TubularCorporation

I just ordered some Hammond project enclosures and a Georges Bataille book on Amazon, what kind of government watch lists am I on now?

I'm fully back on board the "if I want it I have to build it" wagon.

Some chooch sold me an industrial grade CF card on eBay and then sent me a shitty OEM card that won't even work in the thing I needed the industrial card for (and is worth about $15 less than the $17 they charged me). And the shitty part is even if they let me return it the overseas shipping to Israel will cost more than the amount of the refund. I tried to send someone an EHX pedal there once and shipping was going to be nearly $200.

That thing looks very cool, and is reminding me I rally need to finish building my 3trinsRGB+1c soon. Had all the resistors populated and soldered and then moved and haven't really been building much sine then until recently. Part of the issue is that I have to decide if I want to build it stock or break the little pin patch thing to a bunch of banana jacks.

Well, I finally got of my ass and finished the Jasper synth that I started before my move last fall. I still need to build an enclosure and add a MIDI interface but it's already working and calibrated and sounds really, really good. I've never been lucky enough to play a real Wasp but this thing sounds as good as any of the demos I've heard. Looks like partial kits are currently available, plus there's a Jasper-specific MIDI board (I had to get a regular Wasp MIDI retrofit kit back when I was getting parts for mine) and files for 3d printing enclosure now, so if you can solder it's a good time to grab one. Not the fastest build in the world, but not that difficult, just a lot of parts to source and fiddle with. I was a bit skeptical of the keyboard but it's really responsive and easy to play.

So with some help from Tom from the Reaper Blog, who suggested the first two steps and basic premise that got me started in the right direction, I've made a custom action that replicates (and improves) the "paste to current selection" function from Pro Tools. When I was editing audio books that command was absolutely indispensable for quickly replacing breaths and other noises between words with room tone. There are plenty of other ways to accomplish the same thing, but if you're working on ten or more hours of audio with a tight deadline every single keystroke counts, so it's vital to be able to remove the noise, put in room tone, and ideally crossfade it with the adjacent audio with a single keystroke. Even two keystrokes is kind of pushing it. In Pro Tools you would select a healthy amount of room tone, copy it to the clipboard and use a keyboard shortcut (three keys if I remember right, I haven't used Pro Tools in a few years) to paste the contents of the clipboard into the selected range. It didn't actually crossfade IIRC but it was good enough, and anything else was too slow. Here's a custom Reaper action that does the same thing but also automatically crossfades the edges AND changes the color of the room tone clips so they're easy to spot on the timeline. You need the SWS extensions installed, a clip of room tone saved as a file and imported into slot one of the SWS Resources list (estensions/resources) and your color of choice saved into SWS custom color slot one. The action: - Item: Split items at time selection - SWS/S&M: Resources - Add media file to selected items as takes, slot 1 - SWS: Set selected item(s) to custom color 1 - Take: Crop to active take in items - SWS: Select next item,keeping current selection (across tracks) - SWS: Select previous item,keeping current selection (across tracks) - SWS/AW: Fill gaps between selected items (quick, crossfade using default fade length) I assigned it to R so now I can just quickly select a range, press R and then move to the next problem area. Works pretty much flawlessly. This assumes you have Reaper set up so that items loop the source media (which is the default behavior in Reaper). If you've changed that so items don't loop by default, you'll need to add one more step to the custom action: - Item properties: Loop item source Put this third in the list, right before "Set selected item(s) to custom color 1" if your items don't loop source media by default. EDIT: you can also leave out the "Crop to active take in items" step if you want to have the option of going back to the original audio easily.

That mystery Yamaha is in a car on its way across town right now. Finally! Hopefully it will be more exciting than a DX27. The guy who's getting rid of it used to play out with it in the 80s or early 90s and is a Kraftwerk fan, so I'm pretty confident it won't be a shitty auto-accompaniment type thing. EDIT: it's a DX27. A really, really beat up DX27. There's rust all over it, the chassis has a big dent around the screen so it's kind of tilted to the side, the pitch and mod wheels are sort of mashed so that they drag against the front plate, and it generally looks destroyed. But I'll be damned if every single thing on it doesn't work perfectly, even the battery is still good. The volume fader isn't even scratchy, even though it looks like that end of it was under a drippy pipe for years. Weirdly enough, half the buttons have X marks in pencil above them that I assumed were indicating which ones were broken but they all work fine, so maybe he marked his favorite patches or something. I'll have to give it a good cleaning and bend back the bent parts of the chassis and replace the battery but it sounds great. Not exactly an exciting synth but I'll definitely hang on to it. The picture really doesn't do justice to how trashed this thing is. DX keyboards are indestructible. EDIT: these old things are such a pleasure to work on, hardly anything new is built to be serviced so easily. Two hours and I've already completely striped it, washed all the buttons, bent all the damaged metal parts back in to shape, cleaned and lubricated all the controls, fit it with a battery clip and a new battery, and Dremeled all the rust off. Even took apart the plastic end pieces and washed them, all I have to do is let them dry, put it back together, and clean between the keys and it'll be functionally almost like new. Still beat up on the outside, but fantastic shape inside. It took me almost that long just to put a new key into a 2000s Korg a couple years ago.

Relationship status: it's complicated.

I ordered an LP of the first Nadieh record last week. Regrets? Nope.

Beteen working at that record store and having had mostly musician and artists for friends since high school I've known a lot of nutters, so this is the sort of thing that I think about pretty regularly.

I think a more interesting discussion would be whether the audiophile industry is, in fact, exploiting people on the autism spectrum. When I was looking for one of the links I posted earlier I happened to also find out about sensory processing disorder, which I'd never heard of before somehow. From what I've read about it since, it's actually pretty common the most ambitious estimates are something like 20% of humans qualify for the label to some degree, although that seems absurdly high), and it's basically a neurological difference that makes some people much more acutely aware of subtle differences in sensory input, especially sound. Not, like, extra acute senses - everyone who doesn't have an actual sensory impairment can detect the same stimulus least a bit - just an extremely heightened neurological sensitivity to and awareness of it. There's a very high rate of comorbidity between SPD and autism spectrum disorders (those Polynesian navigators that people have been talking about lately, for example). There's also a very high comorbidity between autism spectrum disorders and OCD spectrum disorders. That seems like a perfect storm for selling people expensive snake oil. Anecdotally, I worked at a pretty serious used record shop for about 7 years and in my experience there at least, being an audiophile seemed to have a pretty high comorbidity with ASD. I don't know, I find stuff like that pretty interesting and this has also made me feel a bit more sympathetic to audiophiles and even less sympathetic to the companies that sell audiophile bullshit. I also found a link to an Amazon seller who was hawking $13,000 audiophile HDMI cables but f course I didn't bookmark it. EDIT: the HDMI cable might have been linked somewhere in the hundreds of comments on one of the articles I linked to the other day, actually, but I've got to get ready for work so I can't check now. It's worth trying to find, though. The comments on the Amazon item page were gold.

Hell, if I have a laptop in front of m when I'm listening to music on a stereo system, whether or not the lid is open has a bigger effect - actually it has a really big effect, the reflections from the back of the laptop screen really mess up the center of the stereo image, especially low mids. More than m3 does, mp3 mostly just kills transients. But hell, a couple months ago I had a spider plant above one of my speakers and one of the runners dropped down so it was hanging in front of the midrange driver, and that had as much of an effect on transients and high frequency response as I hear in a well compressed mp3 (except since it was only one speaker it also messed up the imaging and made all of the high frequency content sound like it was panned a bit to the opposite side). Which is to say, totally obvious if you're listening carefully but also so subtle that in practice it's irrelevant.

I promise I'll get to this! Medical thing seems to have been a false alarm thankfully, but I worked 6 days this week (today's the last one) not counting wrk I have to do from home tomorrow, and am generally burned out. But I have a short week next week so I'll be rested up and fresh on Monday or Wednesday. Your physical and mental state have a much bigger (real, researched and demonstrated although I'm not going to bother digging up citations) effect on how you perceive sound than mp3 compression does, so if I'm going to do this I want to be rested. That's also another reason why, on the listening end, these debates are pretty moot. Not getting enough sleep makes a bigger difference than good lossy compression does. Moving your head an inch to the right has a bigger effect than lossy compression.

The Mother32 is just what I needed e-mail, solidly built, very Moog-y sou ding, extremely easy to use without being too basic. I definitely wouldn't pay full price for one in 2018, but for the same price as that new Behringer I'm very happy, it does a lot less but does it really well.

I've been really enjoying Riviera, too. It's calculating impulse responses on the fly, so parameter changes take a second or two to actually kick in, but you can get some really bizarre sounding spaces out of it.

You and also use the action list to find shortcuts for anything that has one, and assign custom shortcuts to anything you want. So you could make the spacebar pause instead of stopping if that's more useful.

By default Reaper automatically resamples everything to the project sample rate (which defaults to your interface's current sample rate, but you can force it to a specific rate in the project settings) on the fly. I have no idea if you can turn that off, never tried. Drawing samples directly was a Sound Forge thing way back, and I think Steinberg eventually added it to all their stuff, too. Not sure about Reaper, since technically Reaper doesn't have any audio editor at all, you need an external one. A lot of other DAWs have a built in audio editor. I don't need to do that much anymore (I used to do entire crappy noise pieces just with the pencil tool in Sound Forge but these days the only time I really need that sort of editing is for getting rid of noises in spoken word stuff I'm editing for work, and the kind of work I'm doing doesn't pay enough or give long enough deadlines for that kind of editing to be an option, so I haven't done it in quite a few years)

Sundevstudio Voice Of Snow I've had this installed for ages and never actually tired it before today. Turns out it's really useful on individual tracks. Manages to make things sound much brighter and yet less harsh at the same time, which is not an easy task.

Last year I traded my old Realistic MG-1 to a friend for a Roland RS-09. Then he sold it and used the money to get a Mother 32. Then I moved in to the apartment above his and we started jamming together and he dove deep into Eurorack and is building a lot of modules now and pulled the Mother 32 out of his rack. And I'm probably going to buy it off him in a few weeks because I miss having the Moog ladder filter from the MG-1.

In the mean time here's an Ars Technica article that does a good job of summarizing the ramifications of the study I linked above, specifically relating them to the shortcomings of mp3 and other lossy algorithms that rely on assumptions about hearing derived from Fourier's research. https://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/human-hearing-beats-sounds-uncertainty-limit-makes-mp3s-sound-worse/

I'll read these posts later but I've got an unfolding family medical crisis (ironically it involves hearing) that just got more serious than I expected it to be, and I really have more important things to think about than tracks for an AB test on a message board. So if you want to upload some clips go for it, I'll AB them Wednesday, but after the last hour here I just don't have the energy to choose my own, and things won't be improving any time soon. EDIT: how about this: some tracks from Pauline Oliveros/Deep Listening Band's "The Readymade Boomerang" (I don't really care which), I think those would be really suitable for this kind of testing and I'm already pretty familiar with them. Maybe some kind of slickly produced 80s pop-classical like Penguin Cafe Orchestra or Michael Nyman would be good, I couldn't really name a particular piece by either of them I'd choose, I'm not really a big listener of either but I've heard them enough over the years to know their general production style. Maybe the soundtrack to The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover would be a good choice, particularly the more sparse tracks that are mainly voice. Most of my CDs have been packed away for years but I might be able to dig up the Oliveros album. But not any time soon.

then logically it would be easy to ABX, yet there are almost no examples of people successfully abxing high bitrate mp3s and other more modern codecs. so maybe the codec programmers know what they're doing after all? regarding the olveros example - imd distortion and aliasing artifacts (though less relevant here) do indeed exist, so what exactly is your point? The Oliveros thing was a tangent. All I know is in the ABX tests I've done, both self administered and administered by other people (although the only one I've had administered by another person was on ATRAC rather than mp3) there's a very characteristic softening of transients at frequency extremes in harmonically rich content (similar to the sound of a CD-R burned at high speed and played back on a CD player with poor error correction, which isn't really relevant today since everything has decent error correction now) that's easy to spot, and an overall loss of high frequencies, in lossy codecs in general. And usually I actually prefer it to the uncompressed audio. I've never really paid attention to the current state of lossy codec testing because for me mp3 is fine for sharing stuff and everything is available lossless now so for listening it doesn't really matter, get it lossless and encode your own mp3s for portable devices. I'd definitely be interested in seeing some results of properly administered ABX tests conducted recently by independent (not industry-funded) researchers. I'll think of some tracks at work today and post a list tonight or tomorrow.

Thanks, I remember them mentioning the specific frequencies when I studied this stuff in college but that was, shit, like 16 years ago at this point. I knew it was sub and super-sonic but the only thing I'd read recently was an interview with Oliveros where she talked in passing about the bias tone being one of the sources, which is something they didn't mention in school.

but you haven't done any proper ABX yet, so what exactly are you basing this on exactly? choose ANY track(s) you want and i'll chop you a 320mp3 and flac samples from them. I've done plenty of ABX tests over the years on this and other things, just not the one on that specific page you linked. I don't have anything to prove to myself here, and again I'm not an "audiophile" at all. If you choose and supply some stuff (if I'm going to do this I want to do it on your terms not mine, and that includes selecting and encoding, both to preserve the integrity of the whole thing and because I really don't feel like expending any effort on this). I'd rather do a forced AB test than an ABX since it's generally more accurate for these kind of things, but either way. I'll probably treat an ABX as forced AB anyhow. Regarding the psychoacoustics of lossy compression, we're talking about 25 year old technology based on 60+ year old research and aimed at getting acceptable sound quality at file sizes that are friendly to dial up networks, and it did that. Even expecting it to be inaudible doesn't make sense. And again, the linear mathematical models it was based on are old and flawed. The time and frequency domain resolution of human hearing is far more sensitive than the mathematical models and lab research from the 1940s and 50s that people are still basing their assumptions about human hearing on could capture. Of course things that are "inaudible" affect what we can hear, that's basic acoustics. Whether it matters is more a matter of personal taste. For me it doesn't most of the time. Here's an example - not quite analogous to the mp3 question but relevant: Did you hear that? The sound sources Oliveros used were all well above 20kHz. I don't know the exact frequencies involved but I know a lot of it was created by tuning sine oscillators so that they beat against the bias tones in the tape machines she was using, which would put things in the 120kHz to 140kHz range. I of IV and her other pieces from that period are a great example of the fact that, yes, even sounds that in this case were 5x - 6x higher than the theoretical limits of human hearing produce plenty of content in the audible range when they interact. It's not rocket science. Whether it's musically relevant is, again, a matter of taste and for me personally it's not a huge deal. Anyhow, post some clips here and I'll have time later in the week to AB them and post results. Maybe I won't hear a difference after all!