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.
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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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.