Anyone telling you they can hear the difference between a 320kbps MP3 and lossless audio is full of shit, anyway. It’s still a great format for keeping file sizes small, though I prefer ogg these days.

“The year 2000!!!” still sounds like the future to me in my head.

Maybe “arranging” or “composing”.

As for tools to make it happen: You can use a “DAW” (Digital Audio Workstation) which is how most people compose these days. I use Reaper because it’s a tiny download, very full featured, and cheap. Ableton is very popular and has the biggest community online. Cakewalk is completely free (with a sign up.) ProTools is what a lot of professionals use, though it’s dying a slow death because it’s very expensive, they’ve gone full subscription model, and the things it can do that drew people to it can be done just as well with other DAWs that aren’t so predatory.

A DAW won’t do the work for you, though. If you want something to make harmonies or drum beats for your melody for you, there are a lot of "plugin"s or "VST"s you can download that can help with that process. Or, if you just want to give something a melody and tell it to make a song, there are probably AI solutions these days.

Good luck! Beware the audio rabbit hole. This can be a cheap, or ridiculously expensive hobby.

Audio! I’m a hobbyist musician.

Gaming is a close second.

/stuff/stuff stuff/

Source: myself a number of years ago…

Panau in Just Cause 2. Minus the bad guys of course. I spent a lot of time just traversing that place for fun.

Weird they’re forward thinking enough to let people code oscillators and effects for their synths, but so backwards as to make the software you have to use to get access to those synths horribly out of date and painful to use.

Next time I boot up my pc, all usb devices are mixed again

Oh shit, really?!? I thought it was USB MIDI devices, not also any USB devices… I only did it the once to update the firmware on the NTS-3. Whelp! Guess I won’t be coding any LogueSDK anytime soon if I’m not even going to be able to transfer the results to the machine without a huge pile of hassle. Kinda baffling anyone is coding for it.

Haha! No, I understand. I rave about something I like, too, and then immediately feel like a salesperson or something. I’m not a power user exactly, but I can usually figure things out pretty quickly and have no trouble typing commands into a terminal and slinging a little code. I’ll have to look into what kind of audio people are doing in Linux and see where it takes me.

Haha! I was not prepared. I got an NTS-3 recently, and Korg’s own software wouldn’t recognize it if it wasn’t in the first ten MIDI devices in Windows. I had to delete MIDI devices until it got low enough on the list. The 10-MIDI device limit hasn’t been a thing for, uhh, decades? I was planning on coding some LogueSDK, but the initial experience has killed almost all desire I have to do that anymore.

Yeah, it’s pretty stupid my machine isn’t capable of running 11. It’s a fairly modern machine. AMD 5600X, RTX 3080. 32gb of RAM. I guess it might just be some bios setting I’d need to change to make it compatible, but I have heard precisely nothing about 11 that makes me want to actually do that. Hopefully Microsoft will follow their trend and 12 will actually be good. I doubt it, though.

Well, the PC isn’t used only as a DAW, so I might still need Linux as opposed to FreeBSD. I’ve been running some form of Linux for a long time, now. I’ve never tried FreeBSD. Don’t even know what it is, actually.

Reaper is my DAW of choice, actually. I haven’t tried it in Linux, though.

I’ve got an Oxi One and go “DAWless” occasionally, but I find it very limiting compared to what can be done in a DAW. I just have to hope Reaper works well in Linux. MIDI routing and what-not is pretty fickle with some of my hardware, now. (Not to mention some software that doesn’t work at all in Linux, like Korg’s dinosaurific software used to edit NTS-3 settings and patches.) It’s a bit terrifying to think what’s going to happen with an entirely new OS.

I had just hit the button on a recording session last night, and a fucking full page “ARE YOU PREPARED FOR THE EOL OF WINDOWS 10!!” (paraphrased) popped up over my DAW. Yeah, I’m prepared alright Microsoft. I’ve got a flash drive with Linux ready to install if you keep pulling shit like this. It’s going to suck because a lot of audio software developers are garbage with Linux support, but if Windows is just as garbage, there’s no reason not to migrate.

Yeah, and I tried Tenacity, and it doesn’t want to work at all. Guess I’m sticking with old Audacity.

Hmm. You are correct. On both my Windows and Linux machines, I am on Audacity 2.4.2. I’ve been using it for years, now. I never changed my sources, and it never stopped working. Haha!

Not mine, but a friend of my dad’s would talk about the time he was an “asshole bagger”. He worked in a slaughterhouse, and his job was to cut a circle around the anus and pull up all the bits that might have poop in them and bag them up. He lasted a day.

Doesn’t sound like they actually went through with it?

They did not. I use Audacity regularly on more than one platform. It collects no data from me. It also hasn’t received an update in years, but still does exactly what it needs to do, and does it well.

That said, I hadn’t heard of Tenacity until this thread, and it looks like I shall be migrating over to that anyway. Better safe than sorry.

I understand. I throw obscene amounts of money at the cash black hole that is rent. I understand entirely how people think that people who make money simply by sitting on assets they own and otherwise provide nothing to society should be, ahem, obliterated. I just think it’s still possible to obliterate them with regulations instead of actual murder.