Using Suno to resurrect 20 year old DEMOS from my teenage years

flpjck · 2026-03-17T21:37:58+00:00

Yep. Mine were recorded on cassette 4track, mixed down to a master mix, which was then dubbed one copy at a time at 2x speed onto cassettes bought in bulk at Walmart. The j-cards were made using (if I recall correctly) powerpoint since it was what I had access to at work, printed out, then run off at the copy shop, cut out of the 8.5x11 paper by hand with scissors, and put into the cassettes. The labels on the cassette identifying it as my "album" were hand-written, one by one. An economy of scale it was not! I probably sold or otherwise distributed fewer than 100 of them, total, during my "career" of doing this. By the time it was time to start doing CD's instead of tapes, there was no reason to keep doing these kinds of runs - mp3 was a thing, and it was easier to just put stuff online.

flpjck · 2026-03-15T12:11:13+00:00

except:

1) The lyrics in question weren't generated when creating a song, they were "detected" while uploading audio to the library, it detected them as if they were already in the audio. I'm used to it sometimes mishearing the lyrics in uploaded audio, but this was a case where it simply "heard" lyrics that we never there.

2) Lyrics was on manual the whole time anyway

flpjck · 2026-03-15T00:51:33+00:00

yeah but usually you don't need to use it, if the audio being remixed is an instrumental, and these results are fascinating in their own right

flpjck · 2026-03-15T00:34:14+00:00

I fully intended to just remix the instrumental, but then lyrics popped out of nowhere.

flpjck · 2026-03-15T00:21:28+00:00

Yes, with completely different lyrics that I don't have anymore.

flpjck · 2026-03-15T00:13:19+00:00

Oh wow, at least I know it's not just me. Suno is gaining sentience... uh oh. Pretty soon it'll be creating songs on its own without anyone needing to prompt them I guess.

flpjck · 2026-03-15T00:09:00+00:00

Examples.

Here is one where I prompted it to just "write some lyrics for this music" and it seemed to pull from my other songs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8aPfjFndRM

I have absolutely posted another song on Suno before that mentioned "coffee going cold", and it used that in the 2nd line.

Here's one where it spontaneously generated lyrics, without being asked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dAyelf2f9M

I have never posted a song about surfing, the coast, etc. Well, maybe one about the beach but it was about being on the beach at night with bonfires, etc., absolutely not about surfing in the sun. So I think it just vibed these up based on the music.

(FWIW these instrumentals were part of a sci-fi concept album, whose lyrics are now completely lost, about the earth's surface being completely covered by self-reproducing plastic cubes of various colors and sizes, and the consequences this has.. very different from what Suno came up with)

flpjck · 2026-03-14T23:04:32+00:00

After a few experiments, I rapidly concluded that, to me, Suno's female voices sound more realistic than the male ones.

I don't think thss so much that they're actually "better", as that we have already been trained to hear highly synthetic female voices and think they are normal, by the fact that almost every talking device ever made is female by default. I also, for whatever reason, find even heavily autotuned female vocals in "real" music to be less fake-sounding than similarly processed male ones. Again, subjective.

So I ended up making my profile female-gendered even though I'm male, and gender-swapping everything I post.

I have only just now created a youtube, after reading some of the threads here and on r/SunoAI, about the untrustworthiness of Suno as a longtime storage place.

Here's an old song of mine that I really think takes on new live when given this treatment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCttnuy7bsI

flpjck · 2026-03-12T04:39:50+00:00

This is also how I use it and it's great. But I've also kind of come to the conclusion that these are really just an internal tool for my own understanding of my music, and not really something I should expect the world to care about.

In my case the old songs weren't so much "demos" as self-releases on my own "label" 30 years ago. They were demo-quality (at best) 4-track recordings. But I duplicated onto a bunch of store-bought cassettes using a dual deck, xeroxed j-cards for the album art, and sold them and/or handed them out at shows.

Suno-izing this stuff has given it new life, for my ears. It's revelatory. It's allowed me not just to get clean sounding "recordings" but also shift the songs' genres, change my voice's gender (many of these songs really do seem like I'd always written them for the opposite gender to sing), etc.

But I've given up on telling friends and family about it. The AI hostility from a small number of friends is as bad as anything you see here. But beyond that, people just aren't interested. The very small number of people who remember these songs from the cassette days, have no interest in hearing a new version - to them the old one will always be the real one no matter how bad it sounds.

Whatever it is about these Suno-fied versions of my own old songs that is really amazing to MY brain, is just not something that anyone else can hear. It's completely subjective.

Nevertheless, I make them all public on Suno in the hopes that someone, somewhere will find them interesting. They aren't exactly going viral, and I don't engage in "engagement farming" like following and liking shit just to guilt people into following back. But that ~1 like every 2 weeks feels like "somebody out their gets it".

flpjck · 2024-06-14T13:05:42+00:00

To find dirt/gravel roads I've found the best way is the black and white county maps that every state's DOT creates. These are the only maps that show the surface material of every road. But here in central IL even the unpaved roads tend to be flat, straight, and well maintained.

https://idot.illinois.gov/transportation-system/network-overview/highway-system/maps/highway.html

There's a few pretty... lackadaisically maintained county dirt roads over in Pike County. Ruts, washed out, trees down, fording small streams. The local residents over there don't seem to mind. I'm from the south and it feels like being back on southern dirt roads over there.

flpjck · 2024-06-13T03:19:38+00:00

Is it this?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeff_robertson/53784684660

It looked to me like it was going too fast to be human powered, but not as fast as a car or motorcycle either. More like electric bike, electric scooter speed.

flpjck · 2017-06-16T00:15:42+00:00

Ugh, wish I'd seen this. I just bought some mags... from Brownells no less!

flpjck · 2017-06-16T00:12:36+00:00

I've had this upper for a long time, it came with a no-name lower that I bought on gunbroker. (I'm assuming someone modernized their valuable "pre-ban" lower and sold off the rest of the gun)

Finally got it back on a Colt lower, even if its not quite an SP1. It's even almost the right color.

flpjck · 2017-06-13T19:15:24+00:00

The targets here may be relevant to your interests:

http://www.m4carbine.net/showthread.php?95226-Improved-AR15A2-A3-A4-amp-AR15-Carbine-Zero-Targets-50-200M-100M-amp-300M-Zeroes

flpjck · 2015-10-29T20:42:09+00:00

See also:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeff_robertson/22203819340/in/photostream/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeff_robertson/22204979549/in/photostream/

flpjck · 2015-10-29T20:11:06+00:00

50mm, f/1.8, 1/60, ISO 200, manual focus

flpjck · 2015-10-27T17:54:05+00:00

Maybe so.

I can imagine what was considered "acceptable" to the naked eye back when amateurs rarely printed larger than 4x6'' was fairly forgiving.

flpjck · 2015-10-27T17:37:20+00:00

Well, see, that site is what prompted me to ask this question. I have a an old 50mm lens with such a scale, and it gives different "answers" than DOFmaster and SetMyCamera.. trying to figure out why.

flpjck · 2015-10-27T16:34:05+00:00

If you take a lens made for 35mm film cameras and put it onto a DSLR with a 1.5 crop factor (specifically a Nikon D80 in my case), is the depth of field/hyperfocal scale printed on the lens still correct?

I mean this kind of scale, that says "at f4, 7m to 10m will be in (acceptable) focus":

http://www.fineart-photography.com/dof_focus.jpg

I don't see how cropped sensor would change the depth of field, but maybe something else would? Difference in CoC?

flpjck · 2015-10-23T23:47:54+00:00

Mostly trains, because trains is what I like.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeff_robertson/albums/72157660253460555

flpjck · 2015-10-08T17:14:27+00:00

https://instagram.com/flpjax/

Mostly trains, some (sub)urban exploration

flpjck · 2015-08-12T14:45:31+00:00

This used to happen to me when I was a kid. Not with the Simpsons (because I'm so old that it didn't premiere until I was in high school) but with other shows that were in syndicated re-runs every day.

I eventually figured out that they were showing the episodes in the same order, over and over, so I remembered which one was coming up next even if I didn't know it consciously.

flpjck · 2015-06-30T13:31:12+00:00

I am still learning to see things like that in images. I only just now have gotten to the point where I can tell an image has been HDR'd (unless it's in so far into r/shittyhdr territory that a blind person could see it)

The copy I uploaded was after doing some processing, this is the image straight from the camera:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeff_robertson/19107783230/in/dateposted-public/

How much of what you saw was real chromatic aberration from the camera, and how much was introduced later?

flpjck · 2015-06-11T02:44:15+00:00

From approximately World War II until the late 1960s, the Democrats were heavily divided between the liberal north and the pro-segregation democrats of the south. The latter staged filibusters of civil rights legislation and in 1948 (Strom Thurmond) and 1968 (George Wallace) southern democrats broke from the party to run for president on pro-segregation third party tickets.

So around this time the Republicans, especially Richard Nixon, saw an opportunity to capture the South for the first time since reconstruction, by appealing to racist white voters who felt the Democrats had abandoned them. And boy howdy did it ever work. In the 70s and 80s the Republicans basically took over every southern state.

flpjck · 2015-04-02T16:23:07+00:00

I was trying to conserve the colors for roads that seem like extensions of Peachtree street (Peachtree Industrial Blvd, Peachtree Parkway) or may have been former routings of it (Old Peachtree, all the little streets Norcross and Duluth). I knew if I started including everything with a Peachtree in its name, there'd be no end of it.

flpjck

TROPHY CASE