I looked at the new Yamaha MGX series digital mixers. Not that I'm in need of an audio mixing console (I'm not these days), but they're new, and I wanted to see what they're all about. Looked pretty good, until "oh yeah, by the way, it has a 4.3 inch touch screen." Yep, that's how you make me instantly uninterested in your product.
I have decided that if I ever can set up my studio again, I will just mix everything in the box, and then get a decent analog mixer for use with analog synths and outboard effects... but who am I kidding? That probably won't actually happen before I lose what hearing I still have left. Fun to think about though.
Joel and I were looking at those yesterday, too. Kinda got excited thinking about upgrading my current setup and ditching the Behringer 1820 interface I use connected to a mixer for multiple soundcards. Then, we saw the touch screen and were out. Too bad, as the mixer itself has some nice features. There's only one company I've heard of supposedly building a screen reader into their mixers, but, of course, they're not available yet.
I wonder if sighted audio people actually want a touchscreen. I could see it being useful for presenting complex UI elements but I feel like nobody had a problem with physical controls when they were all we had. Are mixers just going to be huge tablets one day? Slide this 3 pixel wide arrow 1.4CM to the left at a 72-degree angle to power the device on.
@simon Mixers having less controls and being way more touch screeny have both long since been a thing. I've got a mate who does live sound and they can't see signals from stage anymore, so they set each band member's monitor mix up for them using an iPad standing on stage with the musicians during soundcheck. Cool as a breakout secondary method of controlling things I guess, but personally I wouldn't want a touch screen for everything even if it was 100% accessible.
Hello, GNOME 50.alpha is now available. This is the first unstable release leading to the 50 series. Review the list of updated modules and changes. Use the official BuildStream project snapshot to compile GNOME 50.alpha.
The U.S. ambassador to Canada, Peter Hoekstra, repeated during his stop in Montreal on Wednesday, President Donald Trump's claim that the United States doesn't need Canada.
@donbahno bol prestrelený a nechcel mi predať ani dať a taxikári? taxikári sú prostě podpriemerne inteligentná sorta ani sa nejde rozčuľovať nakoniec som stihol mestskú ráno...
Customized my templates and now I love this thing. Only feature it needs is ability to mute sounds, for when you're working or doing things you don't want the sounds going. I can think of a work around for it until it's a feature, so no rush.
I really miss using a MacBook Air. My 2020 MacBook Air is not able to upgrade to Tahoe. I feel like it is really showing its age. I am interested as to how much better voiceover would perform on a new MacBook using the latest operating system. I usually mostly use it for work. I use the Messages app a lot because I text members of my team. I find that Google Chrome actually works better than Safari for most things that I do on the MacBook. Right now, I am bringing my windows computer back-and-forth from home to work. It works, but I don’t like the form factor of my PC as much as I did the MacBook Air. I don’t have the money to spend on it right now, but I am wondering if I should start saving and see what’s out there by the time the money comes in. If I had a nice new computer, and if VoiceOver was in better shape, I would love using the Mack.
@Bri It’s one of those situations where I really wouldn’t know how much better it works until I plunked down the money for a new computer and gave it a whirl. I have a sense that I would be fairly impressed, however.
@Bri What effect is that? I know there’s a reverb, but what’s the other thing that you did on it? It’s funny, I was actually going to ask you if you still had that producer tag because I was going to throw it in something as a joke.
As seen in a readme: * This program has no real license. Do whatever you want. Print out the source code, fold it into an ironic hat and sell it on * Etsy for all I care.
“…the answer to so many of the issues that are raised isn’t just switching to a new streaming app. The point is to encourage people to be more active participants in local music communities and DIY cultural production, and to support independent music media, buy music directly from artists, and reject the idea that it’s a one-click solution.”
People want to be able to click play and just listen to music. People want the ability to click a genre and listen to music in that genre, without having to actively choose what they listen to (kind of like what radio used to do in the old days, but without the useless banter, annoying commercials and the news, which they can get in other places). We can't change what people want. We can try giving it to them in a way that respects artists more. I think many people would pay 2x for their streaming service if they knew that the extra money was coming straight to artists, just as some people pay extra for vegan or locally-sourced or whatever. Trying to shift consumer behavior is futile, the market has spoken.
In a weird roundabout way, NOAA Weather Radio used Eloquence for its TTS from 2003 to 2016. I've been playing with the recently discovered SAPI 5 version of Speechify, and it's basically a concatenative version of Eloquence. The speech rules and pronunciations are quite similar, and some of the files include references to the Delta programming language which Eloquence was originally written in.
Incredible. Does it take the same phonemes, backquote tags, and such? If so, I wonder if forecast offices wrote pronunciation fixes the same way we have/do.
@NoahCarver Largely, yes. Though tags begin with \! instead of ` and some of them are modified from the originals, for example ts3, the radio pronunciation command, becoming tsR, the overall speech tag system is quite similar to Eloquence's, and it also accepts the same phonemes.
Aha. Final build of this for the night, going to relax in the hottub and not work on as much coding. However, a lot of language updates, including to US, Polish, Hungarian, Portuguese - many more language nuances are considered for them. Added: Mexican and Castilian Spanish. eurpod.com/nvSpeechPlayer-2025…
Thanks; In Brazilian Portuguese, the phonemes for R are fixed. The diphtongs are still too weak as I reported yesterday. In addition, the hard g before a vowel is odd, like in ga, go, gu. It sounds almost like a t. Lastly, some vowels need adjustments. The vowel u, for example, sounds like a British English u, and the ó (acute o) needs to be more open. Just to be sure, have you already applied the current ESpeak's pronounciations?
@clv1 haha sadly it's not just "applying Espeak's pronunciations" - it's literarly writing the shape, openness, sustainance, ETC for each sound from scratch. Even if ESpeak gives us how it says something, the actual sound-wave generation still takes place by the IPA tokenizer, so ipa.py feeds the frames to the wave player to synthesize based on those formant variables. As such it's possible to go into data.py and modify yourself if you look up the exact symbol for that sound in the table, but it's a lot of tweaking work because there's about 15-20 parameters per sound and right now about 140 sounds mapped.
OK thanks for explaining. One thing you could do in the future is to write down suggestions for whom wants to learn how to do this work, i.e. what documents he needs to read to learn how IPA works, what software can we use to manipulate all of those symbols and pipe them into a synthesiser, etc.
"Today is also about helping others make sense of this moment by reminding the world of what we already know: that Wikipedia is the backbone of information online, and that humans are at the center of it."
Wikimania is the annual conference celebrating all the free knowledge projects hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation – Wikimedia Commons, MediaWiki, Meta-Wiki,Wikibooks, Wikidata, Wikinews, Wikipedia , […]\n
I gave Pocket TTS a shot. It's a local AI voice that claims to run well on the CPU, so it's faster to generate output and doesn't require a GPU. The main problem with it is the same as with so many voices these days, AI or otherwise: punctuation. Periods and commas sound the same, and question marks aren't always noticeable. Parenthetical phrases sound odd, and the double dash isn't handled at all. I love seeing this field continue to move forward, but I have yet to meet an AI voice I like.
**UPDATE-very grateful that volunteer has been procured! I'm looking for someone in #Canada (preferably #Alberta ) who would be willing to receive (by mail) TWO different Apple 6.08 800k boot disks to see if you can boot your Mac Plus or SE from them. They simply get immediately ejected on my Mac Plus and this would help me troubleshoot the drive (which i've recently replaced). I will of course pay for shipping both ways. I live in Canmore, Alberta #retrocomputing
I’m having a bad ear day today. It happens to me sometimes, I get a day or three where one ear is basically useless. I am very thankful for Braille, because I proofed an important report using speech to the best of my current ability, and it all sounded fine and the spell checker reported no errors. But when I did a final check with Braille, I found I had written “paradigm shit” instead of “paradigm shift”. Oops, that would have been more than mildly embarrassing if I’d sent that off.
Stop the spread of AI Slop. Support your fellow human beings by investing your valuable time in their efforts. Not everything has to be a financial transaction. In this case, all it costs is a little time, which you’re clearly wasting right this very minute.
I invite you to come look around. Authentic stories, artfully told, and always 100% human. Sign up for free alerts to new stories. No spam. Just fantastic tales.
I tell stories. Most of them are true. A catalog of my many thoughts, rants, essays, and letters. I care little for your outrage, but I do feel your pain.
Today I learned about a particularly vile piece of shit corp, Bright Data. Web scraping as a service. They boast about having 150 million IP addresses from residential IPs and "real user devices" (I can't imagine that it's with the user's consent) and being able to scrape petabytes. They brag about their ability to defeat captchas, turning websites into AI data. Like every possible gross thing you can think of all wrapped up in a package with a shiny website bow.
Bright Data is awful, and their home users are willing participants, they offee "free" VPN service in exchange for exit nodes, like a malevolent TOR, their home users are presumably doing something "naughty" that they dont want their ISP or more legit VPNs knowing about. Bright Data probably sells the flow data anyway because they are deeply unethical.
At Vivaldi we continue to make choices that are different from our competitors. We have chosen to not integrate AI or crypto, but instead we integrate a wealth of other features, based on the wishes of our users.
We are a European company with most of the team based in Norway and Iceland, a few around Europe and a couple in the US.
Our servers are based in Iceland.
If you want to get away from Big Tech, maybe give us a try? If you are already using Vivaldi, maybe introduce your friends?
It’s a web browser. But fun. It comes with a bunch of clever features built-in. It’s super flexible and does not track you. Get the Vivaldi browser for desktop, mobile, and your car!
Last time I tried Vivaldi, I recall facing some #accessibility issues. Have you chosen to prioritize that aspect of user requested improvement, or should I look elsewhere? :)
Wondering if the end game here will be Trump saying "Fine you can keep Greenland but only if you keep a ton of NATO troops here" and then he can go "I made made NATO do their jobs, now we're safer than ever" RT: med-mastodon.com/users/cbarber…
Attached: 1 image
Troops from France, Germany, Norway, Sweden & other NATO allies are arriving in Greenland amid tensions over Trump’s repeated push for U.S. control of the island.
Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok won’t be able to edit photos to portray real people in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal, according to a statement posted on X.
Saying bye to our princess tomorrow. She has a new mass in her lung right next to her heart, and a potential carcinoma in her GI. That’s 2 big things on top of her chronic other 10 things we’ve been managing for the last 8 years.
We didn’t know what to expect, adopting a senior kitty, but we found love and joy, that felt different from having a pet as a baby: that she knew life before us, and she chose and loved us as hard as we chose and loved her.
A single click mounted a covert, multistage attack against Copilot Exploit exfiltrating data from chat histories worked even after users closed chat windows. arstechnica.com/security/2026/…
feld
in reply to thomcat • • •