I recently reorganised my free-to-use music tracks folders so you can see which have been uploaded to youtube and therefore might get hit by content ID and which have not.
Anyone is free to download and use anything from this folder they like. Proper attribution is the only expectation I have for your use of these files.

dropbox.com/scl/fo/jgodxzpzf7s…

A young guy from North Dakota moves to Florida and goes to a big “everything under one roof” department store looking for a job.
The Manager says, “Do you have any sales experience?” The kid says “Yeah. I was a vacuum salesman back in North Dakota.”

Well, the boss was unsure, but he liked the kid and figured he’d give him a shot, so he gave him the job.

“You start tomorrow. I’ll come down after we close and see how you did.”

His first day on the job was rough, but he got through it. After the store was locked up, the boss came down to the sales floor.

“How many customers bought something from you today?” The kid frowns and looks at the floor and mutters, “One”. The boss says “Just one?!!? Our sales people average sales to 20 to 30 customers a day.

That will have to change, and soon, if you’d like to continue your employment here. We have very strict standards for our sales force here in Florida. One sale a day might have been acceptable in North Dakota, but you’re not on the farm anymore, son.”

The kid took his beating, but continued to look at his shoes, so the boss felt kinda bad for chewing him out on his first day. He asked (semi-sarcastically), “So, how much was your one sale for?”

The kid looks up at his boss and says “$101,237.65.

The boss, astonished, says $101,237.65?!? What the heck did you sell?”

The kid says, “Well, first, I sold him some new fish hooks. Then I sold him a new fishing rod to go with his new hooks. Then I asked him where he was going fishing and he said down the coast, so I told him he was going to need a boat, so we went down to the boat department and I sold him a twin engine Chris Craft. Then he said he didn’t think his Honda Civic would pull it, so I took him down to the automotive department and sold him that 4×4 Expedition.”

The boss said, “A guy came in here to buy a fish hook and you sold him a boat and a TRUCK!?” The kid said “No, the guy came in here to buy tampons for his wife, and I said, ‘Dude, your weekend’s shot, you should go fishing.’”

My buddy Rachel put a new album out recently. Kinda jazzy/fusiony/proggy tunes. She's playing most of the things and self-producing/mixing. Essentially uses the computer like a tape recorder, mixes about as much as you would with a basic hardware board and that's that. It's astounding to me that one person can do all this without any of the mischief I rely on every time I open the DAW.

Give your earsies a puff of this and pass it along.

rachelflowers.bandcamp.com/alb…

As many of you know, I once had a little project studio, originally a basement room, then later an apartment bedroom.

For the past 6.5 years, I have not had access to any of my studio gear, and I'm not sure if I ever will again.

One of the pieces of gear I have in that currently inaccessible collection is a Warp Factory vocoder, a wonderful thing from about 1999 or so, used by the likes of Fact Punk. I think they even had something to do with it's development.

The Warp Factory is a 24-band LPC-based vocoder with a stereo modulator and stereo carrier input, plus an intelligent passthrough for unvoiced sounds, which gives it an unusually broad and extremely clear sound not generally found with such devices. In other words, if you want that classic 70s/80s vocoder sound, this won't do it. It's just too big and full sounding, for better or worse, depending on what style you're looking for.

Years ago, I came across MDA Talkbox, which, while it doesn't have the super huge low-end frequency response or the unvoiced passthrough mode, in many other respects, it sounds very similar to the Warp Factory with all of it's filters straight up.

At my request (I think), @FreakyFwoof did a port of MDA Talkbox to Schwung for Ableton Move, which I recently forked. I made three major changes to the original by adding unvoiced passthrough mode, which uses a narrow band of frequencies and four orders of filtering centered around fricative and sibilant sounds to mute the vocoder and pass that through when detected, changed the coefficients for a higher LPC order, and added low-end restoration to bring out the bottom end of the output, which is a little more than just adding an EQ.
With all that stuff disabled, it sounds exactly like the original.

I have now released a forked version of MDA Talkbox, called MDA Talkbox Plus, in VST3/AU form for Mac and Windows, which adds those features, plus fricative gain.

Note: the Mac version is unsigned, because I'm currently too cheap to have an Apple developer cert, but this will at some point be rectified. Instructions for running it anyway are in the readme.

If you want to play, it can be found here:

github.com/borris84/mda-talkbo…

Yes, this was vibe-coded, full disclosure and all that.

Perhaps I will record a demo later.

I guess I've known about mynoise.net for a while, but never really what you'd get if you donate. Thanks to a previous #Audiopub #Stream by@desertstar84@chatmosphere.club, I've gone and donated.

One feature is that, from the main index page which you get to from the top menu, you can enter 3 keywords, one in each box, and hit the surprise me button. When you do, it goes through and searches the database and layers together some pretty interesting results. Here's this one:
mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/cust…

I've developed an early version of a software that will allow you to uninstall those pesky programs and their components which present significant issues when trying to uninstall them. Version 0.5.0 of Wixen Uninstall will let you get rid of McAfee, Norton, AVG, and Avast as well as their other suites. It should be fully accessible with keyboard support. Check the notes and file issues.

github.com/PratikP1/Wixen-Unin…

#accessibility #a11y