Great swathes of adult nations vote for and tolerate idiocracy writ large, whilst young people are trying something, anything, in a strange new society. I can't always agree so I stop and think more, if it's not already too late.
I work professionally with music, including using ableton. I do create but don't sell/adverise, I'm strictly 'backstage'. I love everything about creating music, less so for reading about music (reviews, critiques, dissecting) though there are occasional exceptions. Are you putting your creativity online publicly?
Do you put yours online? I enjoy listening to other musicians. People give soundcloud a lot of grief but I love the service and the musicians I have met there.
Thank you. Your music is enjoyable, I listened to a couple (twice, first track and the fast one) and skimmed (four times) through others (my listening time is packed). Each piece has a filmic quality. The most impressive part is that they are (more of less) finished, which is a feat in itself. Very good.
I am very backstage, I don't wish to be known professionally, except by clients, all of which came via word of mouth - I wouldn't know how to advertise and I'd probably mess it up/give the wrong impression/attract the 'wrong' clients.
I won't link here but I do use soundcloud, I would say it's just ok. Tend to go Faircamp, bandcamp, geocities. MySpace lost 12 tunes.
I'll make a note of our exchange and if I change my mind I'll let you know. Some of my music is not dissimilar to yours, which is often the case, and not a bad thing - like you, it's the act of creation that brings immense pleasure. Thanks again for sharing I enjoyed listening.
Thanks for listening. Feel free to reach out if you ever want to share. I create music strictly for my own enjoyment so I understand where you are coming from. Take care!
I too am holding back on ios18. One of the weekly calls I get from a non tech friend (actually that's unfair, they're just scared to change settings in case something breaks) wanted to know how I made the timelapse video I'd just sent. I dutifully explained what to tap and how to get to it but to no avail - such is said abomination of the ios26 camera app.
Who decides the 'nature' of the content? Who decides what constitutes age appropriate?
These questions of liberty are as old as the hills. And the keepers of the internet and virtually every single government past and present have repeatedly and endlessly shown themselves to be lying, conniving, self interested parties. When will 'we' ever learn?
The so-called "Dynamic Island" on iPhones I already find obtrusive. So-called "Liquid glass" is an abomination to many. The "notch", round corners, and now a dirty screen - this is awful news for creatives, whose clients already finger the screen like it wasn't important.
>do you regenerate waveforms on the fly to be accurate, or just use a GUI-only scaling of an existing waveform, to display things during the editing operation
just use GUI scaling, and only IF the prior is too challenging
You often want sample accurate waveform visualization when tuning samples that are time or pitch warped to set start and loop points at zero crossings to avoid clicks without needing fades.
Overwhelmingly, there's no such thing as a zero crossing. Your closest real world case is a point in time (between samples) where the previous sample is positive and next one is negative (or vice versa). However, by truncating the next sample to zero, you create distortion (and if the absolute value of the preceding sample is large, very significant distortion.
Zero crossings were an early myth in digital audio promulgated by people who didn't know enough.
Fades are always the best solution in terms of limiting distortion (though even then, they can fail in pathological situations).
There's definitely such thing as a zero crossing, it's where sign(x[n-1]) != sign(x[n]) (or rather, there's "no such thing as a zero crossing" in the same way there's no such thing as a peak). Picking a suitable `n` as a start/end point for sample editing is a judgement call, because what you're trying to minimize is the difference between two samples since it's conceptually a unit impulse in the sequence.
I don't think people who talk about zero crossings were totally misguided. It's a legitimate technique for picking start/end points of your samples and tracks. Even as a first step before BLEP or fades.
Theoretically, it makes sense (go look at any of the diagrams of what a "zero crossing" is online, and it totally does.
The problem is that sign(x[n-1]) != sign(x[n]) describes a place where two successive samples differ in sign, but no sample is actually has a value of zero. Thus, to perform an edit there, if your goal is to avoid a click by truncating with a non-zero sample value, you need to add/assign a value of zero to a sample. This introduces distortion - you are artifically changing the shape of the waveform, which implies the introduction of all kinds of frequency artifacts.
Zero crossings are not computed by finding a minimum between two consecutive samples - that would almost never involve a sign change. And if they are computed by finding the minimum between two consecutive samples that also involves a sign change, there's a very good chance that you'll be long way from your desired cut point, even if you ignore the distortion issue.
It really was a completely misguided idea. If the situation was:
sign(x[n-2) != sign(x[n]) && x[n-1] == 0
then it would be great. But this essentially never happens in real audio.
> Thus, to perform an edit there, if your goal is to avoid a click by truncating with a non-zero sample value, you need to add/assign a value of zero to a sample.
No, you (the editor, not an algorithm) look at the waveform and see where the amplitude begins to significantly oscillate and place the edit at a reasonable point, like where the signal is near the noise floor and at a point where it crosses zero. There's no zero stuffing.
This kind of thing isn't computed, a human being is looking at the waveform and listening back to choose where to drop the edit point. You don't always get it pop-free but it's much better than an arbitrary point as the sample is rising.
I mean, you could use an algorithm for this. It would be a pair of averaging filters with like a VAD, but with lookahead, picking an arbitrary point some position before activity is detected (peak - noise_floor > threshold)) which could be where avg(x[n-N..n]) ~= noise_floor && sign(x[n]) != (sign(x[n-1]).
> You don't always get it pop-free but it's much better than an arbitrary point as the sample is rising.
I agree with this, but that doesn't invalidate anything I've said. When you or a bit of software decide to make the cut at x[n], you are faced with the near certainty that the x[n] != 0. If you set it (or x[n+1]) to zero, you add distortion; if you don't, the risk of a pop is significant.
By contrast, if you apply a fade, the risk of getting a pop is negligible and you can make the cut anywhere you want without paying attention to 1 sample-per-pixel or finer zoom level and the details of the waveform.
Thanks very much, this sub-thread has been illuminating for me, and has the compelling quality of being obvious-in-retrospect. I now wonder what my MPC is doing, exactly, when I make an action at what appears to be a zero point. Thanks.
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