guygizmo

joined 11 months ago
 

The recent debacle with Plex has gotten me looking into alternatives again. However they have one really killer feature that, last I looked into it, had no alternatives, which is the sonic analysis features that you can use with Plexamp.

I'm specifically talking about the feature that scans each song in your music library (using a deep learning algorithm) and determines detailed metadata about its qualities like genre, instruments, types of vocals, mood, and other timbral qualities, and then lets you generate playlists based on this data. Here's the page detailing the feature.

My favorite so far is being able to create a "Sonic Adventure" playlist, which lets you pick two or more tracks and then generate a playlist of tracks between them that gradually moves from one track you picked to the next.

Has anyone made an attempt at an open source or self-hosted version of this so far? (Is there even an open source tool for scanning audio to obtain this sort of metadata?)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

Things like this is why I don't update.

It's not just an Apple thing, though they are the worst offender, especially because you can't roll back iOS updates. But with nearly every piece of software I work with now, updating is always one step forward, two steps back. I just want it to keep working the way it's working.

And before anyone jumps in and says "but... but... what about security updates???" to that I say, fuck it. With my threat model I don't need it, and I'd rather take whatever the minimal risk is than deal with my software constantly getting more aggravating with every update. What point is there in keeping software up-to-date if it stops working the way you need it to?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

More than that, I miss UI elements that could clearly be read at a glance. Buttons were bordered and outset and looked like buttons. Text fields were inset and looked like text fields. Title bars were always there for dragging windows. Different sections of UI used light and shadow to make their groupings read clearly. It all happened unconsciously because our brains are designed to notice things like that. And it all was beautifully consistent across the OS.

Skeuomorphism, at least in these specific regards, makes sense dammit!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago

I 100% agree with this. The yearly release cycle has been such a burden for me as a macOS developer. It's very, very difficult supporting so many macOS versions. Even just maintaining virtual machines, much less something like an external drive, that has up-to-date versions of them all is a huge pain!

I can understand why some mac devs just support the two latest major macOS versions. But then that leaves so many people behind that don't or can't update, and there are a ton of reasons not to update, especially with each macOS release incurring more technical debt, getting a little buggier, and making the UI a little worse (if not a lot worse).