has.

Browsing midi clips compared to something with parameters that you can tweak, like all of these have seems infinitely preferably than wandering through a sea of MIDI clips.

This feels like a joke, right? Short, generative midi clips, for real world money? I thought at first maybe the shop thing was like a visual gag, but, no, it's actually going to stripe.

There's a million better generative MIDI tools out there, and the vast vast majority are free. I can't fathom making this and not being embarrassed, let alone anyone actually spending money on the site.

I would normally reserve such harsh criticism but as sporkl points out, this seems to be some LLM generated drive-by money-grab mess.

I do worry that maybe OP is like a teenager and I'm coming off overly harsh, but even if that's the case, then OP needs to learn what actually makes a product differentiate itself and how to actually appeal to a target audience. This ain't it chief, as a musician, I find it actively offensive.

I think if you assume a capitalistic, commercial framing of code, this makes sense.

If you think about all the projects you don't have time to make that require code but would be really cool albeit have no *marketable* value, making those faster to make and easy to share isn't a bad thing.

I want more cool free things people make out of passion - sure, you could argue using AI removes some of that passion, but there's also a large subset of people who are passionate about their field but not passionate about code, and if they're able to make something cool by feeding the idea in and pulling the token generation slot machine's lever on repeat to get their vision, I still think that's cool.

Of course, there's a line where it's slop, so it depends what they're making. A tool to make music? Cool. An album where it's all AI gen'd audio. Not cool. A tool to modify art/apply filters/modify brushes? Cool. AI art standalone? Not cool.

Basically, is the target something standalone as a product we want to have human creativity in the output expression (art) or not. I don't think of MS office as particular artful, but I'm sure many good books have been written in it.

This line is definitely blurry and full of gray areas. For example, https://www.redwoodrhetorica.com to me is totally fine, but I could see why people find it weird.

Similarly, I'm sure to someone working in or on emacs or vim, they're almost sacred and they view the tool itself as a work of art, such that the idea of using AI to improve either sounds offensive, but as long as VSCode works (which, it has had more bugs lately...) I really don't care if they used Claude or whatever to work on the editor/IDE itself.

Of course, there are projects and features which probably shouldn't make it past the "Should this exist?" filter. Complexity does have a cost - nobody wanted CoPilot in Notepad - but having LLMs doesn't change that, I don't think. It means we can do more, but being selective and having good taste to avoid making something bad by adding unnecessary crap to it was a problem far before LLMs.

That wording could be interesting, because it's ambiguous if free is applicable to the repository or the project. Presumably, the latter. This means you could absolutely do source-open but not open-source and still get around it.

Looks both expensive and power hungry, will be interesting to see how that works out

used. Apple used. It's legally a dead trademark, so Apple is claiming ownership of something they've already abandoned, but enforcing that nobody else can reclaim it, despite being a good name. That's not right, they don't just get to name squat.

Decent Sampler is what I had in mind, and I think is slowly seeing more and more adoption. I do have some hope for it.

NI has been a husk for a long time, hardly surprising. It really sucks so many great sample libraries used the Kontakt format instead of something standard and open.

Their hardware was also fine but not ground breaking, in a sea of actually great options. They just didn't keep up.

The in-music-ing of so many brands is not going unnoticed among anyone with "I'll buy a moog" money, so while I expect all the brands in music is hoovering up to be profitable, I don't see any of them as huge loss to innovation.

Oh! I have so many in-progress projects right now,

First up, the "AskHN for help project in progress": I'm working on some pages for my websites and want to capture + embed some interactive gaussian splats. I haven't yet found a good, embedded-able option that doesn't assume a huge dynamic website instead of my simple Hugo based static site. Any good options?

Otherwise,

I just got a vintage horn-speaker. The actual Atwater Kent driver was long since dead, but I ordered a compression driver to feed it after testing it with a talkbox and finding it sounds amazingly honky!

I have a piano's soundboard and 24 solenoids, all the drivers, etc I need to wire up to make a self playing piano (ish, I mean, it won't be hitting hammers - directly solenoid to string)

I got tired of Alexa's slow degradation into a central advertising point and weird LLM-y-ness, so just got some Home Assistant Voice Preview Editions to replace it. Performance is so far worse, so I'll be doing some tuning on that. It also means, unfortunately, replacing a lot of my lights/switches and moving to Zigbee. Total cost, with the two voice/speaker boxes + lights + switches + Zigbee hub I think I'll be about $300 deep. Not too bad.

I have a Dactyl Manuform mechanical keyboard that's 3D printed, has the keys put in, but needs soldered up, hopefully able to knock that out soon too.

Old eleksmaker pen plotter / laser engraver sitting around had it's controller die a while ago, finally got a new one, but will have to actually learn how to setup GRBL and find some open source software for driving - Which, sounds less than fun. Last time I tried, I found all the software to be expensive, hard to use, and generally frustrating.

On top of all of that,

* I have a Hurdy Gurdy sitting at about 3/4 finished, shouldn't need more than another 8 or so hours of work to get playable.

* I want to make some Nuclear Instrumentation Module inspired modules for VCV rack

* I have an AudioMoth on the way, I'm looking forward to learning how to setup so I can learn about bats in my area!

* I'm still about 75% done switching back to linux, now that I feel it's finally ready to be used for music stuff since the transition to Pipewire seems over with and It's no longer a total mess of ALSA+JACK+Pulse+PipeWire. That transition hell mad me switch back to windows for few years, and it's nice to be back

Also, since the last thread I've managed to fully rebuild my studio setup, setting up multiple 3-tier stands for synths + the Wall-o-pedals. It came out really well! Was nice to brush up on at least basic wood working skills for it too. During that project I also discovered 3M dual lock is magic and will be over-using it on everything from now on.

I think the author agrees, just that it's a phrasing problem

I don't think it's some conspiracy to make anyone more likely to get malware. Instead it's that for their business model of mostly being used on business PCs where the same dozen tools are installed all over the world they can be overzelous in protection and it is what most customers want. Really, they should leave the "piracy is malware" thing in defender, it should just be off by default if your PC isn't connected to a domain or setup as "work PC".

Until recently the exception for me was music software/VSTs. I definitely did get a few infections over the years doing so, but after finding some safe sources it went pretty well. To some extent, I still see advise it, actually, just with purchasing first but never using the key, just because DRM in the music software world is so aggressively bad. iLok is a cancer on that industry.

I think to an extent Microsoft is the guilty party here. For may cracks Windows Defender will trip saying "Win32/Keygen" even if there's no actual malware

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/wdsi/threats/malware-encyclo...

This trains people that do a lot of piracy to be used to turning off their antivirus to let something through, which is fine until it's not. It's like drugs, if we know a subset of the population will do them no matter what, we should make it safe for them to the extent we can. False positives, causing people to ignore actual positives, creates a market for these things.

I think this sort of just points to modern security tooling is more-or-less redundant: The leads in the title "Loose on an internal network"... don't do that. You will never, ever, ever configure everything on your network to be 100% safe, keep everything up to date, etc. Crowdstrike, Sophos, don't care- you can't run anything that will catch everything, so the answer is boring: Isolate and prevent any intrusion to begin with. Limit external connections, use sane firewalls, don't depend on cloud infra, and KISS.

If this didn't work, every single small to medium business would be a malware aquarium - and while some are - generally most are fine because the boring, basic stuff and not going out of your way to misconfigure the hell out of things or give anything more permissions than necessary is 95% of the battle. Have guests using your wifi? Have a guest wifi (Vlan) for them. Congrats, you're not already doing better than like 2/3 of easy targets.

Like, this would be interesting if if was "We told OpenClaw our external IP and said go to town" but some insecurity in the internal network is often just outright necessary to not be a total PITA when doing day-to-day operations.

This can still be a useful testing idea for some orgs, but I feel like the applications are very, very limited.

I suspect there's a lot of people on the 2028 refresh train. If you bought a 1700 in 2017/2018 - which a lot of people did, because it was so good $/perf, you could ride the AM4 platform to a 5900(x/xt) now and be still pretty happy, but AM4 is a dead end now and the X570 motherboards are hard to find. So, if you want more PCIe, DDR5, etc. it'll be time to jump once it starts to feel sluggish for high end tasks (gaming, etc.) around that time.

If you need Docx compatibility to interface with the rest of the world, are you better off with the at-least open source option or the sign-your-life-in-eula-and-O365-subscription option.

This isn't rhetorical. I don't know which is worse. I lean disliking Microsoft more, because jazz hands at Windows11, and OnlyOffice at least runs on Linux, but it's still not a fun position to be in.

LibreOffice and other alts definitely don't have as good of Docx compat.

Hi Tim, it's Jim, your manager. Please stick to the officially released statement:

"We tried to put ads in our product and it made people upset, upon realizing that this has angered our already paying users, we realize we should try again in a month. We're also aware GitHub is down, and are doing our best to deliver you a single 9 of reliability"

This helps us establish a strong, cohesive brand image inline with what customers of GitHub expect.

---

Edit: I don't mean anything bad to Tim here, seems like a nice guy with good technical experience, etc. Rather, I'm expressing the almost comical extent to which I and - to the best of my understanding - many other community members see GitHub in a very negative light now, being unreliable and, as the article points out, enshitified. So, this is at GitHub, Not Tim, it's just addressed to him for the bit.

Tim, I do actually appreciate you responding to this thread and if you do have the power to make things better, using that power to do so.

This is definitely fluff, but the fluff is sorta news in itself: This reads as "We messed up, we messed up because we're putting all our resources into moving to Azure, and we're going to keep doing that" to me.

Or you have a heavy, inbalanced object in your car you don't want sliding, something fragile in tow you don't want to have fast decelaration, or just don't have super-human reaction time since some light have extremely fast yellows.

Or, a deer jumped out on the side and you briefly looked away at it.

Or you could tell the driver behind you wasn't slowing down, so the safer option is to go.

Or. Or. Or. Real life is messy, and there's a million reasons to go though a yellow instead of slowing down.

TT Tunings: See https://www.guyguitars.com/truetemperament/eng/tt_thidellF1....

I don't know that's it's obvious standard would matter, if it was actually 12TET, I would expect shifting up/down to be fine. And, really, it should still be, and I think would give you different just intonated keys if you do, and you shouldn't even need to re-intonate since you didn't move the octave. I think it's just that they don't tell you the offsets you need easily if you do this.

I don't think TT can get much closer to 12TET than a normal, well intonated guitar, even if they explicitly went for 12TET. I'm not certain, but my intuition is that given the placement of the octave (12th fret) is literally the halfway point and you can already adjust intonation, beyond that equal temperament should just be placing the frets on a log scale inbetween, which should look normal - no squiggle required.

IIRC, On a piano, the complexity of intonation is because you don't have harmonics so much as partials - the way they work, you don't get perfect harmonics, a string with a 100Hz fundamental won't necessarily have harmonics at 200Hz, 300Hz, etc. it 'll be peaks at different multiplies, and IIRC not spaced consistently even between partials. This makes it so you may want to tune so the partials are pleasant sounding even if it makes the fundamental off a bit. Mostly reciting things from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoKVuo-87l8 from memory here, you might give it a watch.

Tuning can be a problem even in the studio if your guitar is a pain to tune. I have a 7 string floyd that legitimately takes about half an hour to get right every time, but the stability is great such that (assuming little temp variance) it'll stay in tune for months.

As for sucking, sucking is the first step to not sucking. Also, if you though enough ambient and distortion pedals at it, even suck can sound ethereal ;)

Another victim of True Temperament fret marketing - no, it's not closer to a piano (12TET). It's actually further off for some scales. They use "Thidell Formula One temperament" and it's why they recommend a programmable tuner that can handle it, see https://support.strandbergguitars.com/article/257-how-to-tun...

So, it will be closer to JI for some scales, further for others.

If you really care, imho, you should just get either a fretless or a scalloped and learn to hear it and adjust yourself.

Also, guitars go out of tune constantly unless they have something like an Evertune. Additionally, without VERY good fretting technique (no pressing too hard or slight, accidental bending) the True Temperament frets won't matter that much anyway.

Instead, they do make it particularly awful to use any non-standard tunings.

I have a lot of weird guitars (Fretless, scalloped, MIDI guitars, even a 7-string with a septaphonic pickup so I can get a different out from each string!) but didn't get TT because if you actually read and figure out it's not closer to 12TET, which it seems their marketing implies, it feels sorta scammy.

I feel like the price here is a bit dorky, at $10/yr, sure. $30/yr? No.

They obviously know some people just want to make one quick purchase decision and that's why they have a much more expensive, single month plan - but then, just make it pay for 1 week access for like $5 and don't make me have to remember to cancel.

I'd happily give them $10/yr, but $30/yr is better off just spending more on a given product under the assumption money=quality for anything below $500. Anything more expensive, and there's other review sites. Just all around weird pricing.

I'm a guitarist, but also have a modular.

With the right interface, I think the synth can be more expressive. Look at the Haken Continuum or ExpressiveE Osmose - both can be used with something like the Expert Sleepers FH-2 to get MPE data to the modular.

I do see your point, and agree the amount of articulation you can do with guitar is hard to beat, but I do think a synth can win, if the setup is built for it.

So... use a reamp box to make it hiZ again?

I'm a guitarist, but there's nothing particularly magical about a high impedance signal, other than they tend to lead to noise and make really obnoxious things matter, like how low capacitance your cable is. Also, a TON of modern guitars are low(ish) impedance out because they use active pickups.

The pedals and system being dependent on the high impedance was always a bug, not a feature, and make the setup incredibly dependent on variables that really wouldn't be that hard to just buffer then recreate deterministically. Like, if your pedal should react to that impedance just buffer the front, put a big inductor (or a transformer using only half, or, - and I've actually seen this - just a whole guitar pickup) in the pedal. Then you're not dependent on the pickups of the guitar or the capacitance of cable or anything else and you can make sure the effect sounds good regardless of pickup type.

Being instant-on is so, so cool. I really like seeing projects like this and Adafruit's Fruit Jam as they really show "Yeah, by having all this junk in the way, we do lose some things"

Absolutely would give something like this to a kid as a first computer.

This is opinion, not fact

Not OP, but it wasn't presented as a fact. Literally used the word Seams.

There is nothing more unjust than forcing someone to buy something they do not want simply because you think it would be good for them

Seatbelts? Circuit breakers? Literally any safety equipment. You're required to have them because it's not just good for you, but expensive to society if hospital beds are low or there's not enough firetrucks to go around.

Similarly, if you're polluting more than you have to be due to the source of your electricity, that's bad for everyone. I also rent, but I still understand that it's to the public's benefit that home owners (a class that is already above me in assets and wealth) be given motivation to consume cleaner energy if I don't want to have the climate get even worse. It's the same thing, just the effects feel less direct. That doesn't make them any less valid.

You've already stopped replying, but I think an anecdotal stories might do you some good:

When I was 18, I had a situationship with a girl with abusive parents. One night she texted me to go get her because they were being awful (Mostly to each other) and she wanted to get away from it. When I took her back, even though they had told her she could go in the first place, they were angry with her for being out. The dad, angry with me, yelled at ~10PM and pointed a gun at me in my car.

Latter, the police came by my place and tried to give me a Disturbing the Peace citation. I felt wronged: My only involvement had been to remove a younger person from an already un-peaceful situation! The girl's dad had pointed a gun at ME. I wanted to defend myself.

My mom is a lawyer. She went with me to the station when the police wanted to question me, and she told me to just shut up. Don't answer any questions. Even if it was defending myself. Just. Shut. Up.

She was right, but it was still hard. At one point she kicked me pretty hard under the table to tell me to not talk as the office kept trying to get me to. By doing so, they didn't have enough evidence to do anything. They couldn't press charges, so nothing happened. I would've been innocent either way, and would've won any case, but it was sure a lot easier and avoid a waste of everyone's time for me to not defend myself, because by not defending myself then, I didn't have to waste time in court.

Years later, the incident itself is irrelevant. I doubt anyone else by my mom and I remember it - the notable bit was that the entire situation ended that night because I didn't let my strong desire to show my innocence and wrongful persecution win over the advice of my lawyer-mom telling to STFU.

Now, this isn't to say there aren't time where being very, very vocal is the right call. I could rant and rave to you about the time I really pissed in the cheerios of https://www.scanoss.com/ (With some of it happening here on HN, and me actually "Doxxing" one of their employees after he posted on the HN thread claiming to not be affiliated and accusing me of "falsifying information, impersonation, and even extortion" which was comical levels of bullshit.) but I had public opinion firmly on my side, getting constant pings in discord and slack servers as people wanted to know the latest juicy details and how I was sticking it to them.

Full recap https://opguides.info/posts/scanoss/

But optics matter: It was a David and Goliath situation, where the entire incident happened in a short time frame, and as an individual I wasn't representing anybody other than myself. Those are the factors that change your situation.

You're involving Adafruit in drama and posting quickly, not as formal, adult response.

You're a golliath too, with Adafruit being a pretty big name that everyone in this community knows.

You're involving years old drama, where details are murky and intent and other relationships aren't easy to understand from the outside.

All of that combined makes you look bad, regardless of you're the "good guy" or "bad guy" here. Optics matter.

Sparkfun, by being vague and making an at least surface-level professional page here controlled the optics pretty well. It's only on the surface - as others point out, there's definitely some smells to it too - but rash, fast posting from an individual is what's making the optics bad for you - just like how the CTO of ScanOSS directly responding in my situation made him get over 100 thumbs downs on the GitHub thread in that story.

I think, honestly, that everyone involved - you, the person that's saying you dox'd them, Limor, etc. are great people doing great things that got a little too riled up and let things explode into public drama when really even just being the bigger person and making your FOSS Teensy pin-compatible board would've been retaliation enough in a way that nobody would've seen you as anything but the good guys for.

Honestly, if I were you, even if you believe you did nothing wrong, I'd apologize. Say you're sorry for using their real name. Say making extra accounts to contact them when they didn't want to be wasn't cool. Say you felt hurt, and have been stressed, but didn't realize how what you did would affect them. I honestly don't think you meant to dox anyone, because I don't think you saw it as doxxing. So say that, and say you're sorry. Probably in private first, if you mean it.

I'm still trying to put all the pieces together, but https://digipres.club/@discatte/115588660312186707 sure paints Adafruit as the bad party here, though I'm open to information which shows otherwise to understand better.

I had a seaboard. They didn't catch on because the surface isn't very consistent, it's hard to actually hit a note and not bend without setting the "dead zone" pretty large, and the surface itself is just not a great texture to play on.

The ExpressiveE Osmose is proving to be quite popular. I have one, as do 3 other musicians I know personally. It's a very similar idea, but a lot more mechanical.

There's other options too. The Ableton Push 3, Linstrument, Haken Continuum, and a few other MPE synths/controllers all do a better job than the Seaboard by miles. The Osmose is my reccomendation for most people currently, based on the half dozen or so MPE controllers I've had my own hands on and it's price, but I'd love to get my hands on a Continuum.

It didn't augment your skills, it replaced skills you lack. If I generate art using DallE or Stable Diffusion, then edit in Krita/Photoshop/etc. it doesn't suddenly cover up the fact that I was unable to draw/paint/photograph the initial concept. It didn't augment my skills, it replaced them. If you generate "music" like that, it's not augmenting your poetry that you wish to use as lyrics - which may or may not be of good quality in it's own right - it replaced your ability to make music with it.

Computers are meant to be tools to expand our capabilities. You didn't do that. You replaced them. You didn't ride a bike, you called an Uber because you never learned to drive, or you were too lazy to do it for this use.

AI can augment skills by allowing for creative expressions - be it with AI stem separation, neural-network based distortion effects, etc. But the difference is those are tools to be used together with other tools to craft a thing. A tool can be fully automated - but then, if it is, you are no longer a artist. No more than someone that knows how to operate a CNC machine but not design the parts.

This is hard for some people to understand, especially those with an engineering or programming background, but there is a point to philosophy. Innate, valuable knowledge in how a thing was produced. If I find a stone arrow head buried under the dirt on land I know was once used for hunting by native Americans, that arrow head has intrinsic value to me because of its origin. Because I know it wasn't made as a replica and because I found it. There is a sliding scale, shades of gray here. An arrow head I had verified was actually old but which I did not find is still more valuable than one I know is a replica. Similarly, you can, I agree, slowly un-taint an AI work with enough input, but not fully. Similarly, if an digital artist painted something by hand then had StableDiffusion inpaint a small region as part of their process, that still bothers many, adds a taint of that tool to it because they did not take the time to do what the tool has done and mentally weigh each pixel and each line.

By using Suno, you're firmly in the "This was generated for me" side of that line for most people, certainly most musicians. That isn't riding a bike. That's not stretching your muscles or feeling the burn of the creative process. It's throwing a hundred dice, leaving the 6's up, and throwing again until they're all 6's. Sure, you have input, but I hardly see it as impressive. You're just a reverse centaur: https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-11...