Reaper

So I dabble in recording stuff, because, hey, why not? But with COVID, not being able to record new stuff, and all of that I have been pretty burned out. Also, I have been using Pro Tools for the last few years and it has gotten really stale. Just opening the program is depressing somehow. They are like the Maya or Photoshop of DAWs. Don’t like it? Screw you.

But recently one of my friends has started to track stuff at their place and wanted me to lay down drums on it. I think I recommended Reaper to him as an affordable way to record years ago, but not too sure about that. But after working with his files a bit I figured to make sending the project back and forth smoother I would give Reaper a try.

Man, it so far has been way nicer to use than Pro Tools. I took the entire project from Protools to Reaper without even have to google anything. The UI is just that easy to follow and find stuff. If anyone else is looking to escape the Pro Tools nightmare of dongles, license crap, crashes (oh my god the crashes!), I highly suggest giving Reaper a shot.

Folder instead of busses are just so simple and awesome to use. Guitar bus? Just make a blank track and drag them in. Done. Super clean and customizable interface. So far the only real hitch is that the free plug-ins that ship with it are downright ugly, lol! The 7 band EQ is pretty slick and has some nice functionality but it just looks like something from 98. Also, I can’t get my Sound Toys plugs in to load which is a bummer. But FET compressor and pretty much all my other ones load no problem. Get FET now. It’s so worth it.

The next step is to install it on my recording rig and get all the mics configured and try out some tracking with it. In Pro Tools I have been having a lot of crashes that when I am playing and it locks, it just starts screaming in your ear. So bad….

"I want to post my photographs to Instagram, but my ethics are getting in the way."

Interesting Reddit thread here where people are discussing the ethics of using Instagram with all the information that has come to light about Facebook’s data harvesting/manipulation. A good read with a lot of interesting opinions. As I have mentioned here before, I am very anti-social media.

“As I'm sure many of us have been, I have been using my pandemic induced free time to do some intensive organizing and editing of my photography archives.

I now find myself with an ethical dilemma: I want to post my pictures to Instagram, a Facebook CompanyTM

I quit Facebook some 7-8 years ago and Insta some 3-4 years ago due to the many scandals Facebook has been implicated in over the years - from massive data breaches, to major privacy concerns, to anti-trust issues, to willfully illicit use of user data to manipulate elections and public sentiments around the world:

CNET, NBC News, CNBC, NPR / WBUR, Wikipedia Mega List, etc, etc, etc

Sometimes it seems like a silly stand to take / hill to die on-- I am, after all, an infinitesimally small cog in the machine-- but that hasn't stopped my conscience from shouting at me every time I think about giving the 'gram another shot.

What are your thoughts on this? Am I being ridiculous? How ridiculous? How do you navigate the ethical/moral challenges involved with social media platforms?

​I'm curious to see what this community's take is :)”

The Social Dilemma

Watched the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” the other night and while I think all the criticisms in this essay are spot on, I still think it is very much worth watching. It will really give you a clear picture on how much your devices are actually manipulating you. My news blackout now is expanding to keeping devices at bay. Blogging is a bit different as this is a sit down workstation for “doing shit”. Not just that addictive mindless scrolling, searching or playing mobile games like what happened when one uses any portable device.

Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers – a review of “The Social Dilemma”

Interesting essay about the Netflix show, The Social Dilemma that gets into some aspects about the current public discourse that is troubling. This paragraph really hit home to me.

“The Social Dilemma clearly wants to avoid taking sides. And in so doing demonstrates the ways in which Silicon Valley has taken sides. After all, to focus so heavily on polarization and the extremism of “both sides” just serves to create a false equivalency where none exists. But, the view that “the Trump administration has mismanaged the pandemic” and the view that “the pandemic is a hoax” – are not equivalent. The view that “climate change is real” and “climate change is a hoax” – are not equivalent. People organizing for racial justice and people organizing because they believe that Democrats are satanic cannibal pedophiles – are not equivalent. The view that “there is too much money in politics” and the view that “the Jews are pulling the strings” – are not equivalent. Of course, to say that these things “are not equivalent” is to make a political judgment, but by refusing to make such a judgment The Social Dilemma presents both sides as being equivalent. There are people online who are organizing for the cause of racial justice, and there are white-supremacists organizing online who are trying to start a race war—those causes may look the same to an algorithm, and they may look the same to the people who created those algorithms, but they are not the same.”

The Attention Economy

interesting short on something I have been spending a lot of time thinking about. We are just in a firehose of information and a major part of the modern economy is built on TAKING that attention from us and our goals.

“When information becomes abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource. “ - Herbert Simon

Another interesting point is that the whole point of the internet was to be decentralized. But now it’s in the hands of very few gate keepers. Facebook and Google do not have peoples best interests in mind.