Logitech are my go-to example of a company that does the right thing and deserves recognition for it. They kept their squeezebox.com servers going for a decade after they discontinued their Squeezebox hardware audio players. At the same time, they funded a maintainer to keep improving the open source server software that users can self-host on multiple platforms (Linux, Windows, macOS, Raspberry Pi). Two years ago, they finally shut down the squeezebox.com servers that they were running but the server software is still being actively maintained: https://lyrion.org/
That's nice of them! Too bad they don't offer repair for other speaker systems that are out of warranty, nor do they sell components for other repair shops to fix speakers that are out of warranty.
I’m fairly certain that the “odd” behaviour is that of the extremists who hijacked the original concept to promote the idea that being fat is good.
I’d consider calling it “odd” to be an understatement. I always thought such extreme positions were a bizarre denial of the negative impacts that obesity can have on personal well-being and quality of life. Having said that, I only ever encountered such views on the Internet; never in real life.
As a life-long hater of ads (before the Internet, I would mute the TV during ad breaks), I must agree. Before AdSense, animated GIFs for advertising were obnoxious. When the “Don’t be evil” Google started doing advertising, I was so impressed with them. Even their advertising is tasteful - and relevant! They really seemed to have the Midas touch.
But I feel that their choice of advertising revenue as their predominant income stream set them on a trajectory that gradually and inexorably led them further away from their original principles.
A friend’s daughter (young adult) told me about five years ago that cassette tapes are “cool” again. I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music. I still have the cassette deck that I bought in the 90s for my hi-fi separate system but I haven’t listened to it in years. In the mid-2000s, I gave away most of my cassettes to a friend who had bought an old car that only had a tape deck. I only held on to recordings that were only released on cassette: demo tapes, bootlegs of live concerts that I had attended and some DIY releases from 90s’ punk bands that didn’t have (nor want) a record label.
Good cassettes played with a good tape deck are actually really good for music. It naturally saturates and compresses the audio material which often leads to much more homogeneous musical experience. Also the frequency spectrum tends to soften too harsh recordings, which is also cool. It all depends on the genre of course. The typical high resolution classic concert is probably better to be listened from HQ flac or whatever.
Back in the days the only way poor bands could achieve some sort of release was on cassette, paired with car radios and kitchen players this for sure wasn't the best experience to listen to music. And unfortunately many professional tape productions weren't that great either. But this was a management and production problem.
Yeah, it’s wild to me too, but I then remember purposely obtaining an eight track player in the 90s. My daughter has taken to vinyl for a time and now has a discman and it seems like a push back against the Illusion of Choice that music streaming “provides”.
That and she’s clearly genetically predisposed to hipsterism.
> I was surprised because I always considered them to be the worst physical medium for music.
That's a big part of why they're cool.
Imperfection is beautiful. We feel this intuitively when it comes to loving someone, or when it comes to impressionistic art. It really is the same thing with music.
I believe the typical response is that you can simulate that imperfection on digital media... but cassette lovers would argue this is tantamount to putting a photograph through a 'Da Vinci' filter in Photoshop. It's missing the point. There's more to music than what it sounds like. Where it came from, what you did to play it, these are all part of the experience. The context of a piece of a media, the means by which you listen to it, where it came from -- these change how the music feels, even if there is no difference in how it sounds.
Back when vinyl or cassettes were the only option, sure, the response is "screw your romanticism". But now that we have perfect digital media always available, there is romance in getting to choose something fragile and imperfect and precious. People like that feeling.
I'm more a fan of atmospheric black metal, 80's thrash and prog metal, myself but the psychological effects of listening to death metal have been researched. As previously discussed on Hacker News:
Thanks for that. I hadn’t come across Jim Lill before. For someone who’s “just a performer”, he knows a lot (about circuits). I found the comparisons of different order of Equalisation and Distortion to be interesting and I loved his Tacklebox. I’ll definitely check some of his other videos.
Upvoted because that seemed like a genuine apology other than this phrase
> Whilst we can never put into words how deeply sorry we are
To my European ears that comes across as hyperbolic and insincere but maybe it’s fine for an American audience. These things are very culture-dependent.
After shutting down Firefox and restarting, I tried the new profile manager UI just now and also thought I had lost my existing profile. Luckily, it was still available from the hamburger menu (just below the “Synchronise all your devices” option) and I was able to switch back to it (with all my existing bookmarks, containers and extensions).
Thanks. As a beginner guitarist just starting to get into ear-training, that all sounds like good advice. However, I’m curious as to what you mean by “Put on a loop”?
By "put on a loop" I mean "play a sequence of known chords in a loop" - so that you can practice playing and singing notes in context (i.e. in context of a song, jam, etc).
There are tons of backing tracks available on YouTube, but a loop pedal is more versatile, allowing you to play arbitrary chord progressions and workshop them.
Transcribe! is a seriously great piece of software, it's got everything you need to get started with transcription. Another great way is to just get in the habit of tabbing out little melodies that get stuck in your head. (Yes, it's fine to start transcribing in tablature, reading standard music notation is a great skill but not necessary to get started.)
hubguitar.com has a little tool for building printable blank tab sheets which I used years ago to create a few PDFs, of which I've printed dozens of copies over the years.
Thanks for the clarification about playing to a loop.
I have an iPhone and was thinking I could probably learn enough Garageband to create some simple loops that I could play along to. I’m currently at the stage where I’m still working on my timing and developing a solid rhythm (which doesn’t come naturally to me) so until now I’ve been focussing on strumming chords.
I’ve been following Justin Sandercoe’s lessons and was recently learning to play “A Girl Like You”¹. Up until this lesson, Justin always told the learner exactly what notes to play in a riff but for this one, he left it up to the learner to figure it out themselves. He gave enough clues for a beginner like me to figure it out (e.g., that notes are in the C minor pentatonic scale and that they go up and down followed by a big jump up, etc.). I had to listen very carefully and it took me a while but with the clues, I eventually figured out how to play the riff. I got a much greater buzz from learning this way, instead of simply being spoon-fed the notes so this has sparked my interest in ear-training and transscribing.
A looper pedal does sound like something that would be useful in the future when I start to learn more lead parts but I don’t think I’d benefit from it right now. Thanks, also, for the Hub Guitar recommendation. I hadn’t come across that site before and it looks like a good resource.
There’s a lot of bad shit in the modern world but if you want to learn music, it’s a great time to be alive: there are so many great resources for learning, good quality guitars are cheap, my €120 Spark Go modelling amp can emulate more tones than I could ever want, my smart-phone can be a metronome, tuner, ear-trainer, or digital audio workstation – and with Apple Music play 90% of the music I might want to listen to.
You can _definitely_ learn enough garage band to make a simple loop! It's very easy to set up, actually - at least on desktop, and I'm sure it's similar enough on the mobile app.
You can mark a section on the timeline to loop, and if you record when you're in that state, it'll just continually record to that same section of track. You can also set it up to do a metronome count in before actually recording. So, if you can manage to stay on time for 2 or 4 bars in one go, you can just record some quarter note strums into your phone mic - bang, perfectly serviceable loop for practice.
You can even start out with just a loop of a single chord to get a sense for how different notes sound against it in context. When that gets boring, do a little I-V or I-IV loop and try to notice the change in feel of different notes in, say, the major pentatonic scale for the root note. Then try a twelve bar blues, and then, ya know, whatever. It's a lot of fun, I'll often just toss out a quick loop and noodle if I've got ten minutes between meetings or a long build or something.
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