Monday, August 25, 2014

call them hobbits if you want, but there seems to have been some insular dwarfism going on in the british isles a few thousand years ago...

i had to leave my browser window open last night, and it's generally a bad idea to try and record with it open due to ram issues. it's done now, mostly. i'll have to wait until after 2 am to get back to downloading the rest of the libraries i'm looking into - i'm looking at about a 50 gb download, and...

there was a court ruling last year that put usage based billing in place, meaning the isps can charge you based on your bandwidth. there's a really bad oligopoly in canada with internet, stemming from the way the infrastructure was built. somebody might correct me (i'm not old enough to remember, first hand) but i believe the telephone and cable companies in canada were previously state operated. honestly? that makes far more sense to me, and the reason is that it doesn't make sense to have multiple lines. you want one cable infrastructure and one phone infrastructure - anything else is just wasteful. but, the result of it moving from public to private ownership was that, in any given area, there's a monopoly on the cable and a monopoly on the phone based around who owns the lines. splitting the lines up to different companies in different areas didn't really have the effect of breaking up monopolistic practices, and why would it? if you live here in windsor, cogeco owns all the cable lines (and bell owns all the phone lines) so you're ultimately forced to go through one of them if you want to use the infrastructure.

so, reacting further to the monopoly, the court ruled that the companies that own the lines have to sell service to smaller isps. so, the way it works is that teksavvy buys bandwidth from cogeco, and i buy bandwidth from teksavvy. the capitalist relation should mean that's more expensive, because there's more managers.

but it isn't. it's less than half the price. but what i like about teksavvy is that they offer very basic rates. i'm on youtube all the time, and i download a bit of music, but i don't game or watch netflix or anything like that - and there's only one of me down here, rather than a family of 5 or 6. my average monthly usage is much less than 30 gb - and usually closer to 20. nor can i download faster than the internet will let me download. so, all i need is about a 5 mbps line with a 50 gb limit. what i have is a 6 mbps line with a 75 gb limit (for $25/month) - and 99 months out of 100, i'm not going to get close to it. even if i were to download 50 gb of libraries in peak hours, i'd still only be something like 73 gb for the month.

i don't want to push it, though.

teksavvy didn't like the ruling. so, what they've done is put the download limit down (and, like i say, 75 gb is usually way more than sufficient for me) and allow unlimited downloads over night, from 2-8 am. it's a good solution for gamers, i guess, who are usually up all night, anyways.

for me, waiting until after 2 to suck this down is an isolated thing to make sure i don't hit the limit...

but, i don't need a browser for that, so i should be able to work overnight. i've got a few things to play with, hopefully one of them gives me what i want right away....

i should point out that i have youtube defaulted to the lowest quality level, though. this isn't for bandwidth reasons, it's because my internet tv is a pIII that shipped with windows 98 on it, so i'm trying not to max it out. well, that and i just use it to watch lectures and news shows...

i don't need noam chomsky's wrinkles or paul jay's bald head beaming at me in crystal clear high definition or who-gives-a-fuck p.
it sounds like an organ because it's being played like an organ...

good idea. i wish you'd rock those low tuba notes a bit more, though. now that i've got one paying attention, what's with tuba players being so polite? your instrument sounds best when you blow into it like you're trying to knock the house down. why is that you all play such a powerful instrument so timidly?

yeah, the person doing this review is really doing the plugin a disfavour. not only does this person not understand what the instrument's ranges are, they're playing the keyboard like it's a piano and just randomly running through the presets...

the plugin woks best with a little bit of distortion to fatten it up. but it's a more raw sound than you see in most sample libraries, which seem to want to focus on a polished film score sound.

deathtokoalas
i wish you would have done staccato on the ewql. the truth is that even a roland juno can do decent sustain stuff. it's the staccato that requires a sampler...


Andrew Chellman
I always thought it was the other way around, in my opinion. Staccato is short, there isn't much time to decide if it sounds realistic or not. EWQL has round robin which contributes to a nice staccato sound. 

deathtokoalas
it's short, but it's pretty complex when you think about it - a bow scraping a string, producing a sort of a broken waveform with fundamentals collapsing differently from note to note. staccato on a real string instrument consequently always sounds a little out of tune, which is difficult to create synthetically. the longer the notes get, the more easily a synthesizer can use the tools it has to shape them just because it conforms better to what a synthesizer does...

reali reddoot
the fundamental frequencies collapsing? elaborate 

deathtokoalas
you're scraping two tense objects together in short bursts. we usually think of modelling strings in terms of combining frequencies of sine waves because they're vibrating strings, but staccato is really more like scratching nails on a chalkboard in the sense that it's two rough objects rubbing against each other. so, there's a lot of friction in there (meaning the waveform is quite broken) and not much of the vibrating action we associate with string synthesis - meaning that the associated frequencies (fundamental and resonant, excuse my colloquialism) fall apart very quickly.

reali reddoot
very interesting, im very curious now and must conduct more research. Thanks for the insight!!

deathtokoalas
if you want to get something close to it, you're going to need to model the friction with a noise generator or random oscillator and do a lot of experimentation to "dial it in". you're also going to need a way to get the notes to spike out of tune a little as a result of the extra force on the string. i've played with a few abstract synthesis approaches that use physical modelling of things like springs to get around the limitations of traditional oscillation-based additive synthesis. with the tools we have available today, you're likely to be able to get something decent - but not with a traditional hardware synthesizer.

it might be fun as a project, but if you're serious about getting a good staccato for musical application, i'd really advise using a sampler.
your program looks a lot nicer nowadays than it did when i downloaded the demo back in 99, although it still seems to work in basically the same way. nice to see that doppler's still rocking it...