News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

meta-meta

Re:Skill to Create Product Videos on Monday November 02, 2026 @05:26PM (#50344846)
Good idea, but the demo video needs some work. The music is too loud and distracting especially with that 4 on the floor kick drum, and it sounds like there's some aggressive sidechain compression to make room for the narration.
This is very cool! Will definitely project on the ceiling.

I am struggling a bit with this explanation though:

> ZenithTrack shows a strip of the sky, a thin ribbon, one rice-grain tall, about 2,500 rice-grains long.

What does it mean to say "one rice-grain tall"? Is that angular diameter at arm's length?

Re:iNaturalist on Friday April 03, 2026 @04:23PM (#47631767)
That's what Merlin is for but it's a ~450mb install. BirdNet is only a ~30MB install and birds are everywhere, so what's wrong with having an online option for most people who spend most of their time within range of a cel tower?
Well said! I agree. I find that standard notation is an amazing tool for conveying how to perform a piece, and absolutely terrible for understanding the harmonic structure and reasoning about a piece. That stuff is all hidden and inferred if you have the years of experience to just know all the intervals present at a glance.
Re:Tomorrow's Emoji, Today: Unicode 17.0 on Tuesday September 09, 2025 @03:03PM (#45187049)
The thing about emoji that gives me anxiety is that different OS/browser renders them differently, so I can only guess about whether what I'm trying to convey will translate.
Nice! My partner predicted this in some album art she did for a friend. https://badbraids.bandcamp.com/album/supreme-parallel
Re:The worlds weirdest musical instrument on Tuesday May 06, 2025 @02:51PM (#43908416)
This is timely, I've been listening to Carolina Eyck a lot during the past few weeks! I've been building a virtual theremin for the Meta Quest, hoping to make this instrument more accessible and flexible by leveraging the powers of visual overlays and motion controllers. Here's a basic walkthrough: https://youtu.be/m8xFstjNxUo?si=ss2wSk1SIG90OWCM

I've been stuck waiting for Meta to verify my identity. Shortly after that happens, it'll be available on the Quest store.

Re:Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord on Thursday March 06, 2025 @05:12PM (#43285583)
until the discord server goes down
Re:Audiocube – A 3D DAW for Spatial Audio on Friday January 31, 2025 @11:51AM (#42889280)
oh that's MUCH better!! I was hoping you erred.
Re:Audiocube – A 3D DAW for Spatial Audio on Thursday January 30, 2025 @05:41PM (#42882917)
Hmm 20ms is quite a lot. I'm targeting <3ms, ideally.
Re:Audiocube – A 3D DAW for Spatial Audio on Thursday January 30, 2025 @05:29PM (#42882819)
Thanks! I joined your Discord... And looks like I "liked" your Audiocube post on FB about 4 years ago :-)
Re:Audiocube – A 3D DAW for Spatial Audio on Thursday January 30, 2025 @05:29PM (#42882813)
Oh yeah, I forgot about this. I think it was a bit less developed last I looked. Not sure if there was another reason I wasn't considering it. Thanks!

edit: ah, it's because it is a plugin for Unity's audio system which I've already determined adds more latency than I want.

Re:Audiocube – A 3D DAW for Spatial Audio on Thursday January 30, 2025 @02:40PM (#42881366)
This looks great! How small of an audio buffer have you been able to get down to? Any plans for an API?

I've been developing a VR spatial sound and music app for a few years with the Unity game engine, bypassing the game engine's audio and instead remote controlling Ambisonic VSTs in REAPER. I can achieve low latency with that approach but it's a bit limited because all the tracks and routing need to be setup beforehand. There's probably a way to script it on REAPER but that sounds like an uphill battle. It would be a lot more natural to interface with an audio backend that is organized in terms of audio objects in space.

What I'd like is more flexibility to create and destroy objects on the fly. The VSTs I'm working with don't have any sort of occlusion either. That would be really nice to play with. Meta has released a baked audio raytracing solution for Quest, and that's fun for some situations but the latency is a bit too much for a satisfying virtual instrument.

Here's my project for context: https://musicality.computer/vr

Re:What Do You Visualize While Programming? on Friday October 18, 2024 @01:31PM (#41881627)
If months are circular for you, in which direction do they progress? A few years ago I realized my mental model of calendar months goes counter-clockwise. No idea why. I'm also aphantasic, so it's a sense of space and movement but I'm not actually seeing a circle. NYE is at 12 o'clock, but January is oddly at 11.

edit: here's the article that prompted me to reflect on this https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually...

Re:Foobar2000 on Wednesday July 31, 2024 @05:51PM (#41123855)
Totally agree. On Windows, Dopamine https://github.com/digimezzo/dopamine is close to giving me what I want but it crashes frequently and simple things like dragging a directory of music onto it just don't really work. Has to be imported to the DB first.

Musicbee https://www.getmusicbee.com/ was kinda promising for a while but bloated and clunky.

VLC and Foobar get the job done but the UI is meh.

Streaming and iTunes really wrecked everything.

Re:The Case for Bash (2021) on Thursday May 18, 2023 @01:51PM (#35991617)
I built a VR environment for making and thinking about music, intuitively playing with alternate tuning systems, building instruments in space and livestreaming.

https://www.youtube.com/live/v4uHqdTr-bs?feature=share&t=426...

There are a few simple but powerful building blocks. One main feature is an egg shaped "note" which can be placed, resized, retuned and cloned on the fly. It's played by physics interactions with a "mallet" or sports balls, anything with a collider.

One of the instruments is a sine wave organ which has drawbars to control the amplitude of overtones. Unlike a classic organ, these overtones can be independently retuned and assigned envelopes to produce a range of timbres. Pitch is consistently mapped to a spiral - an isomorphism of pitch space.

It has a theremin which provides visual and tactile feedback and a voice with vocal formants controllable with a thumbstick.

It has a physics based sequencer of sorts which consists of "mallets" on a wheel which spins at a desired ratio of whatever BPM is set in a DAW. These wheels can be cloned and multiple mallets arranged around the circle using the Euclidean rhythm algorithm.

Since low latency audio in Unity is tricky, the VR app is really just a controller for synthesizers running in Max/MSP and IEM spatial audio VSTs running in REAPER. One day I'd like to package some portion of it into a mobile VR app for things like remote jamming or music lessons where models of the theoretic ideas are right there in front of us to tinker with. For now, it's just for me.