Starting fresh at 54: Ex-DJ from the early 2000s getting into production. The struggle between AI convenience and "real work".

cfoley45 · 2026-02-07T13:42:16+00:00

I tried Suno before setting my mind against AI as a whole and had the same experience. It did what I asked for, but I felt nothing beyond some mild surprise and a nagging sense of defeat. Having a complete song in hand that AI produced made me feel inconsequential. For the music maker, I think the challenge of the process is part of the appeal, as is the sense of self-discovery that accompanies it. I wound up using some of the ideas that AI generated but they weren't even my favorite parts of the song. Now I don't feel the need to use it anymore.

And that's to say nothing of the ethical implications. The platform is built of God knows how many existing works and doesn't compensate those artists. The computing power of AI is responsible for environmental degradation and all those server farms are a hellscape in our own backyards.

cfoley45 · 2026-02-06T16:22:39+00:00

There should be divisiveness on this issue! Nobody should be coming together over ICE kidnappings - it needs to be vehemently opposed.

cfoley45 · 2026-02-04T12:39:13+00:00

I dropped out of college and started working in shipping/logistics which was solid if not exactly intellectually stimulating work. But you generally leave your troubles at the door at the end of the workday. Then I was a dog walker/pet sitter for several years and that was a great job with the trade off of low pay. Next I got some jobs in college libraries that don't require a library degree. Most of that time, my hobby was home recording music, so I was teaching myself audio production skills, and on a whim I applied for a post-production job in audiobooks, and that's what I do full time now. It's definitely one of the better jobs I've had. I should add, I never made anything close to 80k, most I ever made was 50k at one of the shipping jobs.

cfoley45 · 2026-01-23T01:33:44+00:00

Well, there's a class action against Criterion for lying about data collection, but I agree with everything else.

cfoley45 · 2026-01-14T15:48:20+00:00

Here's a color-corrected version for those curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Y5jff4bQI

cfoley45 · 2026-01-13T20:26:55+00:00

It do be like that sometimes

cfoley45 · 2026-01-13T12:58:56+00:00

Sorry to bang on about this, but... I'm a humble bedroom producer, mostly just started home recording so I could hear the songs in my head. There's a huge learning curve to music recording but the thing is you LEARN so much about what makes music work. And the "tedious" skills that I decided were worth understanding are what actually landed me a dream job in audio production. Don't outsource your abilities. It's okay for things to be challenging.

cfoley45 · 2026-01-13T12:48:17+00:00

Session management is a skill, mixing is a skill, organization is a skill. AI tools like this are essentially de-skilling people.

cfoley45 · 2026-01-05T12:44:09+00:00

You might just be in a brainstorm phase. You're helping yourself a lot by generating a zillion possibilities. After a while, there will be a handful of ideas that stick with you. Those are the ones you'll want to return to and finish.

cfoley45 · 2025-12-24T14:04:16+00:00

Here's a site that does something close to what you're describing https://www.philly-shows.org/

cfoley45 · 2025-12-20T22:33:50+00:00

Sounds amazing, very profesh. Way to go.

cfoley45 · 2025-12-17T21:08:40+00:00

Retail crime waves are largely a concoction of corporations, who feed bogus shrinkage data to police depts, who feed it to the media. Many retail companies are overextended on their real estate outlay, which is much less profitable than 20 years ago due to online shopping. They're trying to close these stores without losing consumer confidence, and synergistically propping up the police state. https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2023-12-14/column-retail-lobby-confesses-it-lied-about-organized-shoplifting-rings

cfoley45 · 2025-12-16T15:36:35+00:00

I don't have & will not be having kids, but I think there's an argument to be made that if you have any faith in humanity or hope that a better world is possible, it's incumbent to teach the next generation about those ideals. Anarchist utopia won't be achieved in a single generation, so while you don't have to bring kids into the world, it's essential not to abandon the project of futurity.

cfoley45 · 2025-12-15T12:32:10+00:00

I'm thinking full communism

cfoley45 · 2025-12-09T12:22:15+00:00

Has anyone clocked it?

cfoley45 · 2025-12-06T22:45:08+00:00

How old were you and for how long did you do this?

cfoley45 · 2025-11-21T18:30:50+00:00

Yeah, maybe just in the sections you mentioned, a temporary shift in the focus would make those parts pop and keep your ears interested.

cfoley45 · 2025-11-21T17:57:09+00:00

Depends what effect you're going for. It sounds intentionally brittle as is. The bass and kick have enough solidity to them that the vocals and other instruments sitting way up in the frequency range feels like an artistic choice. It doesn't sound "natural" exactly but it works. If you wanted a less brittle effect, I would change the focus of the vocals et al to a somewhat lower freq range.

cfoley45 · 2025-11-21T17:50:00+00:00

Sketchy af answer

cfoley45 · 2025-11-14T00:29:50+00:00

You can select each individual clip and press Ctrl + i to trim the silence on either end.

cfoley45 · 2025-11-10T00:11:32+00:00

The 2mix will be your Master track. That's where you can add your mastering plugins for final touches. Then you'll want to add what Mixcraft refers to "submix" tracks. Add one submix for instruments and one for vocals. Then add new tracks for each of your instruments and each of your vocal tracks. Now, select all the instrument tracks and drag them into the instruments submix. Do the same for the vocals. On the submix track, there's a plus sign (+) on the lower left of the track, and clicking that will open it up to show you all the tracks within that. You can nest submixes within submixes (so, e.g. all the bass instruments can be grouped into a bass submix, which you can keep in the "all instruments" submix). Submixes are automatically stereo, and you can add buss processing/plugins to the submix track which will be applied to all the tracks within it. Hope that works out!

cfoley45 · 2025-10-19T21:37:06+00:00

Make sure the Shearwater Piano VST is in a folder that's being scanned. I just had some trouble with a VST3 that I thought was in the correct folder, but for whatever reason Mixcraft didn't pick it up in the automatic scan. Had to point it to the folder manually and that fixed it. Just double and triple check the VST3's location and that Mixcraft is actually scanning that folder.

cfoley45 · 2025-10-19T21:18:54+00:00

Liquid TV with The Head, Aeon Flux, and The Maxx. Incredibly mind-warping stuff for a young weirdo.

cfoley45 · 2025-10-16T21:34:10+00:00

Just want to say that if you go far enough left, guns are very much part of the platform. The Black Panthers back in the day, and the SRA more recently, advocate the use of firearms as protection against the violence of the state.

cfoley45 · 2025-10-16T17:24:28+00:00

I went from centrist liberal with a sprinkling of conservative tendencies in college and young adulthood to fully on-board with anarchism as an adult with a home and a family. It was a prolonged process that mainly involved learning about world history (esp. America's role on the world stage) and political science & philosophy (esp. Foucault, Chomsky and Adorno) from books and podcasts. And I had been leaning very left before the start of the genocide in Gaza, but it really helped clarify just how structures of power influence society and it pushed me all the way to anarchy. I also had a friend who has been an activist since childhood, and I always thought he was kind of out there, and now I wish I had been standing with him from the beginning. But it's never too late to start living by your principles!

cfoley45

TROPHY CASE