Ryanmf

I love that Thom and Nigel continue to experiment in this space, and having been previously unfamiliar with Bundle I was pleasantly surprised to see that several of my favorite artists/labels have released material via this channel in recent months.

But I'm not sure if I really see the benefit of this (for artists or listeners) over e.g. Bandcamp, and the more I dig into BT's messaging about Bundle[0] the less I feel I understand about the overall strategy.

[0]http://blog.bittorrent.com/2014/06/16/bittorrent-bundle-hits...

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

Elsewhere in the comments someone claims to have found his Facebook profile, and perhaps they did. But as a counterpoint, my hometown of Glendale (Northeast LA-adjacent) has the largest population of Armenians anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. Lots of Armenians == Lots of guys named Armon/Armen/Arman. We can safely assume at least two of them drive for Uber.

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

Just yesterday I was investigating music/production startups, and one of the few ideas I came across that seemed halfway-interesting was Splice[0]. On the producer side they have plugins for a few DAWs that enable easier collaboration and version tracking and so forth. But what comes of that (and why it's relevant to your comment) is a Soundcloud-ish embeddable web player that breaks out all the tracks/stems into a timeline beneath the main player interface.

It's pretty interesting, although I don't know how much of an opportunity is there, for some of the same reasons mentioned in the other replies. Musicians and producers can be incredibly reticent about this stuff.

[0]http://splice.com

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

I love Mutable Instruments so very much.

And somehow I'd missed the SP LXR, thanks for the link.

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

I sort of agree.

On one hand, if you have no use for CV i/o aleph is basically a non-starter. Additionally, there are other CV solutions e.g. Expert Sleepers or the Kenton MIDI > CV boxes that get the job done a lot cheaper.

As you note, a substitute (of sorts) for anything they make can be had cheaper. Brian & Kelly et. al. have never been a concern oriented towards being the budget provider of anything, as they readily admit:

"monome is operated on a human scale. we use local suppliers and manufacturers with whom we've created long-term, trusting relationships. environmental and economic sustainability are critical considerations in our design process. we believe in beautiful design and quality craftsmanship. editions are produced in short runs according to demand. staying small affords the flexibility to pursue interesting new directions, not simply commodify established trends."

There is something to be said for the blank slate, raw unadulterated OSC, it only does exactly what you tell it to do design ethos. When I bought a monome I had never seen or used anything like it before. Though it should be noted that I sold my monome and kept my Launchpad, at least in part because the monome could be sold for exactly what I bought it for, and I'd be lucky to get $100 for Novation's hunk of molded plastic.

However, $1400 doesn't get you very far in Euro (especially if we're including the aforementioned ES modules to emulate aleph's USB>CV capabilities). One sound source, an EG and a filter? Maybe an additional source of modulation if you budget well? Not to mention power, rails and cases, cables and other accessories, etc. Ultimately, I defy anyone to find anyone with any experience in the matter who doesn't think modular synths are a money pit.

For that matter, Reaktor is basically just a springboard to spend more money on more Reaktor ensembles—largely because there are some teams doing really great stuff for that platform—and Max, plus an audio interface, plus a cheap plastic box of knobs and faders leaves you maybe $700 to buy a computer? It's not as if aleph is way out of line with the alternatives on price.

Where it does stand alone, and the reason I find it compelling, is that aleph is the first all-in-one box I'm aware of that offers the sound/data processing and marshaling capabilities of a computer without the "dude checking his email on stage" aspects of a laptop. That's something that I believe people have been awaiting anxiously, and although it's far from perfect, it's a start.

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

The Soundplane from Madrona Labs[0] certainly merits a mention here. Pairs exceptionally well with their software synths Kaivo (physical modeling and granular synthesis) and Aalto (the closest thing to a Buchla in VST form).

I kind of assume at this point that most people who have an interest in this sort of thing know about monome[1], though I was surprised that there hasn't been more interest from HN in their most recent release, aleph[2], a (mostly) open source sound computer that can interface with just about anything that produces sound, cv, or bits.

[0] http://madronalabs.com/

[1] http://monome.org

[2] http://monome.org/aleph/

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

Apparently they've had similar issues on Mixcloud:

https://twitter.com/J0EKAY/status/484097294598275072

And even if hip hop/trap/neo-soul/etc aren't your style, if you're into any electronic music at all there's probably something for you on Rinse.fm (unfortunately they're more an internet radio station than a platform like Soundcloud, not exactly apples to apples from a user perspective).

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

It's been really interesting over the last 24 hours or so to watch the reaction from Joe Kay[0], whose label/collective Soulection[1] has shared hundreds of hours of mixes and dozens of original tracks and remixes on Soundcloud[2], and to an extent (at least initially) built their following on the site (not to take anything away from the impact performances, etc. have had on their growing popularity), but were always at high risk of this sort of takedown due to remixes of popular rap/r&b tracks.

One of my initial takeaways from this development is that while Soulection may not have come to exist without Soundcloud, the "next Soulection" will almost certainly take root anywhere but Soundcloud.

It's a shame.

[0] https://twitter.com/J0EKAY

[1] http://soulection.com

[2] https://soundcloud.com/soulection

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

I submitted a two point critique via the Uservoice widget, one was merely a UI issue, another I feel might be worthy of a wider discussion.

I was excited to see this posted, and hoped it would be what I had been looking for. My friends and I had not yet found a suitable World Cup prediction competition site.

I immediately signed up, and was ready to send off some invites, when I found that Scoragora wanted me to predict a score for each of the 48 matches in group play, a fairly tedious exercise. Further, upon completion, it is completely unclear whether the game will be calculating winners and runners-up from the groups automatically, whether there will be an opportunity to pick winners in the knockout rounds—basically everything after group play is a mystery.

Suffice to say this is not what I expected. I can understand some need for score predictions—most likely in the later rounds for tie-breaking purposes (perhaps the best way to handle this is to ask users to predict the cumulative goal differential of the winning side). But score predictions ultimately aren't the core functionality of a game like this. If I predict that Brazil will defeat Mexico 4-0, and my friend predicts that Brazil will win 4-1, I don't really care who was right about the score, we both rightly acknowledged that Mexico is a shambles at the moment (poor Chicharito—he's only 26!) and that Brazil ought to win.

The functionality I expect to see front-and-center is, simply put, predictions about who wins each match through the final. I truly can't tell whether that functionality exists in Scoragora right now, and I don't really care to predict 96 scores for the privilege of finding out. Moreover, I'm the geek in my group of friends, there's at least some chance I might fill out the entire prediction form to satiate my curiosity about how you've constructed this web app, but I'm certain none of my friends will have the patience to do so, so I won't be inviting them, and we'll conduct our competition elsewhere.

UPDATE: I've just tried out Yahoo's game, and theirs is structured almost identically (though a bit prettier), so maybe my expectations are out of line? I don't understand why the game basically resets when the knockout rounds begin. If i predict that Spain and Chile will get out of their group, and a friend predicts Spain and the Netherlands, and another predicts the Netherlands and Chile, there should be some benefit for the one made the correct prediction and some penalty for the two who didn't.

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

  "The ruling confirms the need to bring today's data
  protection rules from the 'digital stone age' into
  today's modern computing world where data is no longer
  stored on 'a server', or once launched online disappears
  in cyberspace"

— European Commission vice-president Viviane Reding ("who has led the EU's data privacy efforts")

What—and I'm asking in earnest—is that quote even supposed to mean?

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

  shitty.enterprises
  butt.construction
  wank.academy
  bum.careers

So this might be my new favorite website. (also, Andrew WK oughtta register party.institute)

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

OP: Did your analysis of MF DOOM include his work alongside Madlib as Madvillian or his various other pseudonyms (King Geedorah, Viktor Vaughn, etc.)?

I find it a little hard to believe he's not at least in the Wu Tang/Canibus/KK cluster, if not #1 overall.

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

This turned out to be a bit more credible than I expected, though I'm surprised to see Shure rated higher than Grado.

Moepstar is right, Beyerdynamics should absolutely be on the list, and given the success of the TMA-1 Aiaiai should be as well. Also, Audio Technica may have produced some cheap crap in the past, but they should be at least one category higher based merely on the strength of the ATH-50.

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

I'd like to hear more about this, any links you can recommend?

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

W. David Marx has been doing wonderful analysis of Japan and this phenomenon of trend adoption/synthesis/evolution—specifically with regard to fashion but he's covered many other topics as well—at http://neojaponisme.com for years now.

Don't lose your weekend to the archive. Or, you know, do.

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

Miles looked down the business end of a trumpet, and I'm an idiot.

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

This isn't exactly a revolutionary concept. Onyx Ashanti[0][1][2] has built an entire performance around it (literally, the the whole system is custom built). And on a sort of parallel track, nerds like Herrmutt Lobby and DZA have done some really remarkable things pushing the boundaries of what can be done with off the shelf MIDI gear[3] as well as with game controllers[4].

Perhaps Mi.Mu will be the best execution of a MIDI/OSC glove to date—it will probably have to be if it's going to make it on stage with performers like Imogen Heap and Tim Exile.

I will say, sometimes an encoder is exactly what you need. Other times what you need is a long throw fader (to say nothing of the very particular engineering of crossfaders for scratch DJs). I hope designers and engineers continue to experiment in this space, but not every conventional interface needs 'disrupting', and they certainly don't all need to be made wireless. I always feel a bit annoyed when these developments are framed as a breaking down of walls between performer and audience, a paradigm shift away from the dark ages of electronic musicians hunched over banks of knobs and 'checking their email'.

It's a cliché, and I'm not even sure it maps to reality all that well. I'm fairly certain Miles Davis spent the majority of his time on stage looking at piano keys. And if not there, at his collaborators. Maybe occasionally a glance towards the audience. Maybe. Stevie Wonder never looked at anybody. It never mattered, because that was never the point.

[0]http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/11/way-out-from-behind-th...

[1]http://createdigitalmusic.com/2012/10/open-source-music-berl...

[2]http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/04/fractals-bots-nodes-an...

[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zN7Pjwjcp0

[4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQaMW_5oxyg

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

This episode of Frontline[0] from January aired for the first time (I think, DVR marked it as new) on KQED in the Bay Area this week. It profiles several defectors, as well as the editor of Asia Press[1] and is certainly worth an hour of your time.

[0] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/secret-state-of-nort...

[1] http://www.asiapress.org/rimjingang/english/

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

I don't know about 'discounting' but John wasn't composed until well after virtually anyone who might have encountered Jesus personally was already dead, near the end of the first century AD. Not exactly the type of source that can be relied upon for accurate, direct quotes.

Ryanmf

12년 전discuss

It occurs to me that x-sharing startups in the mold of Airbnb/Uber may be most likely to overcome their regulatory challenges not through litigation or lobbying, but simply due to more of them popping up and the increased likelihood that the average person knows someone who has benefitted ("my friend's daughter who paid her way through law school driving for Uber", "my cousin the line cook who was offered the opportunity of a pop-up run at an established restaurant after a few successful months on Cozymeal", etc.)

Also, I wonder if Cozymeal might find opportunities on the operations/materials side of this equation. I know that e.g. sourcing and selecting ingredients is frequently a very personal experience for chefs and restauranteurs, but I can't help but think there could be some upside to facilitating volume pricing of certain ingredients for members within a particular region, not unlike how members of hobbyist electronics groups will organize group buys of components. If ingredients are a bridge too far, they might apply the same logic to more practical items—flatware, napkins, menus, and so forth.

Submissions

Amazon has finally cracked the kid tablet code

The new Kindle Voyage e-reader is shockingly good

Aleph, from monome: Programmable Sound Computer That Does Anything

When Steve Jobs was my age, he made mistakes…

The Oxymoronic Citizen Journalism

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