dmitch57

I have a Mac Mini and an LG monitor connected via Thunderbolt. Audio is Scarlett 8i6 via USB-C. The problem is static electricity zaps. Often after walking across the room, when I touch the monitor - any metal part including the stand - I hear a static zap in the main speakers (via the Scarlett). Amazingly, the Mac Mini does not have a 3-prong AC plug, so it isn't grounded on its own. I tried reversing the Mini's AC plug and that does not help. The monitor is grounded. It looks like Thunderbolt carries a ground signal, but I don't know if that means that the Mac is actually grounded via its TB connection to the monitor. I don't get the audible zaps when I touch the Mini. Or any other piece of metal even remotely connected to any of this gear. Only the monitor. Mac, monitor, Scarlett, and audio amp are all plugged into the same well-grounded AC circuit. This did *not* happen when I had an iMac. So it's got to be something about the Mac Mini or the LG monitor. The zaps are pretty loud; if the mains are cranked up, the zaps are downright scary. Anyone ever see/hear anything like this? Any words of wisdom? Thanks.

I was in the room when that decision was made. It was part of the move from the closed-off old-school OS9 world to UNIX-based OS X. Yeah a resource fork was a good idea in its time, but the problem was, it didn't play well with any other systems...any other systems, anywhere. Try to send a file to someone using any computer other than a Mac, you'd need a special tool at one or both ends. Any data channel anywhere - if it wasn't specifically designed for connecting two Macs, then it didn't handle resource forks well (at all, actually). That made the resource fork mechanism more trouble than it was worth. The move to UNIX-based OS X was a result of the Apple/NeXT merger. Lots of Apple folks were unhappy with the decision to drop resource forks. NeXT folks, who had been using UNIX for years, were more positive about it. 🙂 Filename extensions were and are not the replacement for resource forks. Lots of Mac files don't need or have extensions. Executables of any kind do not need extensions. Magic numbers and file headers are the modern replacement. So I guess I'm saying that this particular decision by Apple to drop an old technology was actually driven by a need for more compatibility with other systems. Quite different from the decision to drop FireWire support (which I certainly find appalling).

I don't think it's storage issues that make movies disappear from streaming platforms. It's licensing.

I agree that general use of compression is less and less useful. One application I'll probably always use it for is certain high-gain lead guitar tones which need a lot of sustain. Compression before the amp is a super-useful way to get those sounds.

Most reliable: Mackie 1402-VLZ mixer. I'm all for digital equipment, amp sims, etc.... But this Mackie, which is the router for all audio in my studio, works as well as the day I got it about 20 years ago; of course it never needs a reboot or a software update; I've never had to open it up to clean the pots or anything else. It's certainly the most reliable piece of gear in my studio. Least reliable: Roku Ultra streaming box. I don't even want to go into everything that was wrong with it; I ditched it for an Apple TV 4K and streaming is just so much easier now.

(I'm allowed to post these because, as you can see from my avatar...) How many guitar players does it take to change a light bulb? One to change the bulb, 9 to say "I can do that". How do you make a guitar player stop playing? Put some sheet music in front of him.

Now that it's out there, I hope folks, you know, listen to the song before pontificating further. It sounds like John singing to me...because it is him. It's not AI-generated. It's 4 Beatles performing on a previously unreleased record. The production is pretty nice (though the strings are kinda obviously derivative). Heck, Paul even ceded composer credit entirely to John, which never happened on a Beatles record before. It's not the best rock record of the last twenty years, or anything close. But I'm glad it's out there, and I'm glad I listened to it today.

My personal take is that as long as that number is not 100%, then there is no question: I am going to work at a sampling rate higher than 48K. I'll spend all day working on 4-bar section of music if it's not yet as perfect as I can make it. Even if 99% of the listeners won't know the difference, of course I'll still do the work. If there is a 1% chance that working at 96 is going to sound better, of course I'll work at 96. Why not? Disk space is vanishingly cheap. There is plenty of CPU power these days. I just don't see any reason NOT to work (and listen) in a way that maximizes the chance that my music - or anyone's music that I listen to - will sound better. Even if it's only 1% of the time. (My ears tell me that that number is greater than 1%, but it doesn't matter to me - as long as it's not zero.)

I'd add the whole Apple Silicon (M1, etc.) chip line to the list of revolutionary Apple designs. That was pretty recent - 3 years ago this month - and Apple users are still switching over from Intel to Apple silicon and being amazed. It's not just the technical design which is groundbreaking (unified memory bus; RAM and GPU on the same chip as the CPU, and, let's face it, freaking fantastic performance). It's the idea of one company truly owning and controlling the entire stack from silicon to apps, for all their products. Nobody else has ever done it in the consumer arena. (IBM did it in their space 60 years ago....) We could go 20 years before anyone else does it. That's pretty big. I don't think they're slacking off at all. Sure, I wish there was a M3 27 inch iMac announced the other day; I'd buy one soon. Patience, grasshopper.

Amazon Music has an uncompressed option: https://www.amazon.com/music/unlimited/why-hd So does Apple: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212183 Some other services do as well.

I believe this day will come, but not anytime soon. Just as it is currently not possible to make a CGI film of a synthetic human look actually realistic, you'll be able to detect an AI-created guitar solo for quite some time. There is an uncanny valley effect in both cases; folks with musical ears (and musicians in general) will be able to distinguish AI-generated sounds from human-created sounds for a long time. Call that the Musical Turing Test, if you will. BUT...the day when an AI passes the Musical Turing Test will come. Eventually an AI is going to produce some music that I won't be able to distinguish from human-generated music. You know what? As far as I'm concerned, if the AI-music sounds good, and makes me feel something, it is good. Regardless of its provenance. Being a music geek, I'll want to know how it was created, but if it was created by AI and it sounds good, I'd be cool with that. All that really matters is what comes out of the speakers and how it makes me (the listener) feel.

"Hot Fun in the Summertime", Sly and the Family Stone, is the one for me. It never fails to evoke the feeling of 3 months of freedom to wander and play outside all day and half the night.

The Who - Baba O'Riley Wilco - The Late Greats Pearl Jam - Better Man (sad lyrics but joyful music)

Valhalla Supermassive reverb. Its usefulness and quality are way out of proportion to its cost (which is zero).

This made my day.

Oh sure, there will always be exceptions. Plenty of lefties who play righty were probably influenced by things like the lack of right-handed guitars when they wanted to start learning, or closed-minded teachers who said "This is the way", handing them a right-handed guitar. These exceptions don't address anything about my theory or any other theory about why guitarists fret with their left hand. Come on, surely you admit there is no comparison between the level of activity between the right thumb and the left thumb. My hands aren't big enough for me to fret with my left thumb, so my left thumb is just an anchor. A crucial component, sure, but it would work just as well if it were an immobile stump. Comparing the activity and motion of the left thumb to that of the right thumb...as Jules Winfield would say, "They aren't in the same ballpark. They aren't even the same sport."

I have a theory on this. While it appears that the left hand is doing most of the work for right handed players, actually there is one crucial component of the right hand: the thumb. It has the most complicated motion and musculature of all of the digits. Most right handed players don't use their left thumb at all, though some use it for fretting the low E. But no matter what a right-handed guitarist's right-hand technique is, the right thumb gets a real workout, doing things none of the other fingers do. Imagine using a pick with your non-dominant hand. The opposable thumb - one key to the ascent of primates in the evolutionary tree. So my theory is, the dominant hand is chosen for the work the thumb has to do. That's also why classical string players use the position they do - no thumb action in the left hand, lots of thumb use with the bow in the right. Unfortunately there was never any allowance for lefties in that world. No left handed violins.

Unless the filmmakers were big enough that they had their own AI to generate the music for their own films. Disney (for example) will be doing this sooner or later. The buck would have to stop at them - the filmmakers - so they would have done a fair amount of due diligence after the music was generated, and before it was placed in the movie....to make sure the generated music was sufficiently free of prior influences. To guard against lawsuits.

The way I see and hear it is: the latency of my amp sim rig is down to 5 ms or so. That is the same latency as if I'm sitting 5 feet from my amp (sound travels a foot per millisecond, roughly). At that point the latency is pretty much meaningless. Think of the difference in audible latency it you sitting 1 foot from your amp vs. five feet. Can you hear the time difference? I can't.

Back to the OP... I'm imaging a process for copyrighting AI-generated music which is similar to the labyrinthine process currently in place for applying for tech industry patents. With the patent system, you generally have to hire a team of lawyers who go through piles and piles of patents, patent applications, and publications comprising prior art, in preparation for writing the actual patent application. The Patent Office does a similar search after the patent is applied for. Prior art has a huge impact on determining whether something is new and patentable. Similarly, I can see armies of lawyers and analysts and other minions who are employed by folks hoping to commercialize AI-generated music. These minions would use all sorts of tools - most likely including other AI - to determine if a newly generated riff/melody/soundtrack/whatever is sufficiently free of identifiable prior influence so as to be safe to use in a new movie/commercial/record. Then, the inevitable conflicts happen when someone claims an actionable influence on some new AI-generated music. Off to the courts, with cases somewhere between a patent battle and the "My Sweet Lord" IP case. The plaintiff would be the copyright owner of the original music. The defendant would be whatever corporation hired the team which cleared the new music and got the new copyright. This all sounds super conducive to artistic creation... 🙂

Not a single recipient, but when Metallica sued Napster and a bunch of its users, nobody was making any money off the copies. The suit was strictly about illegal copies. But anyway, I wasn't talking about actual lawsuits or court cases. I was talking about the meaning of the word "illegal". Which I thought you were too. 🙂

Sheesh, those solution don't even address the current "problems" of making personal backup copies, or of ripping a CD so you can play it on your phone. There is case law addressing those issues...but actual legislated IP law is so far behind the times, it's scary. I don't have a lot of faith in the US congress coming up with solutions to these problems.

I don't think so. What is illegal is copying a copyrighted work. I rip a copy of a CD I bought and give you the copy for free; that is a copyright violation. My profit or lack thereof has nothing to do with it.

There is a flip side to this question: if/when an AI generates some music that for some reason actually ends up making money...who gets the royalties? My engineer-self says "it's only fair the the folks who wrote and trained the AI get some of the royalties" but I'm 100% sure that would not happen. I haven't looked at the EULA details for ChatGPT or Bard, if there are any, but I imagine some publicly usable AIs may eventually have some form of GPL-style open source licensing specification, restricting who (if anyone) can profit off of the output of the program. Such licensing might alleviate, partly, the problem of reuse of existing music in the generation of new music: if nobody can profit from the generated music, maybe that could constitute a new form of fair use.

Ah, I was not fully explaining myself. What I should have added is: if an instrumental part doesn't sound good to me, there is no way I am going to like it. So, for instrumental music: if it doesn't sound good to me, I don't like it. There have to be other attributes in order for me to like it (emotional connection, sincerity, etc.); sounding good to my ears is necessary but not sufficient for me to like it. "How good someone is" is meaningless to me. That sounds like it refers to someone's technical chops. Not gonna name names here, but there are tons of technically "good" players that I have no interest in and that I don't like. Albert King is about the least technically proficient guitar player I've ever seen...but he sounded GREAT, and he was great, and I have always loved his playing and his music.