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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: October 7th, 2024

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  • I think the truth of it is, good sound engineering costs money, time, or both. I both ran sound and did sound design for local stage theater and I was shocked at how little the designers knew how to make their transitions seamless and avoid clipping, resonant frequencies, static, and a whole mess of other issues, many of which need fixes during recording rather than post.

    It took me about 5 years working with audio software before I was making stuff for other people but a lot of other people have the confidence to learn their skill working with live projects, project result be damned. I go back and listen to my early stuff and I hear all sorts of mistakes I didn’t even know I was making.

    Access to good hardware/software can also be a major detriment. I’ve had to sacrifice many design ideas due to available tools. When at the end of the day, it comes down to bad audio vs no audio at all, there’s an obvious winner.









  • So many times now, it seems any time I ask someone to write anything for any reason, they just instantly give up and ask ChatGPT.

    I’ve explained to a few people now: AI in its current form is at best a hammer. You can use it well or poorly, and it doesn’t work on everything.

    This being said, it’s a wave. This has happened about a dozen times in the past with different technologies. They thought human knowledge was on the decline when we started writing books because we would no longer have to remember the words.

    I do think it enables already lazy people even more though.








  • What you’ll find is most modern files for video, like .mp4, are what are called container files. They have to provide a video and audio stream as well as sometimes an embedded subtitle stream. At the end of the day, it’s a folder.

    Then those streams are often compressed, which aren’t readable at a file level. They have to be decompressed first before having any sensible output.

    It helps to understand how a byte stream is taken from the binary values to a usually 16-bit range at usually 44,100 times per second and you’ll quickly realize that you’d be hard-pressed to read the raw bits and be able to imagine the sound in your head. There’s far too much to break down here, but there’s whole college courses focused on just this concept.

    Something that probably resembles a lot more of what you’re expecting is MIDI. That doesn’t contain audio itself, as such, but instead a series of instructions for the computer to play notes with instructions, like pitch, octave, velocity, length, and many custom channels for anything you could think of.

    And that’s all just audio. Video is a dark art that I’ve yet to approach. The things we’ve managed to make happen with the tiny files we use are just wild when you get into the science of it.