Technology tends to serve one of two purposes - to make us more efficient at some task, or to entertain us in our resulting free time. However, when we fixate on productivity to the exclusion of everything else, we often forget about the big picture. Perhaps the best example of this are people insisting that real coders need to use Vim to be productive due to it's unmatched text editing powers.
This is totally absurd. I spend maybe 10% of my time actually writing code, 30% debugging that code, and the remaining 60% trying to solve a problem. Even if I could write all my code instantly, I have only improved my productivity by 10%. I've found that changing my code patterns to let me catch bugs faster and earlier has had a much more significant impact on my coding speed, because taking a chunk out of 30% has a much greater effect on my overall productivity.
But what about the 60%? I'm sure I could make some of that go away with more powerful visualization tools and intense mental training, but when I hit a problem that's simply really hard to solve, nothing short of a cybernetic implant that makes my brain bigger is going to make a dent in how much time I spend thinking about something unless I want to make a stupid mistake and regret it later.
The issue that's arising from our hyperproductive tools is that our productivity is beginning to outstrip our ability to think. We are so productive we can't think fast enough to utilize it. Vim may be the most amazing text editor ever, but it doesn't matter because I spend more time thinking than I do actually editing text. We're so focused on making everyone super productive we seem to forget that we are beginning to receive diminishing returns from some of our efforts.
One consequence of this is that, obviously, we should be focusing on tools to help us think faster. We need to do profiling of people's lives to find the chokepoints and focus on those instead of doing the equivalent of micro-optimizations in C code that's only called every 5 minutes. That, however, does not concern me. What does concern me is the repeated mistakes futurists make when attempting to predict the future of technology.
This Microsoft video is a superb example of good technology predictions implemented in the worst way possible. The entire video treats human beings as machinery that needs to complete various tasks in the quickest way possible, instead of recognizing that human beings are, in fact, people. Many of the human interactions feel fake because all the interactions are treated simply as tasks that must be completed efficiently, regardless of how beneficial the time saved actually is. Productivity is not important, the way it feels is important.
Futuristic architecture often makes this same mistake, creating cold, bland environments that, while they do feel futuristic, are not things anyone would want to live or work in. We need environments that feel warm, inviting, and natural. When building futuristic environments, we must be extremely careful about where the future is peeking in, because there is such a thing as too much future in one room.
We make things look like wood simply because we like how wood looks, not because we need to build anything out of wood anymore. We like trees growing around our houses. We make our lights look like the sun instead of actually being white. We are constantly making arbitrary choices that have nothing to do with productivity and everything to do with making us feel comfortable. Until designers recognize this and stop sucking the life out of everything in an effort to make it more "productive", they will inevitably be shunned in favor of slightly less efficient, but more inviting designs.
Design is an optimization problem that must maximize both productivity and feel, not one or the other. Some people actually like color in their IDEs and webpages that consist of more than flat text, faint lines and whitespace.
January 18, 2013
January 11, 2013
The Earbud Loudness Wars
I have a Zune I got as a prize at a Microsoft Hunt The Wumpus competition back when Microsoft was still under the delusion that they could actually compete with the iPod. My Zune has served me faithfully for almost 7 years. I am now on my third pair of earbuds for my Zune, and have noticed a disturbing trend.
The Zune has a volume control that goes from 0 to 20. I have sensitive ears, so with my first pair of earbuds, which came with the Zune and were presumably made by Microsoft, I listened to music at a volume of 3. Sometimes it was bumped up to 4, but never higher unless a particular song was abnormally quiet. I wish I could say this will let me keep my hearing pristine for many years to come, but standing next to the freeway for 4 years has probably screwed me over anyway.
Eventually these gave out and I had to get new ones. I picked the "Gumy" brand because it was almost identical to my previous earbuds and I like that style. I can't even hear bass properly due to a hearing defect so I really don't give a shit about "EXTREME BASS LOUDNESS!!!11!1!!one!!", and I've heard bad things about Skullcandy, which was literally the only other brand there. After plugging in my new earbuds, however, I noticed that a volume level of 3 was too loud - I thought my ears might be playing tricks on me, but after several tests, including a blind test, I was absolutely positive 3 was definitely too loud, and I'd have to reduce my volume to 2. Once again, volume level 3 would be used for quieter songs.
After another 2 or 3 years, my old Gumy earbuds have finally died, so I just went and bought new ones. Not interested in trying any new brands, I got the exact same brand, type, and color, such that my new earbuds were almost completely indistinguishable from my old ones. Then I plugged them in. Once again, they were significantly louder than my previous ones. Thinking perhaps my ears were not accustomed to the sound or perhaps my old earbuds had decreased in volume, I ran several tests, but I eventually realized that my comfortable level of listening had been reduced to a volume level of 1.
There is nothing below 1. If this trend continues, I will be forced to either find an exotic brand of earbuds I can only buy over the internet from a manufacturing plant on the moon that lets me actually listen to songs at a volume that does not cause hearing damage, or I will be forced to stop listening to music on my Zune. I'm not entirely sure how this trend is even possible, although it may have something to do with a miniature amplifier inside the earbuds, but it seems to be mirroring the infamous Loudness Wars. The issues involved with the Loudness Wars are a topic for another day, but this same phenomenon has occured with my headphones plugged into my computer. A comfortable volume is something like 5 on a scale from 0 to 100. At least in windows I can punch it into behaving reasonably, but it's still just as ridiculous.
I have always been annoyed at people listening to music at volumes that are obviously going to cause hearing damage for no real apparent reason, and its also why I avoid concerts like the plague, but now it seems that our society's obsession with loud music is making it almost impossible for me to not listen to loud music and it's pissing me the fuck off.
For now, my earbuds are working fine, and I can still listen to them comfortably on a volume level of 1 without problems, but if anyone knows a pair of non-stupid earbuds that does not fall victim to this trend, it would be useful information 3 years down the road when this pair gives out.
Also, if you are going to have a volume control, make it actually useful, please. I'm sick and tired of volume controls with a range from "Almost Too Loud" to "What The Fuck?!" At least some of us don't want to listen to music at offensively loud decibel levels. I can still tweak the volume in FL Studio when I'm mixing my tracks, but studio-quality headphones become a lot less useful when they have an effective integer volume range of 0-8.
The Zune has a volume control that goes from 0 to 20. I have sensitive ears, so with my first pair of earbuds, which came with the Zune and were presumably made by Microsoft, I listened to music at a volume of 3. Sometimes it was bumped up to 4, but never higher unless a particular song was abnormally quiet. I wish I could say this will let me keep my hearing pristine for many years to come, but standing next to the freeway for 4 years has probably screwed me over anyway.
Eventually these gave out and I had to get new ones. I picked the "Gumy" brand because it was almost identical to my previous earbuds and I like that style. I can't even hear bass properly due to a hearing defect so I really don't give a shit about "EXTREME BASS LOUDNESS!!!11!1!!one!!", and I've heard bad things about Skullcandy, which was literally the only other brand there. After plugging in my new earbuds, however, I noticed that a volume level of 3 was too loud - I thought my ears might be playing tricks on me, but after several tests, including a blind test, I was absolutely positive 3 was definitely too loud, and I'd have to reduce my volume to 2. Once again, volume level 3 would be used for quieter songs.
After another 2 or 3 years, my old Gumy earbuds have finally died, so I just went and bought new ones. Not interested in trying any new brands, I got the exact same brand, type, and color, such that my new earbuds were almost completely indistinguishable from my old ones. Then I plugged them in. Once again, they were significantly louder than my previous ones. Thinking perhaps my ears were not accustomed to the sound or perhaps my old earbuds had decreased in volume, I ran several tests, but I eventually realized that my comfortable level of listening had been reduced to a volume level of 1.
There is nothing below 1. If this trend continues, I will be forced to either find an exotic brand of earbuds I can only buy over the internet from a manufacturing plant on the moon that lets me actually listen to songs at a volume that does not cause hearing damage, or I will be forced to stop listening to music on my Zune. I'm not entirely sure how this trend is even possible, although it may have something to do with a miniature amplifier inside the earbuds, but it seems to be mirroring the infamous Loudness Wars. The issues involved with the Loudness Wars are a topic for another day, but this same phenomenon has occured with my headphones plugged into my computer. A comfortable volume is something like 5 on a scale from 0 to 100. At least in windows I can punch it into behaving reasonably, but it's still just as ridiculous.
I have always been annoyed at people listening to music at volumes that are obviously going to cause hearing damage for no real apparent reason, and its also why I avoid concerts like the plague, but now it seems that our society's obsession with loud music is making it almost impossible for me to not listen to loud music and it's pissing me the fuck off.
For now, my earbuds are working fine, and I can still listen to them comfortably on a volume level of 1 without problems, but if anyone knows a pair of non-stupid earbuds that does not fall victim to this trend, it would be useful information 3 years down the road when this pair gives out.
Also, if you are going to have a volume control, make it actually useful, please. I'm sick and tired of volume controls with a range from "Almost Too Loud" to "What The Fuck?!" At least some of us don't want to listen to music at offensively loud decibel levels. I can still tweak the volume in FL Studio when I'm mixing my tracks, but studio-quality headphones become a lot less useful when they have an effective integer volume range of 0-8.
December 18, 2012
Dreams of Failure
I graduate college in 3 months. I filed the paperwork and started a company almost a year ago, but after getting hammered by homework, it is sitting in dilapidation. For five years I've fought to try and make my dreams a reality. For five years, I've failed, miserably. I am more fortunate than most in that my parents are perfectly willing to let me stay with them throughout college, so failure is relatively painless for me.
I have failed at almost everything I have ever attempted to do. Be it a combination of foolish ambition or rash decisions, the only projects I ever actually completed were pathetically simplistic, and usually done for school. It started when I was 12, and tried to build a campaign for Age of Mythology, a real project I could call my own instead of simply tinkering and upgrading existing ideas. I made half of one mission and gave up.
When I was 13, I was introduced to Freelancer, and became very interested in building mods for it. I volunteered to help an attempt at recreating the Halo universe inside Freelancer. For almost 2 years I tried to help in various ways without having any real skills by organizing schedules and development plans. Then I got myself banned from very mod I'd worked on so hard, and had my dreams crushed by a lead developer who screamed at me for being a useless piece of shit that just annoyed the crap out of everyone for two years instead of doing anything useful.
A short while later, I teamed up with someone else who had left that same mod for unrelated reasons in an attempt to rebuild an open-source version of Freelancer that would be bigger and better in every way. At least this time I knew it was stupidly ambitious, but I was hoping that by creating it as a community effort that ambition could be met by the combined skills of many people. Obviously, this never worked. It never even got close to working. I had no idea what I was doing, learned the basics of C++ only a few months ago, and had no idea how to build a 3D game.
In the middle of this, I got my first programming job as a royalty-only, laughable attempt at making a spiritual successor to the Descent series. I was forced to work with an artist who was completely fucking insane and a manager who was either totally incompetent or hopelessly idealistic. A month after taking the job, the last remaining programmer quit, leaving me, a 15-year-old high school kid, as the "lead programmer" of a game when I had no idea what I was doing. I quit 2 months later and learned never to take royalty pay, ever.
After finally giving up on my stupid open-source freelancer project, I played Cave Story, and realized that instead of using someone else's graphics engine, I could build my own. If Cave Story can make a compelling game with such a basic graphics engine, surely I could too? Back then, the best open-source 2D graphics were SDL, which didn't do much more than draw things on the screen. I decided I would build a better, open-source engine in C#. Like everything else I had ever worked on, it was a disaster.
After rebuilding the engine in C++ and coming up with some rather inventive ideas for how to do unusual 2D graphics, I quickly realized that it should really be a proprietary engine. For the first time I began thinking about making a living through my own projects instead of working for some giant corporation. It was at this point I saw an incredible flash animation and sent some very bad fanart to a certain amazing person. I had a vision of something truly remarkable, something amazing, the missing link to my constant daydreams and fantasies and bizarre programming experiments. When I discovered that this person I was practically worshipping as an idol had similar ideas, I instantly knew that I had to find a way to make it happen. In the spring of 2008, everything in my entire life became focused on achieving one, singular goal - make that game idea into reality.
That summer, I landed an internship at Microsoft and spent 3 months working the only real job I've ever had. I hated it. The entire time I had been working on a much simpler 2D game idea, hoping it would serve as practice for what my cave-story imitation had morphed into - an epic multiplayer focused game that bore absolutely no resemblance to the original game idea. It was supposed to be my company's breakout title, a way to generate the funds needed to build my idol's game idea, and I'd build most of it during my last year of high school as my senior project.
The incredibly basic 2D game idea imploded after I realized I couldn't write my own physics engine. Instead, I started using Box2D, and set out trying to construct the epic multiplayer game. It was a catastrophic failure of massive proportions. By the end of the year all I had to show for my project was a stupid jeep driving across a platform. I passed anyway, and somehow got accepted into the University of Washington, but only once I wrote them an angry appeal letter after being rejected.
I prepared to move out and start my new life free of my parents. Ok, the game hadn't worked out, but that summer I'd get the rest of the basics done, and during my first college quarter I can get an initial alpha out and I'll be able to pay for my dorm that way! This, of course, was also a complete and utter failure. I ran back home with my tail between my legs after only a single quarter in that hellhole and half my savings gone from paying for housing, after realizing half my engine was broken and needed to be rebuilt from scratch. I also discovered that I was terrible at network programming.
I figured I needed help on focusing on work more, so I tried to build a productivity app, only to learn that GTK+ is almost impossible to work with and Qt has a 1.5 gigabyte SDK of madness. Then I tried to build an alternative to MSN after its servers kept crashing and dropping messages, but that failed miserably for similar reasons. It was around this time I realized that the one thing I thought I hadn't failed at - my simple audio engine - was actually complete garbage and almost totally useless.
Throughout my second year, I attempted to reconstruct the engine, and intended to port it to C# so a friend could use it. This, of course, also failed. It was during my second year I came up with a pivotal, brilliant idea that I was never able to work on because I lacked the foundation necessary to make it feasible. My work on that foundation was then interrupted by realizing I needed to build a physics editor, which in turn made me realize that CEGUI is terrible. So not only did I fail to reconstruct the engine, I also failed to build the physics editor, and every single other editor, and the editor I built to make editors.
By chance, at the beginning of 2011, the amazing person I still considered an idol suddenly needed a programmer for his game. Seizing the opportunity, I successfully got a chance to build a prototype, put everything else on hold and got to work immediately.
Then my mom had a heart attack and nearly died. I became more determined than ever to make sure 2011 would be the year I finally managed to do something. Anything. So of course I discovered my animation system was broken and eventually had to put the prototype on hold. Then I only got a 3.4 in the computer science class, and ended up having to major in Applied Mathematics instead of computer science because they wouldn't let me in. Thus, I had failed at getting into the major that was the entire reason I had wanted to attend the UW in the first place.
I wanted to get serious, and finally created my company sometime in November 2011, possibly more out of desperation than for any real reason. I completely failed at finishing anything at all for 2011. I decided 2012 would be the year everything changed and went back to my physics editor, determined to make it work.
So of course I failed at that too. Then I failed at finishing my productivity manager. Then I tried to build a puzzle game so drop-dead simple there was no way I couldn't finish it and completely failed anyway. At this point college dumped so much homework on me I was virtually incapacitated for 6 months. I was convinced I had to get the puzzle game to at least be functional by the end of summer 2012, so naturally I failed to do that. I then decided I needed the tile game to be up and running with a demo in a month or two, and continued my amazing streak of utter failure.
2012 is almost over and the world is supposed to end in a few days. Two weeks ago I released my first commercial album. After my entire life being a miserable failure at everything I cared about, I decided my goal for the album was to make a measly $45. Surely, I can meet a goal that is so pathetically low all it does is pay off how much it cost to get it into iTunes and Google Play? I was pushing the album on every single social media outlet I had access to. I made $15.
2013 will be my sixth year of fighting for this dream. My dream has been torn apart and shredded into a ghost of what it once was. Now all I want is to just be able to feed myself without living in my parent's house. Screw being famous or rich, I just want to make a living doing something that doesn't make me want to throw myself off a cliff. I guess wanting a job that you don't absolutely despise is stupid, idealistic thinking.
I wish I had something to show. I wish I could say, look at this thing I built that nobody is looking at! But I've failed at everything so hard I don't have a single completed project. The only thing I have to show for the last 5 years is a useless piece of paper in a major I didn't even want and a list of failures so long it's disturbing to look at. So why then, do I continue in this hilariously idealistic dream that is clearly never going to work? Because I am numb to failure at this point. I can't do anything else. I simply trudge onward, relentlessly fighting against this endless storm of not being good enough, hoping that next year, next year will be different... I will fail a thousand times if I have to just to make this happen.
Because dreams are worth fighting for.
I have failed at almost everything I have ever attempted to do. Be it a combination of foolish ambition or rash decisions, the only projects I ever actually completed were pathetically simplistic, and usually done for school. It started when I was 12, and tried to build a campaign for Age of Mythology, a real project I could call my own instead of simply tinkering and upgrading existing ideas. I made half of one mission and gave up.
When I was 13, I was introduced to Freelancer, and became very interested in building mods for it. I volunteered to help an attempt at recreating the Halo universe inside Freelancer. For almost 2 years I tried to help in various ways without having any real skills by organizing schedules and development plans. Then I got myself banned from very mod I'd worked on so hard, and had my dreams crushed by a lead developer who screamed at me for being a useless piece of shit that just annoyed the crap out of everyone for two years instead of doing anything useful.
A short while later, I teamed up with someone else who had left that same mod for unrelated reasons in an attempt to rebuild an open-source version of Freelancer that would be bigger and better in every way. At least this time I knew it was stupidly ambitious, but I was hoping that by creating it as a community effort that ambition could be met by the combined skills of many people. Obviously, this never worked. It never even got close to working. I had no idea what I was doing, learned the basics of C++ only a few months ago, and had no idea how to build a 3D game.
In the middle of this, I got my first programming job as a royalty-only, laughable attempt at making a spiritual successor to the Descent series. I was forced to work with an artist who was completely fucking insane and a manager who was either totally incompetent or hopelessly idealistic. A month after taking the job, the last remaining programmer quit, leaving me, a 15-year-old high school kid, as the "lead programmer" of a game when I had no idea what I was doing. I quit 2 months later and learned never to take royalty pay, ever.
After finally giving up on my stupid open-source freelancer project, I played Cave Story, and realized that instead of using someone else's graphics engine, I could build my own. If Cave Story can make a compelling game with such a basic graphics engine, surely I could too? Back then, the best open-source 2D graphics were SDL, which didn't do much more than draw things on the screen. I decided I would build a better, open-source engine in C#. Like everything else I had ever worked on, it was a disaster.
After rebuilding the engine in C++ and coming up with some rather inventive ideas for how to do unusual 2D graphics, I quickly realized that it should really be a proprietary engine. For the first time I began thinking about making a living through my own projects instead of working for some giant corporation. It was at this point I saw an incredible flash animation and sent some very bad fanart to a certain amazing person. I had a vision of something truly remarkable, something amazing, the missing link to my constant daydreams and fantasies and bizarre programming experiments. When I discovered that this person I was practically worshipping as an idol had similar ideas, I instantly knew that I had to find a way to make it happen. In the spring of 2008, everything in my entire life became focused on achieving one, singular goal - make that game idea into reality.
That summer, I landed an internship at Microsoft and spent 3 months working the only real job I've ever had. I hated it. The entire time I had been working on a much simpler 2D game idea, hoping it would serve as practice for what my cave-story imitation had morphed into - an epic multiplayer focused game that bore absolutely no resemblance to the original game idea. It was supposed to be my company's breakout title, a way to generate the funds needed to build my idol's game idea, and I'd build most of it during my last year of high school as my senior project.
The incredibly basic 2D game idea imploded after I realized I couldn't write my own physics engine. Instead, I started using Box2D, and set out trying to construct the epic multiplayer game. It was a catastrophic failure of massive proportions. By the end of the year all I had to show for my project was a stupid jeep driving across a platform. I passed anyway, and somehow got accepted into the University of Washington, but only once I wrote them an angry appeal letter after being rejected.
I prepared to move out and start my new life free of my parents. Ok, the game hadn't worked out, but that summer I'd get the rest of the basics done, and during my first college quarter I can get an initial alpha out and I'll be able to pay for my dorm that way! This, of course, was also a complete and utter failure. I ran back home with my tail between my legs after only a single quarter in that hellhole and half my savings gone from paying for housing, after realizing half my engine was broken and needed to be rebuilt from scratch. I also discovered that I was terrible at network programming.
I figured I needed help on focusing on work more, so I tried to build a productivity app, only to learn that GTK+ is almost impossible to work with and Qt has a 1.5 gigabyte SDK of madness. Then I tried to build an alternative to MSN after its servers kept crashing and dropping messages, but that failed miserably for similar reasons. It was around this time I realized that the one thing I thought I hadn't failed at - my simple audio engine - was actually complete garbage and almost totally useless.
Throughout my second year, I attempted to reconstruct the engine, and intended to port it to C# so a friend could use it. This, of course, also failed. It was during my second year I came up with a pivotal, brilliant idea that I was never able to work on because I lacked the foundation necessary to make it feasible. My work on that foundation was then interrupted by realizing I needed to build a physics editor, which in turn made me realize that CEGUI is terrible. So not only did I fail to reconstruct the engine, I also failed to build the physics editor, and every single other editor, and the editor I built to make editors.
By chance, at the beginning of 2011, the amazing person I still considered an idol suddenly needed a programmer for his game. Seizing the opportunity, I successfully got a chance to build a prototype, put everything else on hold and got to work immediately.
Then my mom had a heart attack and nearly died. I became more determined than ever to make sure 2011 would be the year I finally managed to do something. Anything. So of course I discovered my animation system was broken and eventually had to put the prototype on hold. Then I only got a 3.4 in the computer science class, and ended up having to major in Applied Mathematics instead of computer science because they wouldn't let me in. Thus, I had failed at getting into the major that was the entire reason I had wanted to attend the UW in the first place.
I wanted to get serious, and finally created my company sometime in November 2011, possibly more out of desperation than for any real reason. I completely failed at finishing anything at all for 2011. I decided 2012 would be the year everything changed and went back to my physics editor, determined to make it work.
So of course I failed at that too. Then I failed at finishing my productivity manager. Then I tried to build a puzzle game so drop-dead simple there was no way I couldn't finish it and completely failed anyway. At this point college dumped so much homework on me I was virtually incapacitated for 6 months. I was convinced I had to get the puzzle game to at least be functional by the end of summer 2012, so naturally I failed to do that. I then decided I needed the tile game to be up and running with a demo in a month or two, and continued my amazing streak of utter failure.
2012 is almost over and the world is supposed to end in a few days. Two weeks ago I released my first commercial album. After my entire life being a miserable failure at everything I cared about, I decided my goal for the album was to make a measly $45. Surely, I can meet a goal that is so pathetically low all it does is pay off how much it cost to get it into iTunes and Google Play? I was pushing the album on every single social media outlet I had access to. I made $15.
2013 will be my sixth year of fighting for this dream. My dream has been torn apart and shredded into a ghost of what it once was. Now all I want is to just be able to feed myself without living in my parent's house. Screw being famous or rich, I just want to make a living doing something that doesn't make me want to throw myself off a cliff. I guess wanting a job that you don't absolutely despise is stupid, idealistic thinking.
I wish I had something to show. I wish I could say, look at this thing I built that nobody is looking at! But I've failed at everything so hard I don't have a single completed project. The only thing I have to show for the last 5 years is a useless piece of paper in a major I didn't even want and a list of failures so long it's disturbing to look at. So why then, do I continue in this hilariously idealistic dream that is clearly never going to work? Because I am numb to failure at this point. I can't do anything else. I simply trudge onward, relentlessly fighting against this endless storm of not being good enough, hoping that next year, next year will be different... I will fail a thousand times if I have to just to make this happen.
Because dreams are worth fighting for.
December 14, 2012
Giant List of FREE SAMPLES
Back when I started making music, I quickly realized that trying to make sample-based music without a significant sample library is really hard. While there are thousands of sample libraries for sale, the problem with starting out is that, by definition, you suck, you're probably in high school, and your allowance is likely going towards other, more important things, and not your silly musical experiments.
Over the years, I've been frustrated with how difficult it is to find good free samples. It turns out that there's some really great royalty-free stuff out there, if you can find it. This post is a categorized list of every single sample pack and soundfont I have that is royalty-free, and of reasonable quality in an effort to give beginner musicians a much better foundation to build their music off of. Some of these are soundfonts compressed with sfArk - just drag the file on to sfArkXTc.exe to generate a self-extracting executable that will create the sf2 file when run. Others are compressed using sfpack.exe. A few use the SFZ format (usually when the soundfont in question would take up too much RAM), which can be read by the free sForzando VSTi.
198-StratocasterVS
MIS Stereo Piano [ SoundFont | Directwave ]
MIS Orchestra Samples [Requires Directwave]
SGM-V2.01
Nylon Guitar 1
Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra SF2 (original SFZ)
HQ Orchestra Samples
070 Bassoon Ethan Nando
Roland Sound Canvas
Tubular Bells
Maestro Concert Piano (SFZ)
1400 Samples Drum Kit
mhak kicks
drums_industrial
drums_ken_ardency
RolandOrchestralRythm
JD Rockset 5
Ellade Drums
The Freq's Glitch Hop Sample Pack
Bitcrusher
Tube Screamer
Rez v2.0
Reaktor 5 (free version)
Reaktor 5 Factory Selection
Mikro Prism [Requires Reaktor]
dmiHammer
Jug Drum (free version) [Requires Kontact]
Dryer Drum [Requires Kontact]
The SimulAnalog Guitar Suite is very nice, but is for non-commercial use only.
What are these samples capable of? You know you can't ask me that without getting a bunch of disgusting self-promoting links for a programmer's pathetic music making attempts, right? Oh well, if you insist:
More songs like these can be found in their respective albums:
Solar Noise - EP
Aurora Theory
These samples are extremely versatile, so don't mistake my own laughable attempts at using them for some imaginary limitations. There are thousands of samples in these packs, so get creative!
Over the years, I've been frustrated with how difficult it is to find good free samples. It turns out that there's some really great royalty-free stuff out there, if you can find it. This post is a categorized list of every single sample pack and soundfont I have that is royalty-free, and of reasonable quality in an effort to give beginner musicians a much better foundation to build their music off of. Some of these are soundfonts compressed with sfArk - just drag the file on to sfArkXTc.exe to generate a self-extracting executable that will create the sf2 file when run. Others are compressed using sfpack.exe. A few use the SFZ format (usually when the soundfont in question would take up too much RAM), which can be read by the free sForzando VSTi.
Instrumental
000_Florestan_Piano198-StratocasterVS
MIS Stereo Piano [ SoundFont | Directwave ]
MIS Orchestra Samples [Requires Directwave]
SGM-V2.01
Nylon Guitar 1
Sonatina Symphonic Orchestra SF2 (original SFZ)
HQ Orchestra Samples
- Percussion 1 Percussion 2 Strings 1 Strings 2 Strings 3 Brass/Woodwinds Choir/SFX Bank 1 Bank 2 Bank 3
070 Bassoon Ethan Nando
Roland Sound Canvas
Tubular Bells
Maestro Concert Piano (SFZ)
Percussion
SAMPLES - 5000 DRUMHITS1400 Samples Drum Kit
mhak kicks
drums_industrial
drums_ken_ardency
RolandOrchestralRythm
JD Rockset 5
Ellade Drums
The Freq's Glitch Hop Sample Pack
VSTi
While not samples, these are free VSTi plugins, compatible with most modern DAWs.Bitcrusher
Tube Screamer
Rez v2.0
Reaktor 5 (free version)
Reaktor 5 Factory Selection
Mikro Prism [Requires Reaktor]
dmiHammer
Jug Drum (free version) [Requires Kontact]
Dryer Drum [Requires Kontact]
The SimulAnalog Guitar Suite is very nice, but is for non-commercial use only.
What are these samples capable of? You know you can't ask me that without getting a bunch of disgusting self-promoting links for a programmer's pathetic music making attempts, right? Oh well, if you insist:
More songs like these can be found in their respective albums:
Solar Noise - EP
Aurora Theory
These samples are extremely versatile, so don't mistake my own laughable attempts at using them for some imaginary limitations. There are thousands of samples in these packs, so get creative!
November 13, 2012
The Weekend Apelsin Got Lost All The Time
So on thursday morning my friend apelsin mentioned a hackathon at his college, San Jose University. I expressed interest but pointed out that I live 800 miles away. So he bought me a ticket on the last plane flying to San Francisco that night. 10 hours after he had mentioned this hackathon with me, I was riding on a train to San Jose University (after missing one train and getting off on the wrong stop).
The hackathon had prizes - $3100, $1500, and $600 for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, respectively. The goal was to build, in 24 hours, a AI for a game. The game was a 7x7 board with empty tiles on it. To win a round, you must construct a continuous path from one side to the other. Player 1 must construct a path connecting the left and right sides, while player 2 must construct a path from top to bottom. The squares are grouped into randomized sets, which are then run through over and over, and each time a set is made available, each bot places a bid on the set. The highest bid gets to pick any square from that set and claim it. You had 98 credits to bid with (7*7*2 = 98) and there was no way to get more.
I was able to build an atemporal pathfinding algorithm that constructed a 7-turn path by figuring out in advance which squares would be available which turn. To prevent difficult edge cases I simplified it so it would always try to do it in 7 turns and simply bid 14 credits each time. My friend helped with debugging and brainstorming ideas, as well as setting everything up, and we had to keep correcting each other on how the game actually worked, but the entire time I was also learning how to use a mac, since my only laptop was a piece of shit and he only had macs.
We were also trying to use Codelite in the hopes that it would be better than Xcode, but that ended up being a disaster with constant crashes and failed debuggers. As a result, I learned two things from this hackathon: I fucking hate macs, and Codelite is a horrible, unstable IDE you should never use.
I was only able to stabilize our algorithm with 40 minute left in the competition. I attempted to implement an aggressive analysis algorithm that would detect a potential win condition for the opponent and block it, but it never worked. Had I instead extended the algorithm to simply look for alternative paths longer than 7 turns, we probably would have won, but I didn't realize that until after the competition. Even though we only had a very basic algorithm, our pathfinding was extremely strong and as a result we got all the way to 4th place. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough for a cash prize, so we weren't able to recoup the plane ticket cost.
So then we took a train back up to his house in San Francisco, went out for dinner, and did more music stuff with his crazy studio monitor setup. The next day involved fisherman's wharf, candy, being lost, and getting to play around on a hardware synth. Then I went to bed and today I got flown back to Seattle.
All because my friend looked at a hackathon advertisement on Thursday morning.
The hackathon had prizes - $3100, $1500, and $600 for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd, respectively. The goal was to build, in 24 hours, a AI for a game. The game was a 7x7 board with empty tiles on it. To win a round, you must construct a continuous path from one side to the other. Player 1 must construct a path connecting the left and right sides, while player 2 must construct a path from top to bottom. The squares are grouped into randomized sets, which are then run through over and over, and each time a set is made available, each bot places a bid on the set. The highest bid gets to pick any square from that set and claim it. You had 98 credits to bid with (7*7*2 = 98) and there was no way to get more.
I was able to build an atemporal pathfinding algorithm that constructed a 7-turn path by figuring out in advance which squares would be available which turn. To prevent difficult edge cases I simplified it so it would always try to do it in 7 turns and simply bid 14 credits each time. My friend helped with debugging and brainstorming ideas, as well as setting everything up, and we had to keep correcting each other on how the game actually worked, but the entire time I was also learning how to use a mac, since my only laptop was a piece of shit and he only had macs.
We were also trying to use Codelite in the hopes that it would be better than Xcode, but that ended up being a disaster with constant crashes and failed debuggers. As a result, I learned two things from this hackathon: I fucking hate macs, and Codelite is a horrible, unstable IDE you should never use.
I was only able to stabilize our algorithm with 40 minute left in the competition. I attempted to implement an aggressive analysis algorithm that would detect a potential win condition for the opponent and block it, but it never worked. Had I instead extended the algorithm to simply look for alternative paths longer than 7 turns, we probably would have won, but I didn't realize that until after the competition. Even though we only had a very basic algorithm, our pathfinding was extremely strong and as a result we got all the way to 4th place. Unfortunately, that wasn't enough for a cash prize, so we weren't able to recoup the plane ticket cost.
So then we took a train back up to his house in San Francisco, went out for dinner, and did more music stuff with his crazy studio monitor setup. The next day involved fisherman's wharf, candy, being lost, and getting to play around on a hardware synth. Then I went to bed and today I got flown back to Seattle.
All because my friend looked at a hackathon advertisement on Thursday morning.
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