ndguardian

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Full disclosure: Haven't read the article yet.

Working in corporate IT, this most likely is targeted toward enterprise customers who either take a long time to roll out OS upgrades or can't due to technical limitations within their environment. In those cases, paying the cost of extended support is more palatable to troubleshooting or rushing mass OS upgrades. This is a fairly common practice with enterprise software vendors.

Edit: Okay, just skimmed it. Looks like this is actually a new program for non-enterprise consumers, which is interesting. First I've heard of that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

I watched it all the way through since I'm a Halo fan, but I'll wait and see what people say about season 2. On its own, season 1 was...fine. I think if they didn't have any references to Halo and called it something else, basically left it intact but not Halo, people probably would have said it's okay. Not great, but okay. It definitely doesn't feel like Halo though, and so much of the show conflicts with established Halo lore.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Agreed, I think this is what is being suggested.

 

Howdy!

So I recently got a hold of a Criter and Guitari Organelle M and just got myself set up to write up custom patches on it, and I'm looking for inspiration on a simple patch to make on it.

For those that don't know what an Organelle is, the synopsis is that it's a Raspberry Pi-based musical computer that you can custom program your own patches on. These patches can be anything from synthesizers, samplers, sequencers, effects...really whatever you want to make musically.

Anyway, I'm just about done working through some tutorials to get a better handle on how that all works, and I'm interested in potentially simple patch ideas to build. Anyone have any thoughts on a simple synth concept or something like that I should try to make?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I am just now starting through Fallout 4. I’ve had it in my library for a while but never got around to it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I’m not sure that this is a “game” idea so much, but I’ve had this idea I haven’t been able to wrap my head around the implementation of.

Think a digital audio workstation such as Ableton Live or Logic, but gamified. Complete various musical objectives to pass levels, have a creative mode for just making music and maybe even a multiplayer mode for collaborative or competitive music making.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I tend to go back and forth between Go and Python. Typically for work stuff I am writing AWS automation utilities though so I'll opt for Python because Boto3 is lovely. Go is typically for my personal projects.

I've also been itching to try my hand at Rust, but haven't brought myself to start yet.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

My SO just had something similar pop up yesterday. She was running into weird errors on her Chromebook, so I had her change her user agent to Chrome on Windows. Everything magically worked. Hmm…

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The Tracker is a hardware groovebox using the old school tracker workflow. Not for everyone, but it’s a nice piece of gear for making music without a computer.

 

I'm not affiliated in any way with Polyend, but on Polyend's official Reverb (and I think some resellers as well) they're selling new Trackers for $359/€399. If you have any plans to buy one, now would be a pretty good time. I just pulled the trigger on one myself.

Per the email from them, the sale goes until September 4th or while supplies last. Also I confirmed as I was typing this, but that price does seem to be reflected with at least Sweetwater and Zzounds. Can't speak for others yet.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Apologies in advance for the novel!

I'm a little late to the party here, but here is my story. Nothing too glamorous, and admittedly I'm still very much an amateur.

In high school, I wanted to be in band. Always loved music, loved listening to it and wanted to make it. Unfortunately I came from a pretty poor household and we couldn't afford an instrument.

Five years ago (wow, it's already been five years?!) I decided "hey I'm making decent money now, maybe it's time to learn to play something." So I went to my local music store knowing NOTHING about how to actually play an instrument. But I decided to walk around and see if something called out to me.

I walk by the keyboards section, which is having a pretty slow day, and one of the guys there is just rocking out on this Korg Minilogue. It sounded phenomenal, and I just knew the synthesizer was for me. Admittedly up until that point, if you happened to ask me what a synthesizer was, I would have just said something like "it's a fancy electric piano." Yeah...real informed decision there. But I left with a lighter wallet and a brand new synthesizer.

Well, having a synthesizer is nice, but it's not conducive to making a full song, especially if you know little about making music, but at this point I am just devouring all of the synth YouTube content I can find, and stumble onto the wonderful world of grooveboxes.

"Wow, I can make full songs on a little box that I can just take with me? Sign me up!" Now, in case you don't know, my background is in tech. As such this scratched two itches for me, which are my love of music and my equally strong love of gadgets and gizmos. I may or may not occasionally be referred to as the little mermaid by my friends.

So I went down that rabbit hole. Mind you, at this point I still BARELY know anything about actually making music, and do I really have to learn about chords and scales? Where's the fun in that. So I took the "more dollars than sense" approach and tried to supplement my lack of skill with more gear. Spoiler alert: it didn't work.

Eventually I decided "I've got way too much gear and nothing to really show for it, and that needs to change." I went through all my gear and decided "this fills a practical use case, and this does not," and sold anything in the latter category. It was a huge relief.

Around that time I also ended up signing up for a couple online courses on music production, like Andrew Huang's on that site that used to be called Monthly. It wasn't bad...helped me get a better idea of how to think about music production overall, and I finally forced myself to put out my first track. It wasn't particularly good, and I've only officially released one song since then, but I'm still slightly proud of it.

Since then I've only ever officially released one other track and have worked on others off and on. I have no visions of making a career out of it, but I enjoy having fun and just noodling something out. Maybe I'll release more, maybe not, but at the end of the day I'm at a point where I enjoy what I'm doing with it all.

In regard to what made it all click for me - I naturally fell into the technical aspects of it (like how MIDI works, how to use a mixer, etc), due to the fact that I troubleshoot tech for a living and that felt like an extension. As for the more musical parts, I think what really did it for me was learning that musical inspiration is exactly that - inspiration. It doesn't have to follow a specific formula. You can start from complete randomness, and if you like it, great. If you don't, you can always build up from there or start again.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I’m lucky in that my employer went the opposite direction. Downsizing our local office and just letting us all be 100% remote. We’re a geographically distributed group so it doesn’t make sense to enforce office requirements.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Wait. I can automate my meetings too? I dig it.

 

Howdy!

I've got a question that isn't explicitly music production oriented, but it seemed the most relevant. All my music is completely vocals-lacking so I've always shunned a mic, but now I'm working on a series of tutorial videos. Given the target audience is musicians, I want to get the audio right, and that includes my talking.

I was dabbling in mics and I've landed on the Rode Procaster as overall it seems to offer the best sound for my purposes and seemed to play the best with my room acoustics so far. My problem now though is that I do still get a little (tiny, maybe imperceptibly to everyone but me) echo in my recordings, and I know that is easier to clean up before it gets into the recording.

The room I'm in is an apartment bedroom (well technically it's set up as an office, but I digress) about 10'x10' in dimensions. I have desks and a bookshelf in there, but otherwise the walls are fairly bare. Given it's an apartment I can't really glue stuff to the walls.

What would be some suggestions for addressing this? Right now I'm considering either putting some foam up using some thumb tacks, or just cleaning it up in post using RX9 since I have that available too. Thoughts?

If it would help, I can cough up some recordings for reference.

Thanks in advance!

 

Or don't. You do you. But they are both sweet and affectionate and would love to snuggle you and eat your food.

Eevee is the kitten, and is my SO's snuggle buddy. Link is the big guy and is my tiny furry overlord, who dictates my snuggle schedule and bed time.

PS: I know cats in boxes and bags are in right now, but meh.

 

Hey there!

So I’ve had a migraine that has been going for a couple days now. Nothing entirely new, but it’s frustrating. Dark room, low noise, tried sleeping it off, taken multiple medications for it including my Ubrelvy which normally knocks it. It took the edge off, but now I’m going on day 3 with the migraine with no perceivable end in sight.

Anyone got any tips that normally helps them to knock their migraine that’s worth considering? Normally I don’t care too much as I’ve put up with them for years, but this one has me all nauseous which makes it that much more miserable.

Thanks in advance!

Edit: Sorry for not seeing the responses on this sooner. I went back to bed afterward and mostly stayed in bed and holy crap the responses blew up. I also called my neurologist and told them about it much like some of the advise that others have mentioned, and they started me on a round of prednisone to help. Fingers crossed it gets rid of it. Seems to be helping, but only time will tell. If it doesn't, I'll see about giving some of these a try. Thank you so much!

 

I know this isn't strictly music production related, but it might be a good way to share what we make with the rest of the fediverse. If people don't think this belongs here, let me know and I can delete the cross-post.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/2650755

We Distribute is bringing in a new feature - The Mixtape! We create playlists of songs that broadcast through Radio Free Fedi, and share it with the wider fediverse. It's an opportunity for people to discover music by Fedizens, and help support artists on the network.

Our first playlist is themed around hot summer vibes.

 

So I am an absolute sucker for that synthy stringy goodness, and a Streichfett is really sounding like it will scratch that itch for me. Before I pull the trigger on one though, is there anything else that I should consider too? I'm hoping to keep with a smaller footprint but I'm happy to consider all options.

 

Hey there!

A while back, I had created this solution for creating a custom Geofence using IFTTT for my Wyze camera. This allows for multiple users to control the state of the camera based on whether anyone is home or not. It was originally posted to Reddit, but given all the Reddit shenanigans as of late, I pulled my posts and comments from there. I figure I should move this here.

I'll go ahead and post the solution here too to hopefully make it more readable than the gist.

----- Original text -----

Alright, got this written up. Hopefully this helps! If something is wrong or you have any questions, let me know.

It`s 1AM here so I kept it brief near the end, but I can add more details as needed later. I need to get to bed.

To create a geofence using IFTTT, there are a few things you will need. You will need a Google Sheet per person, a Google App Script and an IFTTT Pro subscription. Everyone using the geofence will need the IFTTT app installed on their phone to update accordingly.

One person, presumably the person who will “own” the geofence, will need to make a Google Sheet. In column A, you will put the name of the person a value will correspond with. Start with row 1. Put the owner’s name. In column B, put the value of TRUE or FALSE. This will be updated later by IFTTT.

In column D, row 1, put something like “Anyone Home?” - This is just to let you know what the value in Column E represents.

In column E, row 1, put the following function:

=OR(B:B)

This will check if any value in column B equals TRUE.

Every other person who is part of the geofence will need to create a separate Google Sheet (annoying, I know). In A1, that person should go ahead and set the value to TRUE or FALSE. Doesn’t matter which one right now, as it will also be updated by IFTTT. Then share the sheet with the geofence owner.

For each person, in the owner’s sheet in column A put the name of the person, and for column B, put the following function, replacing [URL] with the URL for the shared sheet.

=IMPORTRANGE(“[URL]”, “A1")

Upon entering the function and pressing enter, the value should resolve to the value from the shared spreadsheet. At this point, you are done with the owner’s sheet itself, but don’t navigate away from the spreadsheet itself yet. You have one more thing to do, which is to set up the Google App Script.

You see, by default the IMPORTRANGE function in Google Sheets only updates when the spreadsheet is open in a browser or app. This is not good for automation tasks, so we need to force refresh the spreadsheet. On the Google Sheets page, click Tools > Script Editor. This will create a Google App Script linked to the owner’s Google Sheet. For the code, enter the following below.

function refresh() { SpreadsheetApp.flush()}

And then click Save. In the upper right hand corner, click the blue Deploy button.

On the left side of the screen, click the clock icon, and then click the Add Trigger button in the lower right hand corner. You should now have a prompt for your trigger. For the following options, set the values below.

Function to run: refresh Which deployment should run: Head Event source: Time-driven Type of time based trigger: Minutes timer Select minute interval: Every 5 minutes (can tweak as needed) Click Save

You are now done with the spreadsheet portion. For the future, you will only need to have new people create a new sheet, share it and add a new row in for the person in question.

Now to IFTTT. If the owner doesn’t have a pro subscription, you will need it now.

You will need to create two applets via a web browser.

Create two applets as described below. Let’s start with the function to turn the camera off.

For the IF section, select Google Sheets. If you haven’t already, you should be prompted to connect to your Google Account. Go ahead and do this.

Select the option under Google Sheets for “Cell updated in spreadsheet.”In the URL section, enter the URL for the primary spreadsheet with everyone’s records. In which cell to monitor, enter E1.

For the “Then that” section select the Wyze service. If you haven’t done so already, link the Wyze service. Then select the “Turn off device” section, and select the device in question. In my case, a Wyze cam. Then add the action.

You will need to add a filter code section, and include the following code in it.

if(GoogleSheets.cellUpdatedInSpreadsheet.Value.toLowerCase() === 'false'){ Wyzecam.turnOffDevice.skip();}

Then save. Repeat the same process for turning the camera on, with two major differences. Instead of using the turn off device option, use the turn on device option. And instead of the code above, use this code.

if(GoogleSheets.cellUpdatedInSpreadsheet.Value.toLowerCase() === 'true'){ Wyzecam.turnOffDevice.skip();}

Now you are done with IFTTT in the browser. Get the IFTTT app installed on your phone and wrap this up. These steps are slightly different between iOS and Android, based on my own experience. With Android, location-based applets tend to be unreliable so we go based off of wifi connections at home, while with iOS location is reliable but wifi is not an option.

Additionally, the steps are slightly different with the owner vs shared spreadsheets, but only in the cell referenced. Shared spreadsheets will use the cell A1 while the primary spreadsheet will use the cell B1.

For each person in their IFTTT app, they will need two applets. One will be to update their spreadsheet when they leave home, and the other to update the spreadsheet when the return home.

For the first one, create a new applet, using the appropriate “if” option as mentioned above. If using WiFi as the trigger, enter the name of your WiFi connection. If using location, set the location for home. For arriving at home, use connect to wifi or entered a location, and the opposite for leaving home.

For the “then” option, select Google Sheets, and then select “Update Cell in Spreadsheet”, linking the appropriate Google account if needed.

Set the drive folder path if the spreadsheet is located in a folder in Drive. If it is not located in a folder, leave this blank. Set the spreadsheet name for the spreadsheet, matching case. For the cell, select the cell per my comment above.

Assuming the first applet is to mark that you are away, set the Value option to FALSE.

For the second applet, repeat the same steps, setting the Value option to TRUE.

Do that on each device, and you should be done!

 

So this is a very early song that popped into my head that right now I'm simply calling "Forest Night Theme" because it makes me think of a child walking through a forest alone at night. Calm and peaceful, but also with a slight apprehension as to what else could be lurking in the forest.

Anything you all think it might absolutely benefit from, or anything that just should be dramatically changed? I know in its current state it's rather boring since most of the parts are static...planning on spicing things up once I have a good skeleton to hang everything else off of.

 

I'm a fan of grooveboxes and other do-it-all gear. It gets me away from the computer and lets me focus on just making music, and typically there's some kind of limitation to force creativity.

Here's what I've got.

  • Roland Verselab MV-1
  • Akai Force
  • Synthstrom Deluge
  • Sonicware SmplTrek
  • Roland SH-4d (though I technically use this one solely as a synth module, but still)

Bonus points if you've got tracks you want to share! Like I made this track on a Maschine+ and then mixed in post in Logic. https://soundcloud.com/ndguardian/dreams-of-loss

 

@Beto - feel free to remove this if you feel like it doesn't belong.

Also full disclosure, I am in no way affiliated with this app other than I just discovered it.

Anyway I was looking around for mobile Lemmy clients since mobile is how I always interacted with Reddit. Seems like it's slim pickings for now for fairly obvious reasons, but I stumbled onto Mlem. It's pretty bare bones at the moment, but it seems to have the core feature set. It also looks pretty nice. If you're on iOS and are looking for a mobile Lemmy client, it may be worthwhile to check it out.

2
Intro? (lemmy.studio)
 

Well, guess it's time to introduce myself. I'm ndguardian, a tech guy by day, (very amateur) music producer by night and gamer the rest of the time. Based out of the midwest US. On that note, technically wouldn't I be more mideast? Definitely more on the eastern half of the US, but whatever.

I don't really have a formal music background...I was in show choir in high school, then as of a few years ago decided to get into synthesizers and grooveboxes. I don't release a ton of stuff, though technically I do have two tracks on Soundcloud. I'll link that at the end in case you care to check it out.

I like to think I have a fairly mixed taste in music, with my preferences ranging from Ozzy Osbourne to Hans Zimmer. As for my music production preferences though, I tend to steer more toward ambient and soundtrack-esque music.

Anyway, feel free to hit me up if you have questions or just want to chat.

My Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/ndguardian

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