Notices by Scorewegian 🎶 (music@berserker.town)

gear fanatics

@ned i don't know because i just learned of their existence. if you start googling it right now, you'll know more than me. i found out about the recorders in a video called something like "epic portable recorder test" and there aren't that many videos about them out there, so i think you'll find it if you just type that.

@ned several vendors have made recorders like these. some of them are so simple to use that they don't even have a menu system. it's not AGC. it's just a recorder that you don't need to set a gain on.

@ned no, these don't work like that.

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1686005-REG/zoom_zf3_f3_digital_field_recorder.html

@ned remember that every professional condenser microphone out there already has an amplifier in it that doesn't require a gain setting. these 32-bit recorders essentially have the same dynamic range as such a microphone. there is no point in setting the gain. the output level will look really low in a DAW but it sounds absolutely fine when you turn it up.

cool, so the latest thing in digital audio recording is apparently the same idea i had recently:

32-bit float recording that can't clip.

with modern delta-sigma converters that we've been using for decades now, there isn't really a clipping point. they're just measuring voltage changes. the clipping only happens when decoding to PCM.

so there's no reason to limit the dynamic range to 16 or 24 bits. you can just use floating point numbers, and those have an insane numeric range and precision.

all DAWs use 32-bit floats internally anyway, so it makes perfect sense to also record in that format.

#audio #musicproduction

@ned @chimera yeah. Linux is lagging behind in this regard. macOS was the first to have to deal with it when Apple introduced Retina displays, and next in line would've been Windows when systems started shipping with 4K displays. there's less pressure to get it right on Linux, and much is based on voluntary effort, so it's taking longer. it's a painful wait as an end user though.

@ned @chimera we should raise funds to donate 4K monitors to the developers of all the apps that are having trouble. we don't need to explain why we are giving them brand new monitors. they'll discover why during testing. :trollface:

ran into yet another issue with the GUI scaling for 4K monitors on #Ubuntu #Linux. the #SurgeXT plugin is huge in #Ardour and covers the entire screen and can't be resized.

my system GUI scaling is set to 200% because my monitor's pixels are twice as dense as on a regular HD monitor.

some apps seem to interpret this setting as "make everything appear twice as big as normal" while others just interpret it as "use twice as many pixels".

what i want is twice as many pixels, not twice as big as normal. most apps seem to understand this and behave as you expect, but certain apps seem confused about it. no developere appear to have tested these apps on a 4K monitor.

@chimera my theory is that most Linux users and developers are still happily using HD monitors and aren't very aware of these issues.

@chimera unlike your average professional developer, your average hobby developer probably doesn't have an array of devices to test their software on, so everything is tested with the "It Works On My System" method.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RSIWbZ6Vc

i didn't realise Behringer were such dicks

i think if there's one band everyone knows about that kind of did what i want to do with music next, it's what The Beach Boys did on Pet Sounds. it's almost a jazz album with how sophisticated it gets at times, but still accessible and not overly pretentious.

@ned to some extent. there is a bit of inertia to these things. plug-ins move quicker than everything else though. you're on steadier ground if you have a popular DAW. older producers are also a factor and they're probably what keeps stuff like ProTools and Waves afloat these days. it wouldn't surprise me if many schools also stick to and teach tools that are quite old by this point.

recent developments on the corporate side of music software:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_Aq3pCtsZo

DJ Reeds