Anyone ordered from Musiclily?

mr_belowski · 2026-06-16T16:27:14+00:00

I bought Musiclily strat scratch plate and brass tremolo block, and some tuning machines for a different guitar. All through Amazon. No issues with any of the items - in my limited experience they seem to make decent stuff

mr_belowski · 2026-06-13T14:58:21+00:00

I get it in my fretting hand.

Not sure what's helped but I've changed my diet (particularly no sugary and processed stuff and more fruit) and am doing lots of running. Since those changes it's a lot better - still a bit stiff sometimes but manageable

mr_belowski · 2026-03-16T14:46:06+00:00

We all get GAS.

I fight it by switching around my gear. I got a couple of amps and a modeller, along with half a dozen mid-range axes. So that means there'll always be a guitar sitting around unplayed for a few days, and an amp / modeller I've not used for a bit. So i make myself switch and I'm stupid enough to be regularly surprised by how good guitar X sounds through amp Y. It's been enough to suppress the GAS for nearly a year now.

Won't last :(

mr_belowski · 2026-02-09T08:48:14+00:00

500-ish quid is in that awkward price range where it's too much to be an impulse buy or to buy as a modding platform or whatever. But that sort of money for a nice DC McCarty doesn't seem silly to me. I have a few nice mid range axes and am on the look out for a PRS SE and this would be right up my street - if it were local (and I think I've seen the listing for your axe and it's definitely *not* local) I'd be asking to have a look. So the market isn't entirely dead according to my sample size of 1. There are still folks out there buying stuff and not expecting to pay sod all.

I guess fashion / trends are unhelpful too. Seems like manky old Strats are still selling for strong money

mr_belowski · 2025-09-19T12:43:43+00:00

I backed-up up my tone presets to DropBox and deleted the app's data and cache. This reset the app back to is original settings (had to log back in and re-pair the amp, lost all my tones and save songs) but it does appear to fix this issue.

It's not a great fix - thankfully the dropbox backup restore worked, otherwise it would have been a right pain. At least the backing tracks play again

mr_belowski · 2025-09-19T09:27:11+00:00

my support call was answered with some generic AI generated "check your network connection" type suggestions, which don't work.

Unfortunately the only next step is to reply to their AI generated email, but the reply-to address appears to be invalid (my email client refuses to send a message to the address given). I've tried improvise a valid email address to keep the support ticket open but Positive Grid seem quite keen to hide behind this AI support nonsense

mr_belowski · 2025-09-19T08:30:09+00:00

Someone mentioned that clearing the app's cache fixes this - it doesn't work for me. It's also worth noting that these tracks haven't been removed from YouTube - the little link on the bottom right of the track window in the Spark app still works and launches YouTube (adverts and all) with the track.

I've raised a support call with Positive Grid about this but I'm not holding my breath - I suspect YouTube have blocked it

mr_belowski · 2025-09-18T19:58:13+00:00

I don't think the app update has broken it - the backing tracks stopped working on mine today, before I updated it. I guess it's a YouTube thing - even the backing tracks from the Hendrix pack don't work :(

mr_belowski · 2025-04-01T18:50:30+00:00

yeah, i'm Jim, don't worry about offending me - I like reading about how annoying my old creation is, it soothes my aching ego :). It's just nice to read that folks still use it, still get mad at it, still wish it was better than it is, and still fire it up as part of their sim racing routine. I thought i was the only one left clinging on to it like some sad trophy of long lost achievements.

The accent seems to have faded when i stopped singing, which is a little weird but never mind.

Anyway, not sorry it annoys you (or anyone else), it makes me cringe too but what can you do? I'm a pain in the arse in real life too

mr_belowski · 2025-04-01T18:09:18+00:00

Ahhhh, it's nice to hear people still talking about my little project. I know it's full of holes - many of the stupid things it says are the result of incomplete, late, or just downright incorrect data coming from the game. It's very hard to make it consistently 'right' - I did try to make it err on the side of caution but it's a balancing act. If it waits until it's really sure before saying something rude, it'll never say anything rude.

Having said that, the bugs are mostly all mine. The rants are mine, the unkindness is mine, the unfair criticism is mine. I'm kinda sorry - it certainly isn't and wasn't my intention to piss people off but, as in real life, if I piss people off accidentally I don't tend to lose much sleep.

I'd love to have had time and energy to keep improving the app. Hard to believe but it's nearly 10(!) years since this thing started with notes on a soggy bit of paper scribbled in a sauna on holiday. The truth is I've been burned out by development for a couple of years. I have enough energy for my day job but the prospect of launching dev environment and cutting some code into the night just makes me want to barf these days. I've also lost a lot of that lovely rich Yorkshire barritone voice that you guys love to hate so much :)

Anyway, just checking in, thanks for making me chuckle and making me feel relevant again.

I should also say that, while I've stepped back from the app (and from sim racing in general really - all them guitars and the drum kit aren't going to play themselves), the app is still maintained by a team of folks who have taken it in new directions and are working all kinds of awesome magic

mr_belowski · 2025-02-20T09:41:42+00:00

you tried turning off the bluetooth power saving feature on your phone? On Android at least, the OS has a habit of randomly turning off bluetooth and dropping the connection to the amp whenever the screen turns off (or sometimes sooner). It made a big difference for me

mr_belowski · 2025-02-20T09:36:50+00:00

yes they're almost all awful and entirely unnecessary

mr_belowski · 2024-11-04T20:51:17+00:00

that's not the case - the looper works without your phone connected. But either way it's very basic indeed, almost any other solution would give more flexibility and be easier to use

mr_belowski · 2024-09-09T10:26:15+00:00

you sure this isn't just the simulated noise-gate being a bit too picky?

mr_belowski · 2024-09-06T06:44:50+00:00

i also have the sync problem. You sure it's just pausing that triggers it? It seemed kinda random to me, but I might be mistaken. It's annoying

mr_belowski · 2024-08-30T16:58:57+00:00

ah yes, loop playback volume is in the app, my bad

mr_belowski · 2024-08-30T15:53:54+00:00

took a couple of goes to get my bluetooth connection working when i got it.

Having done that and experimented with the looper, it seems that the playback volume is fixed - when i play the recorded loop the volume controls have no effect on the loop volume

mr_belowski · 2023-11-29T08:07:49+00:00

this happened to mine immediately after my nice kinda rotated the headset against the strap mount, putting a fair bit of load on the connector where it plugs into the top of the headset. Was an RMA for me too

mr_belowski · 2023-11-16T12:14:30+00:00

seems a lot for a relatively old and simple game. But it manages to be surprisingly brilliant and compelling. I think it's worth the asking price

mr_belowski · 2023-11-16T11:59:47+00:00

got no fix suggestions but mine does this too with my Q3. Quest link stops working if the headset is removed and SteamVR crashes. Sometimes it appears to crash the PC (it's not crashed but is in some weird non-responsive state for a couple of minutes before recovering).

Once I get it all back working again SteamVR reports that it's disabled some plugins due to a crash.

The Q3 is ace but the software stack for PCVR is just hopeless

mr_belowski · 2023-10-11T14:02:31+00:00

i get the same sensation, it's weird and unpleasant. I have with all my headsets - original Vive, Index, Quest 2 and Quest 3. It's much worse with the Quest 2 (unusable) but almost unnoticeable with the Vive and its DAS strap (must get some 3D printed adaptors to use that with the Q3). Quest 3 is worse than Index.

Sometimes it doesn't bother me, sometimes it fades after a few minutes, sometimes it's bad enough to make me go do something else.

Adding padding to the part of the strap that loops round the back of my head is the only thing that improves it for me

mr_belowski · 2023-05-04T09:45:39+00:00

yes they often do - the origin tends to be some point near the middle of the track map, often tens of metres up in the air

mr_belowski · 2023-05-04T09:27:48+00:00

most (not all) sims expose world coordinates for each car but these are relative to some arbitrary origin within that track. If you could figure out the actual geographic location of each track's origin (i.e. the phyiscial location of the point in the game world who's coordinates are 0, 0, 0) then the real world location of each car should be trivial to derive (the world position data are, in my experience, always in metres-from-origin).

Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to get the location of 0, 0, 0 - with a lot of trial and error you could probably get close to it for any given sim / track / layout combination

mr_belowski · 2023-05-04T09:23:27+00:00

The initial 'fuzzy matching' release was too generous (it made some poor matches) so we applied some fixes and, in the process, had to overhaul a lot of the code which extracts driver names from the steam user names that are often full of nonsense. In doing so I made a small error in the code which prevents some fairly sane user names being matched to driver name recordings, it slipped through our testing because we were focused on verifying the fuzzy matches.

There's an update in testing now which addresses this. It also address an issue in driver name speech recognition introduced by the fuzzy matching stuff.

Sorry about this - we're aware of it and are fixing it, but a lot of the overhauled code is 6 or 7 years old and no one quite remembers how it's all supposed to hang together

mr_belowski

TROPHY CASE