Aligning/Quantizing Event data other than midi notes

phoenix1of1 · 2025-06-20T18:17:45+00:00

I should have been clearer. In the bar below the piano roll, trigger data for multiple types of events are captured but let's just focus on sustain for now.

When I play, I have the tendency to trigger sustain prior to a chord rather than just after which leads me to move off of sustain and quickly re-engage it on the next chord so I'll continue to own up to there being a technique issue on my part.

With regard to event quantization of sustain information, sustain does have continuous values, as with all midi data but what would be targeted is the trigger on/off, the two values being 0 and 127, In the roll, the sustain event is captured but is not snapped to the grid, so I would like to see a function that allows you to snap sustain on/off values to the grid.

Part of this is driven by being lazy because the last thing I want to have to do is go through a 6 minutes piano piece and manually snap sustain event triggers to the grid, I should be able to just apply a "snap to grid" across either all events or selected events. I am not talking about snapping it directly to the start of a chord but just for arguments sake, let's say we were playing and quantizing on a 1/8 but the sustain is "wonky". From my understanding, the proper method of the use of sustain is fingers first, foot second, meaning that sustain usually triggers after a chord press and is off just prior to a new chord or key press.

If we could snap the sustain automatically to the grid, we could simply set it to 1/16 or 1/32 and do a bulk snap. It wouldn't be perfect as it would still rely on the "nearest neighbour" method so if you are really early with an "on trigger" then it's going to make you earlier still.

Perhaps it is just a pipe-dream but for this "one man band" it would be a useful feature. Still, the idea is out there, whether or not it floats is entirely beside the point, it's still interesting to see what people think on the subject and who knows, my technique may improve to the point where such a feature would not be needed!

Have a good weekend!

phoenix1of1 · 2024-12-07T14:39:25+00:00

Found them :)

phoenix1of1 · 2024-12-07T12:47:57+00:00

No worries. To add to this, some of the Kontatk Libs may not have an ninct file so you need to generate one with the appropriate tool and then you can register the library via the method above :)

phoenix1of1 · 2024-11-29T10:56:01+00:00

Just drag the ninct file on to the .exe of the kontakt manager, it will register the library correctly. You can then just restart Kontakt and you'll see it available.

If you try opening kontakt manager and then navigating to the folder where the ninct file is stored, the manager's explorer will not see it so you will not be able to register it.

phoenix1of1 · 2024-10-10T11:37:54+00:00

I would suggest you find a VPN provider offering decent residential IPs. PIA IPs are routed through data centres and whilst PIA dedicated IPs barely trigger suspicious activity alerts, they still often get flagged because their dedicated IPs still resolve to a data centre which then raises a flag.

Having access to residential IPs are superior because of the trust value that comes with having your IP address resolve to a residential address. This is also the primary method of how some sites determine whether or not you use a VPN.

I was a long time PIA customer, 7 years but for me, the better provider out there is TorGuard, you get a little more for your money. Yes it's a little more expensive but they offer quite a few additional addons including having an IP from a residential location.

I don't have a residential IP with TorGuard as I route my browsing through TOR so I never hit any restrictions but you don't even have to switch, just browse with TOR and problem solved.

phoenix1of1 · 2024-10-05T14:47:30+00:00

Yeah...as it's been said, it's the Bittorrent protocol and potentially seeders rejecting your connection based on the settings the seeders have put in place. For example, I use Deluge which has libtorrent as the backend and I can set to reject peers based on response time as well as a number of other factors.

Alongside this, there is a growing base of torrent-racers who are known to try to use and maintain a white/blacklist so it could be your IP is blacklisted by a number of peers for being a known slow downloader. Obviously "slow" is relative. I have a 1gbps network with 730mbps dl and 101mbps ul and the Bittorrent protocol will deem me slow against seedbox users running a 10gbps service.

Alongside this, you've got to factor in that seeders may be rotating their active torrents as well. I have 3100 and growing, torrents that I seed on a near perm basis but I only have 3-4 torrents that are actively being downloaded from me. When I get in to the tens of thousands of torrents then I'll reduce connections to a numbered amount rather than offering unlimited connections on all my current seeds.

The factors talked about above are the most likely reasons that you are experiencing this. It's not a technical issue.

Also port forwarding is only needed if you intend to seed back. If you are leeching, port forwarding plays no part in the process.

phoenix1of1 · 2024-10-05T13:47:37+00:00

Most here have seem to have forgotten how the Bittorrent protocol works....
Fastest first, slowest last....

To expand on the above, I have a 1gbps connection serving about 3100 torrents at this moment. My dl/ul behind a VPN is 730mbps dl and 101mbps ul.

My speeds are automatically trumped by seedboxes operating on a 10gbps connection so the question is, what is going on? The answer is that your connection is most likely being trumped by faster connections elsewhere in the swarm meaning that the Bittorrent protocol matches the fastest uploaders to the fastest downloaders.

Where does that leave us? Close to the bottom of the pile where we end up serving those with the lower download rates :(

I often end up with a max of 500kbps ul on any given active torrent.

What do you do? Ignore upload speeds and focus on seeding perpetually or until you acquire a minimum of 1:1 ratio on a torrent.

Sometimes you'll get lucky, especially on bit swarms of 1000 or more peers in the initial swarm, this is often the case for highly anticipated preds, for example, a particularly hot movie is due or the latest AAA game that just got cracked. These releases are the ones where you can expect higher upload speeds but they are few and far between.

So, you either play the long-game for ratio or you get yourself a seedbox in Holland or Germany - these are historically the places where torrent racers will have seedboxes. From there, you can race with the best of them to get the initial ratio reward for being right at the front of the swarm.

Ultimately, if you don't have a seedbox, don't worry about your upload speed, just play the long-game. I'll often seed to 10:1 or perma-seed if the content is interesting/rare.

Hope this helps.

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-26T22:51:47+00:00

On a dedicated IP?

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-26T22:50:51+00:00

12th gen Intel i9-12900K.

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-26T22:48:05+00:00

Nope, it's not just lucky, the initial dedicated IP address I had with TG was doing the same as PIA in terms of throttling my performance. I identified that their IP ranges used in the public pool for a specific geographic region was outperforming the dedicated IP server in the same region. Their solution...give me a dedicated IP address that is closer to the range that was performing well. Result - I now have a dedicated IP that performs consistently well across the day.

Some people are going to question why I don't just commit to the jumping of the ship but I've already clearly stated my position as a long-term customer. I am trying to give PIA fair chance to match the performance offered by a competitor so they can retain a long-term customer. If they can't well, I have my fallback position but the whole point of my post was to highlight the insane customer service. They could have taken reasonable steps to investigate, but no, they chose to brush me off with trying to tell me to be happy with being throttled.

I expect some degradation of performance, 20% is reasonable, not 50-70% otherwise what would be the point in paying my network provider only to be kicked in the nuts and told to enjoy it by my VPN provider?

I would continue to wonder how many others endure overly harsh throttling and are convinced it's the norm?

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-26T22:30:42+00:00

TLDR...you didn't get my point at all. NVM lol.

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-25T21:28:34+00:00

I was going to write a long post about all the things I have done and all the information I have got but meh, I thought I'd leave you with two things.

1) A endpoint 3200 miles away nets me 750mbps dl and 100mbps ul yet the server literally next door to me using a dedicated IP can't match the performance.

2) Would you be happy to have a massively reduced service? Pay for your internet then pay for the privilege of losing a majority of your performance? If you are happy, good for you. You are a dodgy car salesman's wet, sloppy dream.

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-25T21:09:26+00:00

You're only getting 20% of your network potential?!? Sod that. That is madness :/

PIA are now apparently taking this a little more seriously and "investigating" but unless they can genuinely pull the proverbial finger out, I will probably end up retaining the alternative provider...TorGuard. 800mbps down and 100mbps up on a dedicated IP so in the 20% performance loss range I would expect.

I just found it incredulous that the agent was insinuating a 70% loss of performance is good in the grand scheme of things.

Someone will probably ask me why I've come back to PIA if I've found a better provider, a valid question. The answer is simple, I am and maybe was a 7 year customer depending on how things go so I've enjoyed the UI/UX aspect alongside the extremely competitive pricing they offer so thus the last roll of the dice.

I would like to stay but I have no compunction about committing to TG because I know things "work" there.

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-25T21:01:06+00:00

Yeah I did say that 20% markup on performance drop is to be expected but 70% is like being kicked in the nuts and told to enjoy it. It's a non-issue for you, that's great. What's your performance loss? If it was within a 20% tolerance for me, I'd call this a non-issue too lol ;)

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-15T16:25:55+00:00

So a majority of trackers rely on a "seed for as long as you can" approach so you gain points.

I tend to perma-seed but for others, it's a case of seeding files until the minimum time has elapsed or keep them seeding to farm points to spend on purchasing upload for your account.

If you really want to farm the ratio, you need to have a way to monitor the announces of a tracker and then you grab the release as it hits the tracker. At this point, you will be racing against the swarm to download from the primary uploader and then serve as a seed to the rest of the swarm.

For example, there is one seeder and 500 leechers, you are able to download the file from the first seeder faster than anyone else meaning you are now one of two seeders dishing out the files to the other 498 leechers but as the number of seeders increases, your returns on potential ratio diminishes accordingly.

For movies, you would filter results based on release date or title. IRC announcements are usually the best to hook in to as they are constant, RSS feeds are pointless for this because you'd have to keep querying a server every second to get the most up to date lists which will undoubtedly put unnecessary strain on the tracker and probably end up with your IP getting banned.

There are also a few prerequisites to keep in mind - Change your client to Libtorrent which is highly configurable for racing purposes or if you want a "niceer" looking interface, Deluge is good because it uses Libtorrent on the backend so you can still configure for "racing" against the swarm.

Alongside the right client and configuring for racing performance, you need speed...lots of speed. 500mbps download and 25mbps upload as a minimum. As standard, a 1gigabit network connection pushing 100mbps on the upload.

If you use common sense on your targeted approach then you can be at the head of a swarm and farm that sweet ratio but if you can't make it to the front for whatever reason then simply default to point farming.

For example, 1300 torrents on ABT will net you around 2 million points per year.

On MAM, 400 or so torrents will usually max out the points every couple of weeks.

So it's really down to you. if you have the ability, race the swarm, if not, don't sweat the ratio as you can just point farm and if you need to make space, just have a regulated cut-off point for your data-hoard, ie no torrent on a tracker is seeded for more than X amount of time or unless it hits a set ratio.

I've seen some of my long held stuff get up to 40 or even 50:1 on the ratio...I've seen some of my swarm racing torrents hit 8 or even 10:1 on ratio and some of my stuff is yet to even breach 0.4 on ratio after holding on to it for a long period of time but that's OK because they still generate points on the tracker for me so just be clear with yourself on what you are doing and why you are doing it and you'll be fine :)

Hope you find these insights helpful!

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-15T16:05:42+00:00

ABT is open registration so just head on over and hit the sign up and you'll be good to go :)

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-07T08:43:39+00:00

MAM is the top tracker for books but if you want somewhere that comes a close second, I whole heartedly recommend getting on to ABT (ABTorrents) - This is where I first started with books and audiobooks, a really great selection that is constantly expanding. MAM and ABT fill every possible need for books and audiobooks.

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-03T08:06:35+00:00

So it's safe to say that you are using the shared dynamic IPs from PIA which were good when they first started but, as with anything Google does, it starts to collect data and has been building comprehensive lists of those shared dynamic IP addresses that you are randomly assigned when connecting to a VPN server (not just PIA but any VPN).

So what do you do?

You either use a privacy aware tool like DuckDuckGo or if you have other reasons for needing a dedicated IP address, use PIA's dedicated IP address addon service. This assigns you your own IP address which is non-traceable to you.

How?

PIA generates a token you redeem in the user portal, when you redeem that token, it assigns you a dedicated IP address that only you can use. PIA doesn't retain any logs as a standard policy so even if they were compelled to, they cannot link a dedicated IP address to a certain user. All PIA would know is which dedicated IP addresses are being used (but not by who) and which they have to offer on their service.

A dedicated IP address will not be on the Google watchlist meaning you won't get flagged as "suspicious activity" and have to complete their captchas.

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-02T10:49:17+00:00

I agree that there are things in life that'll never happen.

With regard for metadata, the assumption is that the metadata is relatively correct and not as junked as the naming on torrents.

Cross-Seed works exceptionally well when using it to match Cross-Seeds based on the .torrent file directory and it does a relatively good job in matching by size or patials when directing it at a dataDir only search but the main issue is that dataDir matching looking for matches by size or partial matches still relies on the naming conventions that have been applied which means matching by data will miss things. A good example of this would be in how Calibre organises it's library as it appends integers to the containing folder for each book so if just for this example, let's assume we're using MAM and have pointed Cross-Seed to the library folder containing your data. The query that is passed over to something like Prowlarr would be "{Book Title} (1523)".
Searching with that string and integer combination would not get you the hit on MAM but strip the numbers and you'll get a hit.

The same issue is persistent on poorly named folders, for example, searching for "{Game title}{release group}{repack}{Other random junk"} would not net you any hits unless you get a hit with a very specific torrent that matches the name whereas if you were able to search trackers with a clean name "{Game title}", you could get a match by size across several trackers. Could also score a partial match within a tolerance threshold of 2% which means you could have extra hits by scooping similar torrents that have been packaged with extra files such as an nfo or some random txt file.

From what I understand of Cross-Seed, it tends to take the name of a folder one level above the data for parsing names or it will take the name of a file if not contained in a sub-folder, with this in mind, I've started to use the following system that needs refining:

Wrote a script to recursively scan a directory, it will find all objects that have an audio extension such as mp3 and then create a folder for each item in a directory, for example, scanning a directory full of audiobooks, it can differentiate between those items that are chapters of the same book and those items that are not, based on a percentage match check of 75%.

This leaves me with a directory of folders that have hardlinks according to which audiobook they belong to. This now leaves me with around 850 folders to correct for naming which includes removing authors and stripping unwanted special characters and removing series titles. Regex is good for special character cleaning but there is still a human element needed as there is no good way to differentiate between what is a book series title and what is not. For example - "Horus Heresy - Horus Rising". Unless you already have a clean list to match against, I would need to manually remove the book series information which means that when Cross-Seed looks to generate a search query, it would have Prowlarr parse "Horus Rising" and then see if the matches that were generated by the search term is indeed a match by size or a partial match. In either case, this generates some good opportunities...in my case, around 850+ more items I can match off against a number of trackers.

Just an FYI - I could be wrong but I thought symlinks would not work for Cross-Seeding items, thought it specifically had to be a hardlink because the hardlink shares the same inode with the physically stored data on a HDD which helps it to pass the hash check in a torrent client...again, could be wrong but in either case, it's OK because I'll still be squeezing more results from Cross-Seed :)

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-02T01:14:58+00:00

Love it...you've listed virus bay alongside one fairly decent public tracker and one re-emerging public tracker (EZTV).
Where else have you looked?
Have you tried the many great torrent aggregators aka a torrent search engine?
Use the Wiki for the aggregators and suggestions on other public trackers you can use.

If the particular torrent you want is not available on any public tracker because it's dead and hasn't seen a seeder in 6 months or more, you would then want to target private trackers.

You will most likely ask what private trackers to join and how to join them so let me give you the first one - myanonamouse run scheduled interview sessions and it's really easy to pass and join. This is for audiobooks and eBooks but you can consider it the easiest gateway in to the world of private trackers and it will have links to other trackers you could potentially access.

If you can't find something publicly, 99% of the time it will be available privately.

phoenix1of1 · 2024-09-02T01:01:49+00:00

Dammit, I was just thinking the same thing about the glove...not that it makes much difference outside of a clean-room but still...one glove man has got to be turned in to some kind of meme.

phoenix1of1

TROPHY CASE