AROIOS

MicroRhythms?

SonicProject's OP-X and Synapse Audio's Obsession are two other excellent contenders for the Oberheim sound.

I found myself preferring Arturia in 3 out of the 5 patches (#1, #2, #4). That said, I'd choose Oberheim just for the last patch alone.

The frustration you mentioned with mouse wheels is not a problem of "wheels" per se. We are gonna run into exactly the same experience if a "knob" alternative has the same low-resolution encoders. Wheels and knobs are both rotary controls and share most of the same benefits of easy acceleration/deceleration and fine adjustments. Advantages of wheels are: 1) concealment, most wheel controls only expose a small portion of their perimeters to engage finger tips; 2) needing only 1 finger to control; The advantage of knobs is the slightly finer control offered by the coordination among more than 1 finger. It's basically the same kind of difference between calligraphy with pen attached to one finger vs. pen controlled by three fingers plus a bit of help from the wrist. None of my synth tweaking require calligraphy-level finesse. The current problems with mouse wheels, are low resolution and inconsistent response curve across apps, as we both noted. If you are geeky enough, there's a PC software called ScrollNavigator that tries to address the response/acceleration curve problem. I find it helpful in scrolling through long web pages/documents. But garbage in garbage out, there's only so much magic we can squeeze out of the roughly 7 clicks/pulses generated by a full mouse wheel push/pull. What we need, well, what I need, as I mentioned above, are 1) higher resolution on the mouse wheel encoder, 2) consistent or adjustable acceleration response curves across apps. These two simple improvements would greatly increase productivity across tons of areas. BTW, you can Shift+Scroll for increments of 10 on most Roland soft synths. That should really become industry standard.

<Merged with post above>

A lot of synths support "hover and scroll" with mouse wheels. So clicking and dragging aren't really necessary. What we really need, BADLY, are mouse wheels with finer increments (more clicks per inch). And better yet, UI code libraries that incorporate good mouse wheel acceleration algorithms (similar to what Microsoft does in Windows for low-res mouse movements). Logitech's Infinite-Scroll is a nice design, but it only solved the problem of scrolling through long documents, and don't work well with sliders and knobs in apps like Photoshop, DAWs, VSTs etc.

All the power to you, brother, if you know what you are after.

It gets exponentially more complicated and unintuitive when we bring in envelope_depth, key/velocity_dependent_cutoff/resonance, LFO_destinations... And then let's add two more layers... 😃 I love the possibilities offered by the infinite amount of combinations with these controls, but often find myself on a journey driven by serendipity rather than intention. Well, there's a good reason I'm not John "Skippy" Lehmkuhl, Howard Scarr or Eric Persing.

At the risk of repeating myself, there's the possibility that those simple math turn out to be how our brains work, just at a massively larger scale.

It's part nostalgia, part snobbism, and part simple human nature. I look at film snobs and their "wine critic" style language with cringe, as I do most self-claimed audiophiles. But what they see and hear, are often more than just imagined fair dust. A key aesthetic of films is their luminance response curve, which elevates the darkest pixels and compresses the brightest ones. My hypothesis of why that's pleasing is simple: extreme darkness or brightness reduce our ancestors' chances of survival.

99.9% of audio laymen know nothing about Fourier Transform or Nyquist–Shannon Theorem, yet love to blame the "jagged edges of digital waveform" that only exist in their vivid imagination.

Apples to oranges, but I'd pick Calculus and Quantum Physics over Mona Lisa and Giant Steps any given day, as our species' "capacity to honor". And A.I. is already churning out new math and physics rules that used to take humans centuries, if not millennia, to discover. That's the kind of stuff the keeps me up at night. Mona Lisa and Giant Steps? Nice to have, but won't do a thing to cure cancer or generate free energy.

It sends bots to capture and force humans to grade its output... That's actually not too far from what actually happens. There are huge teams of humans grading and labeling training data and A.I. outputs both here in the US and in outsourcing destinations like India. Remember the online Captcha challenges ? That's us labeling data for A.I. training (and feeding Skynet 😃)

It's mostly marketing. Even the term "Machine Learning" itself is largely just CS guys re-branding good ole "Statistical Learning".

Pseudo-Science

LangLang epitomizes the fetish in Classical circles that worship "fast/hard" for the sake of "fast/hard". Throw him a Jazz Swing piece and wait for a cringy disaster. 1/128th notes at 240 BPM are "impossibly demanding". But what's the point? That a human can catch up with a MIDI sequencer?

Count me as another big fan of Tchaikovsky. 🤝

Yup, and you can't have an informed conversation about A.I. with folks who don't even understand Gradient Descent and believe "if/then statements" are all there is to it.

How do we know human brain isn't just that, except scaled by 100000X? 😃 Even some of my friends in High Performance Computing throw around comments about the "divine human ingenuity" with wild abandon. I just find it amusing how little difference there is between their blind faith in the human mind, and the religious fervor of rednecks they look down upon. 😆

This is showing potential. Give it a few years and the stock music industry will be f***ed like ProfD and CHarrell mentioned.

Yup, "originality" only describes 0.01% of what happens in music or any artistic pursuit. The rest 99.99%, are just regurgitation and imitation.

I suspect artistic "creativity/innovation" is little more than 'hallucinations" displayed by the LLMs and Multi-Modal Models right now. Maybe they are just "tasteful" random mutation that happened to tickle us "the right way" and dwarf in comparison to "creativity/innovation" in STEM, the kind that brought us Calculus and Relativity.

Until A.I. passes a Turing's test for the particular musical task it's asked to fulfill. In other words, as soon as A.I.-generated content become indistinguishable from that from a human counterpart, at similar cost, Mr./Ms. human becomes "useless" for that task.

Yup, PG Music already attempted it 25 years ago with their "Soloist" and "Melodist" features in Band-In-A-Box. 95% of what it generated were insipid and sometimes outright jarring results. But for a songwriter, the 5% usable ideas more than make up for the fluff. As I've said before, improvisation is mostly just a form of mental masturbation, enjoyed only by the performer and a few spectators. To most casual observers, it bears little difference from the output of a computer arpeggiator with a bit of pre-programmed randomness. Human intelligence is vastly more powerful than those simple neural-logical algorithms that churn out "Jazz Improvisation". But we artists are a notoriously self-important bunch, so thumbs-down from the non-techies among us is hardly surprising. 😃

But "Classical" is such a giant umbrella. When my friends make similar comments about how much they love "Classical music", I find it as descriptive as "loving Pop music". If we break music down by 1) Melody; 2) Harmony; 3) Timbre; 4) Rhythm; 5) Articulation, the only thing Classical music have in common is 3). Case in point, I love the works of Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Liszt and can enjoy some Bach on a good day, but the Schumann Sonata above just bores the shit out of me. 😃