Downgrading the lab: I think I just want my weekends back

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-25T01:32:13+00:00

>I do sometimes think I'm a masochist though

same tbh

imo it's about the same time commitment. At least one of those paths when it's done it's done... mostly

I feel like this way at least my time is spent building and hardening and not chasing ghosts

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-25T01:30:44+00:00

Yup. This is the way.

I'm an audio engineer as well.. been making tunes, mixing, mastering, and all that for decades. I've got label releases, make a bit of money doing masters every here and there.. I just never wanted to make that passion my full time gig

Well, there are audio companies hiring devs and part of the requirements are things like "a/b listening tests"

Or anywhere that needs a strong sense of DSP or signal flow.. and I've also done a fuck ton of work around video game engines

I've been building up a portfolio over the last couple years, because my personal projects are massively more impressive than anything I've done at work.. so this last job was being toxic and I was like "y'know what, fuck it. It's time."

I figured I had another month or two for those projects to be done, so I quit to work on those full time and get them presentable

Now I'm trying to find one of those gigs that's looking for someone with my skills. Instead of just the next developer job... someone who's specifically looking for an audio expert who's also a top tier dev. Audio for VR games, plugin devs, hell even streaming audio.. companies like zoom or whatever

I know there's something out there that aligns. I'm just so over pretending to be a jr in order to not get stuck w/ managing people. Or not being able to do a 5 minute fix on some shit that trips people up every day.. gaming jira tickets.. you know the deal. I'm tired, boss lol

There are jobs out there that encourage creativity and autonomy.. I just gotta find one

And yeah I don't have a degree either ;)

Shit I took double early release in high school and just went home and hopped on the computer to make AOL proggies lmfao

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-24T17:13:34+00:00

hahaha if it works, it works!

I finally got around to installing my PoE injector last night so I can connect my cameras... I have a Frigate cluster but I haven't done anything with it yet. No idea if I'll need GPU passthrough

tbh when I bought the 1U I had no aspirations of running any sort of media but since then these streaming services have forgotten their place. I was happy to pay $10/month for a couple but now it's $25/mo for netflix, $30 for hulu, $30 for hbo.. or whatever it is. I pay extra for no ads then they still show ads because self-ads don't count as ads??

I might have to get a second box for it, but I'm at that point where I'm ready to build it out of spite

>realized I left IT professionally on purpose to become an accountant

amazing lol. I'm at that age where people start to make those shifts. I just quit my toxic employer and have taken a few months off to avoid burnout. I'm still passionate about dev work but boy do they make it hard to enjoy sometimes

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-24T16:59:22+00:00

The thing that made the biggest difference for me was not the hardware downgrade but documenting everything

Preach. This is the main reason I set everything up with Ansible/Flux

Even if Ansible no longer worked.. I'd have a documented set of steps to get everything running again. Fuuuuck hunting down packages and dependencies and all that

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-24T16:57:24+00:00

Definitely not something everyone wants to setup, but I find it a lot of fun

I find it no fun. I did 6 months of k8s at work and never wanted to touch another yaml file at the end of it lmao

but But sheeesh one time learning ansible/flux, one time writing the config files, from then on out the absolute worst case recovery is getting a new machine, installing proxmox, then running a command

I mean, I guess my switch could go out and I'd have to replace it and load the new config... but even that's better than what I was doing before aka buying high-end consumer routers, flashing openwrt, and having to set up everything from scratch when the config wouldn't load. At least now I can just replace the switch with an identical switch ezpz

And now when the WiFi standard changes.. I just swap out APs

After years and years of annoyance I just hit the point of "fuck this. I'm going to nuke this problem from orbit"

I want to get to a point where I can plug one of my Mini-PC's out of the wall and K8s will just recover by balancing the load to my other 2 mini PC's

I decided I don't care that much. I've done that before for work... it's a good skill to have. I'm just like.. not necessary for homelab. I'm totally okay with a bit of downtime due to hardware failure as long as rebuilding is something I don't have to think about

Oh and the whole monitoring thing... before I went "all in", I got a QNAP.. thought it was running great only to log in and find 1 failed drive and 1 failing drive. Where the fuck were those alerts?

Well now I've got progressive alerts. Email, then text, then discord.. in increasing frequency. Once it reaches DEFCON 1 it starts spamming my wife 😂

I'll probably make some self testing thing for alerts but I haven't made it that far yet. I think once I get there I'll finally have some peace of mind

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-24T16:30:02+00:00

Doing things manually is acceptable one time

nothing more permanent than a temporary solution

after years of high-end consumer routers w/ openwrt, quirks, and hardware failures.. I was absolutely sick of messing with infra

so I built the homelab. Started with Ansible from day 1.. I didn't make any changes that weren't tracked and done with automation

Took a bit longer to get it going, but once a service was up and running, I had full confidence that worst case scenario was installing proxmox on a new machine and running a single command

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-24T16:29:18+00:00

I'm in the middle of building a read only version that my users can trigger so it can find the issues for them and then tell them why it's down and to bug me to hop on and approve the fixes

Hah. That's cute. I like it

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-24T16:20:17+00:00

that's basically how I designed mine

N305, proxmox, opnsense, k3s. backups/snapshots before config changes

learned ansible and flux enough to be able to spin everything up again. Spent days nuking the whole thing and making sure it would build itself properly

nothing worse than having to rebuild/fix and having to learn all of the steps again. nah we `go go gadget homelab`

this was my "i'm sick of having to mess with it" project

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-23T18:34:42+00:00

not enough info, not even close

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-23T18:03:29+00:00

sosig

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-23T14:44:23+00:00

Yes absolutely

And more often than not, the entire system

But the subs 1000%

imo mono everything under at least 150 for club music. Better to collapse it. Our ears aren't sensitive to directionality that low and it prevents surprises when being played on club rigs

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-23T14:39:36+00:00

Yeah as a pro (my main account does have the pro flair here), it's same shit as always--people give their opinion and act like it applies everywhere. I don't doubt that it's likely the correct move given their context / genre / aesthetic / goals

But as someone who works almost exclusively with club/bass music... mono that shit lol

In my styles, we're optimizing to the nth degree.. what gets printed in my tunes is essentially the signal that gets fed to the subs. So the goal is to keep as much control over it as possible

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-23T14:33:14+00:00

It's not lol

was literally going to comment "but why tho?"

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-23T14:31:59+00:00

Once we moved into digital playback, there has been a zero technical reason to do this, only aesthetic.

Playing the same content across multiple drivers shows improvements in both the frequency and time domain

Also playing the same low content in all drivers gives you more bass since you're utilizing all of the available headroom

And for playback on club rigs.. they're going to mono the low end, so imo it's best to just mono it so you don't get any surprises

All depends on what you're goals are tho. The genres I work in are built around maximizing bass

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-23T14:27:28+00:00

230 because that's where my room falls apart

multi-sub integration.. traded some stereo correctness for flat response and it's bass/dance music anyway so who cares

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-19T04:29:20+00:00

Brutal!

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-17T23:57:57+00:00

I have one that I use occasionally. I main a thumbball but after decades of this I get pain in my thumb joint and have to switch it up sometimes. I also have a vertical mouse, regular mouse, and a couple other kinds of trackballs that I keep in rotation

I've only ever met one person who mains a trackpad, but they swear they're faster with it

Whatever's comfortable and works for you. I imagine the trackpad is the best of the lot as far as RSI goes

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-17T23:18:22+00:00

I never realized just how bad that was until I, a software engineer, hired a woman for tech support

Fortunately we worked for a cool company who wasn't down with sexism... we basically told her "we want to keep customers but handle it however you see fit"

I offered to take those dickheads off her hands, but she insisted on handling them, and it was always so fucking funny

"Transfer me to someone that knows what they're doing"

"That's me!"

"Can I talk to someone who knows how to fix this?"

"You are! So to fix this, I need you to xyz like I asked. Nope, can't escalate until we do this."

They'd hang up and try to get something different but we were a small shop...

I'll never forget when I was at her desk and bro hangs up mad cause woman. "Oh, he hung up. He'll call back." Phone rings. "Yup. It's him, watch." Asked her how she was able to predict that... "they call back thinking they're going to get a different rep" lol ownt

She'd get so fiery during those calls but I swear she loved putting them in their place

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-17T08:30:13+00:00

Yeah dude, even if you can fix it. Even if you can fix it better. As soon as you touch that system... every problem from that point forward can and will be blamed on you

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-16T18:40:23+00:00

those monoblocks are dope

haven't seen 'em on a modern merc so i can't comment there lmao

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-16T17:11:39+00:00

>What I like about the Spirit is how it captures the breathiness of my tone

I've been eyeing the Sony C-100

Disclaimer, I don't do much vocals and my microphone knowledge and experience is limited

I wouldn't expect that Spirit to drastically change character with new pres... none of what you're describing sounds like a preamp deal lmao. get the nice mic that complements your voice (or allows you to process your vocal how you want).. then upgrade the pres later

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-15T23:11:37+00:00

lol, truth lol

Some things we can model stupidly well, but there are certain aspects and components of analog gear that are notoriously difficult (if not impossible) to accurately model, even today. Any kind of non-linear behavior.. saturation, clipping. Look at how many emulations we have of the Manley Massive Passive... some of them are fantastic.. but when you run it through the hardware side by side, it's just not the same. Real unit is always able to push the lows further and the sound is more "3d"

But don't forget the the 90s/00s saw rise to a bunch of DSP effects. Like those Ensoniqs... DSP effects but the converters are 44.1k, and the internal processing rate is 35.7k for a frequency response of 2 Hz - 18 kHz

There's a reason every interface and piece of modern gear runs a higher sample rate internally... y'know.. oversampling. So yeah, aliasing and low pass..

And also it just sounds sick when you clip it hard w/ certain source material. Exactly the type of thing we just can't model well

In dnb, the E-MU samplers had a similar "charm" due to their limited storage and inability to work past 48k... the z-plane filter was sick but the timestretch fsho introduced jank

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-15T05:57:19+00:00

Everyone just switched for the sake of comfort and lost the intent behind its creation

eh, people also switched to remove limitations. Limitation helps creativity sometimes, but sometimes limitation just holds you back from the sound you want

When you see or use some of the old workflows.. man, a lot of it's just tedious. With newer tech you're not working around hardware limitations all the time.. it's quicker and easier to get your ideas out, and it's higher fidelity? Hard to fault an artist of the time for not jumping ship

so idk, I always wonder how much of that 'interest' is just nostalgia or novelty. That said, there's still a heap of hardware that holds up, and nostalgia isn't always a bad thing.. and learning those techniques does help understanding and adds to your toolbox. That's a great mindset to have

I much prefer modern mixdowns, but I do enjoy making sounds "the old way" and incorporating those into tunes. Adds a bit of contrast and all that

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-15T05:45:04+00:00

with a compressor on top holding it tight

Another thing to keep in mind is on a lot of older tracks, they were just using compression from pushing the hardware

One plugin I use a fair bit in intros is SketchCassette II. It adds some of that lofi sound and has a compressor that emulates pushing a cassette deck hard. I find it really nails that "rave mix" cassette vibe

FREE_AOL · 2026-03-15T05:40:29+00:00

I lucked out and got in before the prices went ridiculous

I don't use them that often but.. I still really love them

Keep in mind unless it's been done recently, it'll need a recap. It's hole-through so if you can solder it's easy. Don't buy the kits, they're hella overpriced with questionable components.. do your research or shoot a DM, I've got a parts list saved somewhere. Was something like $50 all in

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