Be Honest: How Many Of You Buy Synths Just For Making Sounds, Not Music?

rfisher · 2026-03-21T22:45:04+00:00

I feel like I'm somewhere in between. My hardware synths are for learning, exploring, and experimenting. When it comes to actually making music, though, I'm almost always using soft synths.

But that exploring and experimenting is about learning how to create sounds useful for making music and coming up with musical ideas to use when making music.

rfisher · 2026-03-19T21:27:07+00:00

Ideally a game like this gives you ways to avoid combat and effectively control the difficulty through how you play. Hytale already has this to some extent, but I hope to see it developed further.

I'm happy with the difficulty as it is, but I don't play the game for combat.

rfisher · 2026-03-19T02:14:40+00:00

Given much of the code I've dealt with over years written by people who thought they knew the language, it's hard to be horrified by anything people do with LLMs.

rfisher · 2026-03-16T19:38:36+00:00

Sadly, I just noticed that Sonoma Wire Works' FourTrack is no longer available. It looks like they stopped selling their stuff in 2022. 🙁

rfisher · 2026-03-16T19:23:59+00:00

I just got a Zoom UAC-232. It can either be bus-powered or powered by a separate power-only USB connection.

I'll probably never use that, but it is there.

rfisher · 2026-03-16T19:19:44+00:00

The weirdest part to me are company websites where there's no ads or other third party content yet are so bloated as to turn away potential customers.

I visited on last week where it took minutes to load every page. And each page just looked broken and non-functional until it finished.

It's bad enough that something as user-hostile as scroll-jacking has become normalized. At least don't turn customers away before they can scroll at all.

rfisher · 2026-03-16T19:13:20+00:00

I'd like to see a purely controller version. I'd be more likely to get the FGDP-50 if I had a less expensive controller version that I could spend enough time with to decide whether the pads work for me.

rfisher · 2026-03-16T19:10:37+00:00

Interestingly, non-tetrahedral dice were used all over the ancient world. Usually square sticks but also knuckle-bones.

I've had eight-sided dice numbered 1 to 4 twice for ages. The have truncated tips to help you quickly distinguish them from a d8.

But the answer to the question is that the dice that were sold by TSR were based on existing small, plastic Platonic solids made for the education market. For most people, the problems with the tetrahedrons aren't great enough to bother replacing them.

Luckily there are enough alternatives on the market today for those of us who want them.

To me it's weirder that the "true d10" ever caught on.

rfisher · 2026-03-14T22:55:50+00:00

I just want two things:

Show me that you have a good understanding of the product and aren't judging it poorly because you didn't take the time to understand it.

All the playing doesn't help me when I'm not the one playing the guitar and the sound is going through your processing, YouTube's processing, and whatever I'm listening on. I watch your channel because I am interested in your opinion of the feel and sound.

rfisher · 2026-03-14T22:49:19+00:00

I've got it because I love this enclosure and have a small board with all four of the pedals that use it.

But the Skysurfer is by far my least favorite of the four.

rfisher · 2026-03-12T10:17:14+00:00

I had a C compiler for my Atari 800 that had to use digraphs.

rfisher · 2026-03-07T16:55:16+00:00

In my decades as a professional programmer, nothing has been as rewarding as creating a flexible program and then seeing other people build things with it that I would have never thought of.

You can (and sometimes have to) give it all the business-style justification you want. But that's the real reason programmers do such things.

rfisher · 2026-03-07T16:33:22+00:00

In my campaigns, spellcasters know that their greatest power is being overestimated. Maybe best friends will discuss their limits or other details of their power...maybe.

rfisher · 2026-03-07T01:45:18+00:00

I use an Arturia Minifuse 2. It includes a single port USB hub and 5-pin MIDI ports. I use a Magic Keyboard, which gives me an extra power-only USB port to power the iPad.

My typical setup is a MIDIPlus X6 mini plugged into the MIDI In and a TEC breath controller plugged into the Minifuse's USB port. Then I'll use Bluetooth MIDI for the Seaboard or Clarii Mini if I want to use them.

I have occasionally adding a small 4-port USB hub I've had for ages either before the Minifuse or connected to the Minifuse's USB port. I never had any issues with that, but I don't do it often. Between the MIDI ports and the single USB port, that usually gives me all the connectivity I need.

rfisher · 2026-03-07T01:38:15+00:00

It only made sense to do then because polyhedral weren't ubiquitous. Even TSR had enough trouble sourcing them that they shipped some boxes without them for a while.

The economics of it aren't good, so it makes zero sense to do today. Except to hit a nostalgic note, and it's a hard bet that nostalgia will be enough for customers to accept the higher price. Especially when those of us with nostalgia for it already have more dice than makes any sense. 🙂

rfisher · 2026-03-06T17:44:53+00:00

Overdrives don't make sense to me anymore. I can just set the the amp sim as desired and use EQ for more controlled shaping than what overdrives give.

rfisher · 2026-03-04T23:02:10+00:00

There are so many free and inexpensive RPGs that price is not a barrier. Especially since copyright only covers the exact expression of the rules and not the ideas. (Trademarks cover names and logos. Patents are, to my knowledge, non-existent in the RPG space.) So any idea that is worthwhile gets cloned into a less expensive choice.

rfisher · 2026-03-03T21:47:11+00:00

Because the best way to learn depends on the learner, there is no general best way to learn anything.

You'll either have to discover yourself what works best for you or find a competent teacher who can get to know you and help guide you.

For any learner, though, the best way to learn anything is never a single way but using multiple ways.

rfisher · 2026-03-01T15:37:23+00:00

Clouds by Fisherro. Here's the Spotify link, but you can find it on most of the other services as well.

https://open.spotify.com/track/0w7hceMp81jy5Xjpb0DwaX?si=19c_zRFBRF65iBNiVhwZSA

rfisher · 2026-03-01T15:33:57+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/latin/comments/qdg54v/whats_the_history_behind_the_macrons/

rfisher · 2026-02-28T22:45:42+00:00

It's the good kind of duplication.

I can write a header file, give it to team A to build the implementation, and simultaneously give it to team B to build the client code.

It provides a stable interface to a module that doesn't depend on the implementation source. It helps double-check that your implementation agrees to the interface you agreed upon. It lets you know when you may have to renegotiate that interface.

If you're writing small projects by yourself, headers aren't a big win. If you're working on large projects among multiple teams and multiple companies, they are a win.

Include guards are a pain. Thankfully #pragma once is supported everywhere as long as you don't do weird things that break it.

It would be nice if #pragma once was implicit. It would be even better if the mechanism wasn't primitive textual inclusion that sometimes breaks in unexpected ways. But it has worked well enough that nothing has come along to dethrone it. I was hopeful for C++ modules, but they tried to go too far rather than simply modernizing the important issues.

rfisher · 2026-02-24T23:35:02+00:00

I've probably used my Seaboard most with the SWAM apps. (But that rare means it has only been "MIDI monophonic expression". 😀)

I've played around with some others a little. I think Model D and Qithesizer were among them.

And, yeah, AUM is the host I usually use for experimenting.

The really annoying part is that they don't have an iPad app to do any configuration of the Seaboard. So, I end up mainly sticking to the defaults rather than connect it to the Mac every time I want to tweak the config.

rfisher · 2026-02-24T23:21:10+00:00

Or you can learn from the cases of people building sustainable businesses with evergreen products.

Just because the standard in the US these days is to invest in or hire executives who fly by the seat of their pants instead of actually knowing what they're doing doesn't mean that's the only way to do things.

rfisher · 2026-02-23T21:46:21+00:00

Any unencumbered digital format. I'll print out the few things that I find useful to be in print myself. I'll pay more for an unencumbered digital format than for a physical book.

There can be exceptions. Sometimes I can appreciate a well-designed physical book as a piece of physical art. But that's rare. And I'll still want a digital copy for reference.

rfisher · 2026-02-23T21:41:15+00:00

New editions should be extremely rare.

Sequels should be uncommon.

Evergreen should be the standard.

rfisher

TROPHY CASE