Spleeter: Extract voice, piano, drums, etc. from any music track - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/deezer/spleeter <comment><USER2> For your listening pleasure, here's a full-length demo. I decided to use the Jonathan Coulton classic "Re Your Brains", because I can legally share and modify his music under its Creative Commons license.

First, the original:

[https://mwcampbell.us/tmp/spleeter-demo/jonathan-coulton- re-...](https://mwcampbell.us/tmp/spleeter-demo/jonathan-coulton-re-your- brains/original.mp3)

Now the derived stems:

Vocals: [https://mwcampbell.us/tmp/spleeter-demo/jonathan-coulton- re-...](https://mwcampbell.us/tmp/spleeter-demo/jonathan-coulton-re-your- brains/stems/vocals.mp3)

Accompaniment: [https://mwcampbell.us/tmp/spleeter-demo/jonathan-coulton- re-...](https://mwcampbell.us/tmp/spleeter-demo/jonathan-coulton-re-your- brains/stems/accompaniment.mp3)

Note: I'm not affiliated with this project or Mr. Coulton. I just think this is a cool project and wanted to share.

<comment><USER3> While it's a great technology, the result sounds somewhat robotic. On the original recording the voice sounds soft, but after separation it sounds like it is synthesized or passed through a vocoder, something is missing. The voice contains pieces of strumming sound. Guitar also sounds "blurred", as if someone cut an object from the picture and blurred the cut to make it less visible. Clap sound is distorted, on the original recording it sounds the same, but after separation it sounds different every time, as if it was filtered or compressed with low bitrate.

It is amazing how the ear manages to distinguish all the sounds without distortion.

<comment><USER4> > While it's a great technology, the result sounds somewhat robotic.

That's like complaining about how bad the pig plays the violin. This is absolutely incredible. The complexity level for this problem is right off the scale and the software does a passable job of it. Given some time and more training data and a few more people working on it this has serious potential.

<comment><USER5> I think you meant how well the pig paints. [1] [2]

[1] [https://pigcasso.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/12/7.jpg](https://pigcasso.org/wp- content/uploads/2018/12/7.jpg) [2] Also, I am not affiliated with anything in particular that has been mentioned, or with the pig.

<comment><USER4> I think the original was in relation to pigs dancing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I gave a talk at pycon this year about dsp [1], specifically some of the complexities surrounding this. I came across a few other ml projects that claimed to do this as well, and the biggest hold up is getting enough properly trained data, tagged appropriately, in order to let the models train correctly. in the git repo of this project they also explicitly state you need to train on your own data set, though you can use their models of your like. YMMV. I will love to try this out, as it's definitely a complex bit of audio engineering. That said, i loved learning everything i did preparing for my talk and need to finish up some other parts of the project to get the jukebox working... Maybe this will help :)

1\. [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fevxy-s0vo0](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fevxy-s0vo0)

<comment><USER7> Seems like most music (from the 70s on at least) is recorded multi-track and the data is out there, just not accessible to anybody. If you ever watch Rick Beato videos, he takes classic songs and isolates vocal/drum/etc. tracks all the time, I'm not sure how he has access to them: [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW0NGgv1qnfzb1klL6Vw9...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLW0NGgv1qnfzb1klL6Vw9B0aiM7ryfXV_)

But you probably don't need to bother with old recordings since there is SO MUCH music being produced via tracking software right now I feel like it should be possible to get a pretty big dataset - the difference being, of course, professional production that affects how all these things sound in the final mix.

Although... if you have enough songs with separated tracks, couldn't you just recombine tracks and adjust the settings to create a much, much broader base for training? Just a dozen songs could be shuffled around to give you a base of 10,000+ songs easily enough. That might lead to a somewhat brittle result but it would be a decent start.

<comment><USER8> Rick says in one of his videos that he and some of his buddies have got old copies of the original source (separated) tracks, and they kind of pass them around between each other.

I find that pretty amazing given the litigiousness of some in the music industry, but there we are.

Side note: I discovered Rick Beato a few months ago and I've watched heaps of his videos. It's really fascinating hearing old classics torn down to their constituent parts. Here's one of my favourites of his: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynFNt4tgBJ0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ynFNt4tgBJ0) (Boston - More than a feeling).

<comment><USER9> Rick Beato is excellent. Nahre Sol and Adam Neely also do great analyses of things. Adam in a more theory oriented way and Nahre in a more feeling and composition focussed way; "Funk as digested by a classical musician" for example looks at funk to try and find the key structures of the style which illuminates things I might not have noticed otherwise.

<comment><USER10> Also 8 bit music theory has very solid video essays on varying compositional concepts that are reflected using game music. I actually find his work most consistently satisfying. Neely and Beato are great but lower s/n ratio. Nahre not enough watches to say but thumbs up for her, too.

Don't forget JazzDuets's channel. His content seems to be most mature and uses actual playing a lot to tune your ear. I find him actually a bit too advanced for my level but I like a lot his very humble and friendly personal touch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is very timely. I've been working for about 3 months now on a utility that transforms mp3's to midi files. It's a hard problem and even though I'm making steady progress the end is nowhere in sight. This will give me something to benchmark against with for instance voice accompanied by piano. Thank you for making/posting this.

For an idea how this project is coming along:

[https://jacquesmattheij.com/toccata.mp3](https://jacquesmattheij.com/toccata.mp3)

Yes, it's terrible :) This particular file the result of the following transformations:

midi file -> wav file (fluidsynth)

wav file -> midi file (my utility)

midi file -> wav file (fluidsynth once more)

wav file -> mp3 file (using lame)

Of course it also works for regular midi files (piano only for now). The reason why I use the workflow above is that it gives me a good idea how well the program works by comparing the original midi file with the output one.

But I did not yet have a way to deal with piano/voice which is a very common combination so this might really help me.

Possible applications: automatic music transcription, tutoring, giving regular pianos a midi 'out' port, using a regular piano as an arranger keyboard, instrument transformation and many others.

Having fun!

Edit: I've done a little write-up: [https://jacquesmattheij.com/mp3-to- midi/](https://jacquesmattheij.com/mp3-to-midi/)

<comment><USER11> Just FYI in case you weren't aware - Ableton Live and several other DAWs have this capability built in. It's far from perfect, but great for humming a melody and then quickly turning it into MIDI.

<comment><USER12> There's a pretty cool library from Googles Magenta team that does piano transcription pretty well. [https://magenta.tensorflow.org/onsets- frames](https://magenta.tensorflow.org/onsets-frames)

They say it's only really good for piano, but I definitely use it for all kinds of samples. Great for inspiration

<comment><USER4> So, I used it to run the same toccata test, here are the results:

The Magenta code:

f_measure 71.56 precision 65.75 recall 78.49 accuracy 55.72

My little batch of code:

f_measure 77.74 precision 93.40 recall 66.57 accuracy 63.58

Interpreting the results is tricky, they are obviously better on 'recall' but that is at the expense of being _much_ less precise which gives a much better result for my code; besides it is nicer to listen to because there are far fewer spurious notes.

My code also runs about 100 times as fast and uses very little in terms of resources. So, rather than being depressed it looks like I'm on to something :)

<comment><USER12> Oh wow that's extremely promising! Yeah the magenta thing destroys my browser when I run it. Still feels like magic though haha. I would be extremely interested in some other options so good luck!

<comment><USER4> Thank you! If you have any files you want me to test with then feel free to send them, email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> messed around with the 2stem model for a bit and it's reasonably good. I think phonicmind is still a bit better - phonicmind tends to err on the side of keeping too much, while the 2stem model tries to isolate aggressively and often damages the vocal as a result (distorting words by losing some harmonics, or losing quiet words entirely)

example:

[https://files.catbox.moe/wjruiv.mp3](https://files.catbox.moe/wjruiv.mp3) (phonicmind)

[https://files.catbox.moe/uuzot3.mp3](https://files.catbox.moe/uuzot3.mp3) (spleeter 2stem)

you can hear spleeter does better at actually taking out the bass drums, but phonicmind _never_ loses or distorts any part of the vocal, while 2stem occasionally sounds like singing is through metal tube (harmonics are missing). will try to read instructions more carefully and see if there's some way to fix.

<comment><USER14> For those who, like me, hadn't heard of PhonicMind before, it's an online service at [https://phonicmind.com/](https://phonicmind.com/) that charges $4 to $1.5 per song to separate out vocals, drums, bass, and the rest of the sounds. You can upload any audio file to that website and get a 30-second preview of separated parts for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> An interesting alternative approach for instrument sound separation is to use a fused audio + video model. So, given that you also have video of the instruments being played, you can perform this separation with higher fidelity.

I was fascinated by the work done by "The Sound of Pixels" project at MIT.

[http://sound-of-pixels.csail.mit.edu/](http://sound-of-pixels.csail.mit.edu/)

<comment><USER16> That's quite clever but not really practical : instruments heard in most music produced today aren't "played" by humans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Gave this a go, it's an easy install with pip, and results are pretty quick even on an old macbook. Splits into 2stems (vocals/accompaniment) on some random songs I chose actually quite good using the pretrained models provided. Of course, ripping the vocals out of the accompaniment takes out a good chunk of the middle frequencies so some songs sound a bit wonky. Worth a play if you are interested.

<comment><USER18> Same thoughts here. I ran _Thriller_ , _Alligator_ by Of Monsters and Men, and _In Hell I 'll be in Good Company_ by The Dead South on the 2 / 5 / 4 stems, respectively. Impressive results. Definitely agree that some of the middle frequencies show some error.

It would be really cool to create "music mappers"/life sounds tracks like what you can do with pictures & art styles (e.g. [https://medium.com/tensorflow/neural-style-transfer- creating...](https://medium.com/tensorflow/neural-style-transfer-creating-art- with-deep-learning-using-tf-keras-and-eager-execution-7d541ac31398))

<comment><USER19> known nothing about the results, i suspect that mid-ranges are poorer mainly because human frequency response is most sensitive towards mid-range aka vocal-pitch frequency

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Non-open source products that also separate vocals from music if you need something more "professional".

One-click process: Xtrax Stems 2 ([https://audionamix.com/technology/xtrax- stems/](https://audionamix.com/technology/xtrax-stems/))

Professional: ADX Trax Pro 3 ([https://audionamix.com/technology/adx-trax- pro/](https://audionamix.com/technology/adx-trax-pro/))

Both products use a server which have a much larger pre-trained models. The professional one has added features such as handling sibilance, GUI to edit note following as a guide for the models, and an editor tool for extracting using harmonics.

(Note: I don't work for this company. I do pay for / use their products, and I also happen to know someone who works there.)

</comment><comment><USER21> I wonder how it would fare on Pink Floyd's "Sheep", where vocals seamlessly transform into instrumentals and it's impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-oJt_5JvV4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-oJt_5JvV4) (skip to around 1:40)

</comment><comment><USER22> Interesting to read Thomas Dolby's thoughts on music/technology interfaces-- particularly with VR [https://semiengineering.com/thomas-dolbys-very- different-vie...](https://semiengineering.com/thomas-dolbys-very-different- view-of-progress/)

</comment><comment><USER23> I'd love to see how this compares with Celemony Melodyne. As far as I've been able to determine, Melodyne doesn't use ML, but it's hard to find out exactly what it _does_ use.

Either way, an open source competitor to Melodyne is a welcome addition!

<comment><USER24> That's the second time I've seen someone mention Melodyne for separating vocals from a full song source - I don't think that's something it can do? Melodyne is for tuning vocals / instruments & correcting timing on already isolated tracks.

<comment><USER13> melodyne's editing interface lets you remove different notes from a polyphonic track. so if it's just vocals + other tonal sounds, you can manually remove the other tonal sounds. example: [https://youtu.be/2ZjdDatxTaQ?t=83](https://youtu.be/2ZjdDatxTaQ?t=83)

<comment><USER25> Hmm, never tried that with melodyne myself and the video you posted isn't a great example of an accurate vocal extraction - those are more like vocal chops and are already pretty dirty to begin with. Based on my experience with Melodyne, I'd be surprised if you could cleanly extract a plain singing vocal without tons and tons of work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Is the paper, "Spleeter: A Fast And State-of-the Art Music Source Separation Tool With Pre-trained Models", available yet? What is the methodology?

<comment><USER13> they made an extended abstract for ismir: [http://archives.ismir.net/ismir2019/latebreaking/000036.pdf](http://archives.ismir.net/ismir2019/latebreaking/000036.pdf)

methodology is a separate u-net per instrument type to predict a soft mask in spectrogram space (time x frequency), then they apply that mask to the input audio. fairly standard.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I look forward to a day I can click a button to watch videos online without any unnecessary and distracting background music (though it would be better if there were an option and precedent to offer unornamented narrative in video players). The next step after this would be to have live 'music cancelling' headphones for the grocery store (if such a thing still exists).

<comment> swagasaurus-rex Wow. Office background noise mute.

The headphones can filter out speech that isn't above a certain threshold. Coworkers nearby can be heard loud and clearly.

Music can play at volume then quiet itself when it detects a person speaking directly to you.

Maybe even a training button to inform it that it is false-positive-ing background noise, or true negative and silencing a co worker you would like to hear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is incredible. I made an example using David Bowie's "Changes". A bit robotic, but even the echo is still present in the vocal track. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPlmrq_rAzQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPlmrq_rAzQ)

</comment><comment><USER29> Does it work with spoken word as well? My use case: improve podcast quality by extracting the vocals only, and leaving out all background and accidental noise.

<comment><USER30> Not free nor open source but you can try a plugin called izotope Rx for this purpose

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder how this compares to Open Unmix ([https://github.com/sigsep/open- unmix-pytorch](https://github.com/sigsep/open-unmix-pytorch)), that one calls itself state-of-the-art as well and is done in collaboration with Sony from what I see of their paper.

<comment><USER31> Oh I just found out their paper, [http://archives.ismir.net/ismir2019/latebreaking/000036.pdf](http://archives.ismir.net/ismir2019/latebreaking/000036.pdf). It's pretty competitive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tried it on "Halleluwah" by CAN, had to hear those drums:

[https://soundcloud.com/alezzzz/can-halleluwah-drums- extracte...](https://soundcloud.com/alezzzz/can-halleluwah-drums-extracted)

Finding drum breaks in music is very time consuming. This is gonna be amazing for music production. Think how 90s jungle would've been if they had access to every drum take ever

<comment><USER32> Wow, this is the isolated track I never knew I needed to hear.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The extracted vocals sound great! But the resulting accompaniment tracks I've heard so far (tried on a handful of songs) aren't of usable quality for most purposes where you'd want an instrumental track – they're too sonically mangled.

Since people are often interested in doing this for a handful of specific tracks and not necessarily en masse, I'd be curious about what a human- assisted version of this could look like and whether you really could get near-perfect results...

What if you explicitly selected portions of the track you knew had vocals, so it could (1) know to leave the rest alone and (2) know what the backing track for the specific song naturally sounds like when there's no singing happening? It could try to match that sonic profile more carefully in the vocal-removed version.

Or what if you could give it even more info, and record yourself/another singing (isolated) over the track? Then it would have information about what phonemes it should expect to find and remove (and whatever effects like reverb are applied to them).

</comment><comment><USER34> I am working on a product which makes use of this technology. I generate vocal pitch visualizations for karaoke

[http://pitchperfected.io](http://pitchperfected.io)

<comment><USER35> Cool - but your website needs some work. It looks like a landing page to gather interest rather than something backed by a real product. Show us some videos and singing, before and after, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Wait the implications of this are huge for electronic music DJs

<comment><USER37> The audio (^F soundcloud) sounds a little warbly... if that can be largely mitigated, then yes, remixes will never be the same

<comment><USER38> While not great, the phase smearing is orders of magnitude better than most vocal isolation plugins I've used. I only expect it to get better. Very cool!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is there anything like this for images? Meaning essentially trying to decompose back into photoshop layers. Wouldn't be feasible for lots of stuff that is completely opaquely covering something, but I'm thinking for things like recoloring a screen print, etc.

<comment><USER37> I have no idea how I managed to re-find these, but I did. Two recent moderately-related/relevant posts:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20978055](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20978055)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21220458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21220458)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Ah, so this should've been the answer to my ask HN [1].

;-)

Edit: I see someone added it in as an answer 14 hours ago. Well, you have my vote ^^

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21399838](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21399838)

</comment><comment><USER41> Played with it. The quality of the result is mostly dependent on the amount of clipping in the source file. Basically, all post-90s masters produce weird results with orcs singing in the background. And classics from 60s yield fantastic results.

<comment><USER42> Might be the training data?

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> This is awesome. I now have Guns'n'Roses playing in my office, and Axl Rose is a faint voice coming from the garage.

</comment><comment><USER44> I gave it a try with Megadeth's Holy wars[1], was expecting something like this[2] but got very deep audio. Not sure why but perhaps it's because bassist David Ellefson uses pick which gives the percussive sound and it suits to Megadeth.

Any parameter I could use with spleeter to get a similar output?

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d4ui9q7eDM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d4ui9q7eDM)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWkykQHsJ-Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWkykQHsJ-Y)

</comment><comment><USER45> I'm trying to find something to generate tracks without guitar. Then I can cover them with my guitar. Will this software help me?

<comment><USER46> depends? It splits it into 2 parts (vocal, everything else), 4 parts (drum, bass, vocal everything else), or 5 parts (drum, bass, vocal, piano, everything else). piano isolation is the weakest.

If you want to play along to drum + bass, then yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Can we use sample libraries to write, record and simulate desired stems for training? I guess the more naturally played the better?

</comment><comment><USER48> Not only are the results good, but the music is generated decently rapidly. The implications are clear: whoever wants to make a quick fortune on YouTube should start converting and uploading truckloads of songs as fast as possible. The demand is there. I could easily see that bringing in millions of views.

<comment><USER49> They'd still get tagged for copyright.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> On iOS, Chord AI [1] gives pretty good results for the guitar chords of any music surrounding the phone.

[1]: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chord- ai/id1446177109](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chord-ai/id1446177109)

<comment><USER51> That's sounds pretty nice! Anyone know an Android version? I just checked Yamaha Chord Tracker and MyChord, but both don't seem to be able to use the microphone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Can someone provide a demo link of source music vs. output?

<comment><USER18> I gave it a test using the project audio sample. Neat stuff. [https://soundcloud.com/thomas- roderick-836298141/sets/spleet...](https://soundcloud.com/thomas- roderick-836298141/sets/spleeter_splits)

<comment><USER53> Holy shit that works way better than I expected. The github project should link to this or a similar example, the technical description doesn't do it justice.

<comment><USER54> I really disagree. It sounds... awful. On par with other approaches, sure, but the main vocals sounds like a case study in digital artifacts and the accompaniment sounds like there's a filter automated over the track.

Far from useful.

<comment><USER53> Do you know of something superior?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> > Spleeter is the Deezer source separation library with pretrained models

Curious, what is Deezer using this for?

<comment><USER56> Gonna guess beat/mood/song analysis.

<comment><USER55> Yeah but they can use the raw song for that I suppose.

<comment><USER57> Easier way to match voices?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is so neat! I went looking a few months back for something like this, and the best I found was Google's Magenta.

It would be really cool to use this to feed into Magenta. Think of the mashups!

</comment><comment><USER58> Karaoke with the most obscure songs!

<comment><USER21> And even better, karaoke that doesn't suck--most karaoke tracks are covers by cheap bands and you can clearly tell the inferior quality if you're familiar with the song.

<comment><USER59> Sure, not to mention the awful singing accompanying most karaoke tracks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Very cool. A close friend of mine (and lead singer in our band May years ago) recently died and we have a couple great recordings from 2 decades ago of his vocals. When we recorded the rest of the instruments they were DI into a Boss BR8. The lyrics sound awesome but the guitar and drums are recorded poorly. This may give us a chance to split the vocals out of the final tracks, and re- record the tracks as a tribute.

Much appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER61> How could we extract anything but the voice e.g. karaoke?

<comment><USER62> I'd guess extract the voice and then subtract it from the rest with something like Audacity. I'm not sure which operation would do that, but I believe that it exists.

Also, other comments here speak of "separating into the voice and accompaniment," so maybe the model/program already do exactly what you need.

<comment><USER63> Invert and mix.

When you have an instrumental version of a song (from the same stems as the vocal version) this is already one way to get the vocals out without any fancy machine learning. The main tricks besides what you can do in Audacity like that are properly time-aligning the tracks (even if they drift a bit) and compensating for phase issues and compression. I wrote a dirty tool that does that and I've been meaning to turn it into some kind of nicer GUI version.

<comment><USER64> I've been doing something like this for a bit in Audition. Center channel extract > invert phase > save as wav > create multi-track project > add original > add modified > up the volume on the vocal extracted modified version until the vocals go away

Or you can do the exact opposite and instead of center channel extracting the vocals you can remove the vocals and use this method to better isolate vocals.

Although if things do fun stuff with stereo it might not be exact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Has anyone tested this with Glenn Gould recordings?

<comment><USER4> Hehe, you want to split his singing and humming into a separate track?

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> I have a large number of multitrack recordings of contra dances if anyone wants to try training this on them.

<comment><USER37> _You_ train this on them! (And then put the results on SoundCloud or YouTube.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Are there any examples I can listen to?

<comment> tomo-makes I set up a Colab notebook to try spleeter out for myself. You can try picking up your favorite mp3, renaming it to "audio_sample.mp3", uploading it to the Colab, and spining all the cells on the notebook. Enjoy.

[https://colab.research.google.com/gist/tomo- makes/33b9bc7f22...](https://colab.research.google.com/gist/tomo- makes/33b9bc7f22e257468ff9bbc7122a6e82/spleeter-multi-source-separation- demo.ipynb)

<comment><USER68> This is great. Thank you! I extended the notebook with an example of downloading a youtube video, extracting the audio, then feeding it through spleeter.

Notebook: [https://colab.research.google.com/gist/shawwn/0f286f5d4bc22e...](https://colab.research.google.com/gist/shawwn/0f286f5d4bc22e04d745657ba3ccad26/spleeter- multi-source-separation-demo.ipynb)

<comment> tomo-makes Cool! That's so handy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> The long story about Spleeter : [https://deezer.io/releasing-spleeter-deezer- r-d-source-separ...](https://deezer.io/releasing-spleeter-deezer-r-d-source- separation-engine-2b88985e797e)

</comment><comment><USER70> I was just testing it out on Gazal, it seems to work perfectly. But when it seems to fail with Qawwalis. My understanding of how this works. Is it safe to assume that the training data from dreezer lacks enough examples of Qawwalis?

</comment><comment><USER71> Aren't all the most popular audio formats lossy? Extracting full data from lossy compression requires reconstruction. Even if they are able to completely extract all tracks they would have gaps and be very low quality.

<comment><USER72> If you want lossless audio in a decently popular format then just go looking for FLAC, you'll definitely find some. Even bandcamp uses it [1].

[1] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC#Adoption_and_implementati...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC#Adoption_and_implementations)

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> Just tried it on _Meet The Sniper_. Disappointment :-(

[This was an unreasonable test, and it did really well considering the likely training set. I bet it could do much better with better data. Still... man, I was so hoping for magic.]

</comment><comment><USER74> Has someone in the Intelligence community approached the author? Oops that's classified. :)

This has implications for extracting sounds from noisy recordings or am I off base? Does it only track pitch patterns?

<comment><USER75> Source separation of speech and speech denoising is a well established field, more researched in general than music source separation. Intelligence officers very likely have access to a range of well-performing ML tools for extracting speech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Is there a known approach that attempts to separate all distinct sounds (timbres rather than pitch) in a track? Specifically targeted at electronic music, not standard acoustic ensembles.

<comment><USER77> That's an interesting idea. Many instruments have greatly varying timbres, though. Combining the timbres back to instruments would require another level of processing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Somewhat of a tangent, but does anyone have a recommendation of an open source (ideally python) program that can make MIDI from piano audio?

<comment><USER4> I've been working on this for the last 3 months.

Can you send me your audio file? I'll send you back the midi I can generate; it won't be perfect but it might be usable. See comment elsewhere in this thread.

<comment><USER78> Awesome! Is your project open source? Can't wait to see it.

Here's the first (but by no means only) file I have in mind:

[http://ocrmirror.org/files/music/albums/ff7/MP3/3-02%20Shnab...](http://ocrmirror.org/files/music/albums/ff7/MP3/3-02%20Shnabubula%20-%20Stone%20Eyes%20\(The%20Great%20Warrior\).mp3)

Stone Eyes from the Final Fantasy VII tribute album Voices of the Lifestream.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Well, can it extract the bass track from "And the justice for all"?

</comment><comment><USER55> Can this also separate the backing vocals from the lead singer?

</comment><comment><USER80> Thank you!! This is really amazing :)

</comment><comment><USER54> demo links would be helpful

</comment><comment><USER81> Karaoke everything!

</comment><comment><USER82> This is amazing - so much possible learning for aspiring producers.

</comment><comment><USER83> Cool stuff

</comment><comment><USER84> Pytorch > TensorFlow</comment>


Simple Stochastic Robots Use Their Randomness to Achieve More Complex Goals - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/georgia-tech-smarticles-stochastic-robot-swarm <comment><USER2> That's the premise of classic roombas isn't it? So a swarm of tiny roombas.</comment>


The Dribbblisation of Design - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/intercom-inside/the-dribbblisation-of-design-406422ccb026#.urul8bvil <comment><USER2> (Disclaimer: I'm a designer and I'm probably very biased about the matter)

In my opinion it's very often a matter of expectations.

When a lot of design decisions are taken by a bunch of people, from management, engineering and marketing, including a designer would simply mean having one more person to compromise with. Companies working this way tend to have designers focus more on making the product look good, thus this dribbblisation of design. On the other side, engineering has historically been expected to deal with design when building products, and nowadays a lot of engineers have learnt how to design on the field. This reinforces the view that designers are only useful to make things look good. Lastly, the tools we use in design are really easy to use, anyone with a couple hours to spare should be able to create some stuff with most of the available tools. With that, it makes deciders think that the only difference will be a matter of taste.

A lot of designers can actually do more than that, the basis of their job is usually to question things with the perspective of the user: "Does it make sense to do this? Is it really useful to have that amount of customisation? How much information do we need to see?" Most of the time the solutions are stupidly obvious, or they're chosen based of how complicated it makes the system, or how costly it can be, and that's where experts add a lot of value.

All in all, if all you need is to make stuff look good, sure a dribbble designer is probably a good fit, just don't expect them to automagically make the product usable. If you want someone to work on your experience, you should probably have your designer work on the problem instead of having them "upgrade" your solution.

Just like how the engineering field is, the design field is really diverse with people doing different things, differently.

(Wow, that was a long rant, sorry about that.)

<comment><USER3> This. I'm not a designer, but my wife is (we met in a design studio I was prototyping for). We were just having this conversation yesterday about how design is "appreciated" in her company, basically going through every point you listed above. It takes a huge cultural change in a company to make something better than "design by engineer" desirable. Many companies want jack of all trade generalists who can code a bit and design a bit, meaning they can be reassigned easily enough to where the work happens to be at the moment. But at the end of the day, it's all mediocre output (though sadly, it is considered acceptable).

And then anyone who plays around with photoshop or illustrator for a few days seems to think they are ready for a visual design career (and interaction design is worse!). Who needs design school? So people encounter so many bad poorly trained and experienced designers that their expectations of the profession begin to be lowered. It is frustrating for those who actually went through hard work to become skilled and experienced UXDs.

I'm personally a PL designer and see the same issues in our field (well, it is very niche, and anyone who can write a compiler wants to design a language....).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My main grievance with modern designs is low information density. Fonts are getting bigger and lots of whitespace is added between blocks. This works great for articles (as an example, medium articles look gorgeous and are a joy to read) but just about anything else is less usable when fewer bits of actual information are on the screen.

Ironically, one can also speak of UX-isation of design. I would define it as misguided thinking that the designer knows my problems better than myself. Take "you should take your umbrella" weather app. The information density is exactly 1 bit per screen which is abysmal. What about my jacket? Or what if I want to play badminton? Just give me the temperatures and wind info dammit.

<comment><USER5> This is exactly the point. Your problem isn't the fonts or spacing, but the focus on prettiness to the detriment of usefulness.

There is always a balance between the two. There's room between the pain that is design without consideration of the information and the user, and information accessibility with no consideration for visual aesthetic.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing. As an example of what I am talking about - one of the internal apps at my workplace recently got a visual overhaul. The functionality is exactly the same. The previous version also had a designer working on it and he too tried to make the thing beautiful (according to what was fashionable then). But because the new version is made according to the current fashion so much less information fits on the screen. I suspect the same thing will happen if someone tries to fit the application into current UX paradigm of dumbing down the interaction.

<comment><USER5> Then the designer hasn't done his/her job. It should start with an understanding of what the user should be able to do. The story of the user interaction for every screen is vital. Without it, you end up with what you've described - something that may well be beautiful, but is deeply annoying to use.

<comment><USER6> And although the design doesn't display as much information, what are the needs for thi tool? Could some of the previously displayed information simply not truly be useful anymore? Was it adding visual noise and distracting from the main purpose of the visualization?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _The Mediumization of Writing_

More and more people want to have an opinion and they use medium to share it with the world. This is killing my narrow view of content creation because I am able to asess every single users motivation. With such clarity, I have determined they are, like me, all experienced professionals with 10 years experience putting their best work forward. Have you seen the comments section? People who don't have a masters in literature from Columbia are actually displaying positive sentiment about this trash. This industry is dead because medium, and other blogging platforms, exist and it is much easier to create and piblish content. People are doing this as a hobby, or semi professionally and I don't like it.

Edit: </satire>

<comment><USER8> If you have to type </satire> it's probably not good satire.

After only a few paragraphs in, it became obvious that you've set up a one- paragraph strawman. His point is that the process of _design_ is being traded and mistaken for _making things look pretty_. Seems like a reasonable argument.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Look at it from the other side. If a designer were to suggest some of the more fundamental changes to how your product should work, would you genuinely listen to their opinions and suggestions, or are these critical decisions being taken by someone higher up in management?

Designers are often pushed into the rear end of the process in every sort of consumer product development (including software development). It is no wonder therefore that we end up with not only ugly but often unusable products. Big opportunities all around for a company that brings good design and better designers to the forefront of product development.

But it is just too damn hard for most people to let go of their ego where design is concerned. The whole design thing looks so intuitive and apparent right from the start that we can't believe we can't do it all ourselves, and, not only that, do it better that everybody else.

<comment><USER4> Proposing fundamental product changes takes solid grasp of what is called "product architecture" in the article, i.e. precise understanding of the concepts involved and the intricacies of their interaction. That means becoming a domain expert, knowing how to work with analytics and maybe even having a basic understanding of backend architecture. Most of the designers I have worked with (admittedly a very small sample) were content with muddled understanding from the point of view of casual user and so mostly drew pretty pictures.

<comment><AUTHOR> I would agree. It gets difficult sometimes to implement a design from a beautiful looking mockup. Mainly because the design does not take into account most of the software use-cases. Then we go back to the drawing board again.

Which is sort of why I think designer who can implement design (in HTML/CSS/JS or iOS/Android) is ideal, as they are much more likely to have that sort of "product architecture" thought process; and being as closed as possible to the code which means it becomes easier to adapt the design.

Personally like Ryan Singer's approach to designing as he jumps back and fourth between HTML and Photoshop ([https://vimeo.com/16814487](https://vimeo.com/16814487)), the design gets much closer to reality.

<comment><USER10> Specialisation vs generalisation though...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This sort of flash-over-substance internet feedback loop has cropped up in a number of different arenas. Five years back or so I was on the staff of a website that was created primarily to promote Halo multiplayer maps, to receive feedback, and to feature the talented creators in the community.

A great deal of excellent maps went through the site, but I became increasingly upset over what I saw as a shift towards presentation-over- substance with the original posts. If you wanted people to play a map, it soon became all but required to have a massive original post, with screenshots and "action shots" and flashy headers to catch people's attention. The focus became more on these OPs than the maps themselves. There was a movement towards standardising the process to reduce the flashy bloat, but it was unable to affect the changes I perceived as necessary, so I ended up leaving the community.

How can issues like these be fixed? Can they be fixed, or is it just a bug in the human code that superficial beauty halo effects everything else out of consideration? Perhaps communities of a certain size eventually reduce to a certain lowest common denominator appeal. I'm not certain.

<comment><USER12> PG had the same worries about HN.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html)

In general, as long as the community continues to value substance and the principle of the most charitable interpretation, it will survive. When we start seeing memes and catfights, that's a sign the community is dying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> This article compares a _community_ of Visual Designers (the ones you find on Dribbble) with 2 specific UX _people_.

A better comparison would be Dribbble vs IXDA, community vs community, one with the focus on form vs the other with focus on function.

If you look at it that way, the signal to noise ratio is honestly about the same in each community. A couple gems here and there, but 90% of the stuff I see or read on both don't seem to be solving anything.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think of dribbble designers as who you hire when you know what the thing is going to do and how it's going to be organized. All else equal, I think there's something to be said about a product looking good. Hiring a painter to build your house makes no sense, but hiring a painter to paint your house does make sense.

</comment><comment><USER5> Potentially contentious viewpoints ahead...

I don't think these are the roles of a designer. But to explain why, I need to unpack some context first.

I've spent most of my career at the interface between marketing, programming and design. Marketers are increasingly having similar discussions about how they need to be more involved in everything to make sure a good job is done. Things that would traditionally be seen as PR or branding or would fall into media or even product design, are increasingly being encroached on by marketing.

At the same time, in the development camp I see people wanting to be part of marketing and creative meetings to talk about feasibility, or to be involved in higher level strategic meetings to talk about technology and its role in business.

Just as designers want to be involved in things that aren't the shiny bit of design, I think we're seeing an evolution in how businesses will work more generally.

Traditionally, the role of orchestration was carried out by middle management; people who had solid skills in the areas of those they managed and who could talk technically to them, but were also good leaders with solid soft skills. People who could coordinate teams to produce outcomes.

Increasingly though it seems like that model is being moved away from, to one where representatives from various departments get together to decide on things where there's overlap. So product, business strategy, development, and design might be holding regular meetings to discuss planning and execution. Think of this as a cross-business scrum if you like.

I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made beautiful and usable by designers. There's overlap. But whilst that means design needs to be in the room, it doesn't mean they need to own it. Corollary: design is in the hands of designers, but dev needs to be in the room to discuss time to implement suggestions raised.

There's an increasing need for facilitation of discussion and understanding cross a department, but I don't think that means we need to put everything in the hands of design, or dev, or anyone else. There's value in specialist teams with deep domain knowledge. But better comma at the fuzzy edges is certainly required.

<comment><USER15> > I think the problem is that it's just very hard now to set a boundary on > where one thing ends and another begins. Application architecture is in the > realms of development, answering problems defined by product people, made > beautiful and usable by designers.

I think you have a misconception here. A designer is not a decorator. Making it usable (and _beautiful_ , as you call it) is way below conceiving the product, in a true designer perspective. Software people don't like to admit it, but designers are much more prepared and educated to conceive a product for _humans_ than engineers or managers.

<comment><USER16> No, I think in many projects designers _are_ decorators - which leaves no one in charge of the user experience from the point of view of the user.

In the same way that a full-stack Linux expert isn't going to understand how someone without 5+ years of command line experience approaches a computer, a trained designer with an experienced eye is always going to struggle to point themselves in the place of a naive user.

Good UI needs to be tested for design assumptions and for user taskflow. The testing needs to be repeated every time changes are made. For any business with a web site that sells to customers, this is _at least_ as important as unit tests in code.

IME designers aren't often interested in this. Some are, but many simply don't get it. And even if they are, there's pressure to see UX as a machine for driving conversions (hence the same Bootstrap template with the same social proof and the same calls to action everywhere), and not so much as a way to make the customer experience more positive.

The proof is that many sites are broken in some fundamental way. I was on a logistics site yesterday trying to organise a redelivery, and the site simply didn't do what I needed. The graphics were pretty, but it obviously hadn't been tested properly, and many elements were broken.

Yesterday's example was unusually bad, but similar issues aren't unusual.

<comment><USER15> > No, I think in many projects designers are decorators - which leaves no one > in charge of the user experience from the point of view of the user.

I agree. That's my experience in this industry, and in big projects. Designers are hired to make things look pretty.

> In the same way that a full-stack Linux expert isn't going to understand how > someone without 5+ years of command line experience approaches a computer, a > trained designer with an experienced eye is always going to struggle to > point themselves in the place of a naive user.

... but with this I can't agree. It's not a reasonable comparison. The full- stack Linux expert won't understand the user mostly because it's not his job to do so. He doesn't have the knowledge and methodology to get to know and understand the user (as well as his context). The UX expert, on the other hand, should be trained specifically to do this in the most systematic and unbiased way possible. He doesn't need exactly to _role-play_ the user (frankly, I don't like this conception of UX, but that's a pet peeve), but he should know and understand him. It's not "I think the user will like this", it's "I know users want this".

> Good UI needs to be tested for design assumptions and for user taskflow. The > testing needs to be repeated every time changes are made.

And in this we fully agree again. All the knowledge the UX expert can harness about the user and his context should be validated, as early as possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The weather app example at the start annoys me. I want a weather app for data, not decision making. I want to consume a couple of data points easily, for various needs. 7 of those 8 apps do that.

Rain amount (bike or bus today?) Wind amount (can I bodyboard today? Rain coat or umbrella?) Temperature (gloves for the wetsuit? Jacket when biking?) Sun amount (can I do a cliff walk this weekend or will the trail be muddy?)

Etc... I don't want an umbrella app, a surf app, a walk app, a bike app... I just want some data that I will use in a multitude of ways.

</comment><comment><USER18> My 2 cents, as a former visual designer, now senior UX designer - Dribbble is a place where lots of pretty baubles are on display, where flash is valued over process, and where it's very hard to get a sense of anything other than the showcased designer's visual acumen.

When I'm interviewing a designer, I don't take it as a positive or negative that they have a dribbble account. If they're interviewing for a position that is primarily visual design, I will peruse their stuff there just to get a sense of their style and capability, but not as a final deterministic factor on their hireability.

Dribbble was never really meant to be a place where people showcased their process, just a place where they could throw out a quick snippet to get reactions. Visual designers find that extremely helpful. If you're not versed in the ideas of typography, color theory, moodboarding, concepting, or any of the other methodologies and tools in a visual designer's wheelhouse, then looking from the outside in at Dribbble can make it seem like a world filled with trite, inefficient, fantastical non-reality.

You're not alone in this. Even I, as a former visual designer, have to tell myself that when I go clicking through Dribbble. It's not a place to showcase fully-polished, finished products - it's not a product marketing site. It's not a place to showcase the messy process of product design - it's not a portfolio site. It's a place where people can toss out ideas and get feedback on the micro-points of it. The colors, they typography, the alignment. Start to expect anything more and the model of the entire site falls apart.

For better or worse, Dribbble is not built to scale as a place for the critique of the entire design process. I think that's where this article gets it wrong. There are plenty of things to critique the site for - the lack of real meaningful engagement, for example, or the highly exclusive invite-only nature, for another - but fundamentally the OPs of this article are projecting thoughts and ideas about what they think/want Dribble to be vs what it actually is.

TL; DR: Dribbble is a place to showcase digital visual art and design artifacts, not a meaningful UX or UI portfolio catalogue.

</comment><comment><USER19> I don't know about this. I think it's wholly possible that people derive inspiration and perspective from Dribbble, Behance and similar sites, and use that inspiration to attempt to solve actual business problems in UI/UX, the specifics of which are never posted to Dribbble, either due to NDAs or more likely, because it would be incredibly boring for the average Dribbble user to look at.

I don't believe Dribbble has portrayed itself as a site to showcase business case studies. A lot of the time, it's simply a repository of design samples or off-work personal projects. And I'll admit, after a long day of looking at dull wireframes, it's simply a relief to look at a fun UI mockup animation, even if it might not work in a real-life production app.

</comment><comment><USER20> The idea "form follows function" (or mission or vision) is as old as modernism itself. Its linear approach, from "vision" down to "visual", neglects an important aspect of design process that is dynamic in essence. Often interaction design redefines a product's core function, or a visual design so beautiful that it becomes an integral part of a product's vision. I'm not convinced that product/design process has to be like a waterfall or a tree or a loop. It can be more like a web too.

These days I've reviewed so many portfolios with post-it notes and hand-drawn flow diagrams. Don't they look all the same like dribbble too? Don't they all tell the same story, over and over?

</comment><comment><USER21> I find the article's tone overly dismissive, and prefer to think of Dribbble as a GitHub for designers: a place to show off, discuss and hone their craft, and seek inspiration.

</comment><comment><USER22> This seems like a recurring topic: [https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dribblization&sort=byPopularit...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dribblization&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

<comment><USER23> 8 of those are the same article?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> This should have 2014 in the title. This article has been discussed several times.</comment>


Ask HN: If you can get users'data from GAFAs for your startup, you'd ask what? - <AUTHOR> I am part of a team building a GDPR token (open source) to allow users to oblige GAFAs to give back all their data and share them with others companies and startups. I wanted to now if what type of datafrom Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, AT&T, GE, GM etc was interesting for your business <comment><USER2> Is this some sort of blockchain play?

<comment><AUTHOR> no, no blockhain. Just OAuth2.0 decentralized with DNS, as the authorization server and the resource server can be behind 2 different domains.</comment></comment>


Thoughts on Immutability in D - <AUTHOR> http://poita.org/index.php/blog/1-latest-news/67-thoughts-on-immutability-in-d <comment><USER2> That's at least one good reason for Haskell to have built-in laziness. The _implementation_ of laziness uses side-effects. The _interface_ it exposes is pure/immutable. If you had to implement it yourself, out of effectful primitives, the result would have an effectful type, despite being pure. So it is simply exposed as a pure primitive, despite being implemented via effects under the hood. Pretty much all of the pure operations (e.g: add) boil down to impure/effectful operations deep down (e.g: an ADD instruction mutating a register).

That's why it is important to have an escape hatch -- capable of saying: "This is a composition of effects, but I _know_ it is pure". In Haskell, this is called unsafePerformIO, and it has the (impossible) type:

      unsafePerformIO :: IO a -> a

If you use this on a non-pure composition of effects, you get a bug.

<comment><USER3> The implementation of _everything_ uses side-effects :-) A computer is nothing more than a state machine after all.

You are right though. It's nice to have escape hatches. D allows this through cast, but unfortunately casting away const causes undefined behaviour.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yeah, I really miss the mutable pattern for lazy instantiation too..</comment>


China's clampdown on religious freedom - <AUTHOR> https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/04/article/chinas-dire-clampdown-on-religious-freedom/ <comment><USER2> I haven't read the article, but I have been following the story on the news. I think ultimately the Chinese government will fail. Religion is stronger than government. Virtually every human society has had religion, And religion has existed long before organized government came to be.

<comment><USER3> If you really want to suppress religion just educate your population.

Higher levels of education are linked with lower levels of religious commitment, especially the more extreme versions of zealotry.

I don't really understand how someone who studies biology or physics to any degree could subscribe to an interventional deity.

<comment><USER4> while literally sitting on the toilet, the following names come to mind:

physics: issac newton, gottfried Leibniz, george lemaitre, james maxwell, lord kelvin,j. j. thompson ...

biology: gregor mendel, pasteur, francis collins...

there are rather a few very big names who are Just Fine doing both.

<comment><USER5> Sure, but their understanding of the world was different. Everywhere around them religion was important. That's not the case anymore. Furthermore, they also knew a lot less about the world in general, because such information simply wasn't available back then.

<comment><USER4> i don't think we've made any staggering advances in knowledge since 1960, when lemaitre died, for instance.

it's just a false dichotomy, sorry.

<comment><USER6> > i don't think we've made any staggering advances in knowledge since 1960, > when lemaitre died, for instance.

We've got Twitter and Reddit, and if those don't encapsulate staggering advances in human knowledge, I don't know what would.

<comment><USER7> Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a native Chinese, I generally find this kind of articles to be funny.

With a master degree in computer science, I would consider myself to be well educated. During my entire education, no one told me to not to be religious. In fact, "religious freedom" was literally written in our textbooks. And we are educated to respect other people's religion. I, and many other well- educated Chinese people, am not religious, simply because we don't find them convincing.

I know many religious people. And I have nothing good to say about them. They are generally less educated, selfish and double-standard. They blame everything bad happened to them, which usually are their own fault, on other (non-religious) people. They credit everything good, which are usually help received from non-religious people, to god. I wouldn't say they are stupid, because they are smart enough to use their religion for their own personal gain.

I'm not saying religious people or religion in general are bad. I'm sure they are not in your part of the world. I'm sure the religious people you known even contribute positively to the society. But that's the pattern here in China, through out the history.

I understand the need for religions. They are very effective tools for keeping a huge portion of population, usually less educated, in check.

I'm not a fan of the CCP. But I hate the prospective of replacing it with any religion ruled by stupider people.

</comment><comment><USER9> I have thought long and hard about why I believe in God (and appreciate science greatly, of course). I have posted my thoughts in detail at [http://lukecall.net](http://lukecall.net) . These things help me even when life is hard (as designed--but worth it). (edit: I should probably have made this as a reply to other comments ... having some computer trouble in last few days; will try to remember. Also, the web site is lightweight and easy, I hope, to get around. The link in question is a few lines from the top.)</comment>


Haiku - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/09/hands-on-with-haiku-back-to-the-future-of-beos.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss <comment><USER2> Be, while an innovative OS in its day for sure, is more interesting to me as a business story. Most people don't realize how close BeOS came to becoming Mac OS X. They had the inside track on the deal, and their OS was technically superior to Next's. But Gassée's determination to hold out for more money combined with the famous Steve Jobs reality distortion field to consign Be to the dustbin of history and cleared the way for Jobs's second coming at Apple. How different the tech world would be today if Gassée had said yes to Apple's initial acquisition offer. I wonder how often he thinks about the breakdown of that deal, lo these many years later.

<comment><USER3> If Apple bought Be, it wouldn't have gotten Steve Jobs.

It is possible that Apple would have died, and Be would have suffered the same fate either way.

<comment><USER2> That is possible. It is also possible that Apple would have thrived in different ways. There would likely be no iPod and no iPhone. Jobs would likely not be the legend that he is today, though of course he would still be in the history books. What is certain, though, is that Be, as both a business and a technology, and Gassée as an individual, are exponentially less successful now (by standard business metrics, not necessarily in a deeper sense) than they would have been had Gassée said yes. I wonder if that still haunts him, or if he has made peace with it.

<comment><USER4>
      > There would likely be no iPod and no iPhone.

Why there would be no iPod? AFAIK it's not Steve Jobs who came with the idea.

<comment><USER2> No, Jobs didn't invent digital audio players, nor did anyone else at Apple. But Jobs decided to pursue it as a business. The story -- apocryphal or no -- is that Jobs named Apple Computer after the Beatles' label, Apple Records. He has always been a music fanatic. It is unlikely that with anyone else at the helm Apple would have driven as hard or as far into the music business.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Just like TFA I booted Haiku in VirtualBox... Several years ago I ran the BeOS R5 livedisk, and while this is reminiscent, since I'm running in a virtual environment it falls short.

Running BeOS on the metal was amazing - setting a thread to realtime would make it really snappy, and it's just not the same when it's virtualized...

Either that or Haiku has some way to go yet - I can't tell...

EDIT: you know what? actually, this is still really impressive... it DOES behave a lot like BeOS, and it's alpha... I crashed firefox, and gdb popped right up. I dropped into a shell (bash) and there was a GNU style environment right there. That's actually really cool!

</comment><comment><USER6> Long ago, I was a beta tester and ran BeOS on a dual ppro 180, for a time, and it was lots of fun, turning processors on and off and bouncing balls between windows. I wish more companies would be as visionary and innovative as Be was, and give us some new, different computing platforms.

</comment><comment><USER7> I remember installing BeOS when it came out. It was impressive and beautiful, and I really wanted it to catch on. I think I'll give Haiku a spin. With VMware, it'll be much easier this time around.

<comment><USER8> except they've been doing all of their development in virtual machines, so the actual real hardware support is quite thin.

<comment><USER9> What if host systems evolved to become little more than virtual machine managers, dealing with hardware drivers and so forth - while the user-space operating system is freed from having to worry about the actual hardware being used unless it really wants to?

<comment><USER10> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exokernel>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Man, I remember how badly I wanted a BeBox when they first came out, partly because the hardware was a hobbyist's paradise (a Geek Port, for chrissake), and partly because the UI was so pretty.

But, Linux and MacOS have come pretty far in the intervening 12 years, and without any special hardware to go with it, I just can't muster the excitement to mess around with Haiku.

</comment><comment><USER12> It sure is an impressive piece of software. I hope it catches on, or find itself a niche market.

I wonder if they're doing anything for developers to easily leverage pervasive multithreading, the bare bones fine-grained threading can be a pain to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER13> Geez. All this Be nostalgia lately has had _me_ pining for it, and I've never used it. Gonna try out R5 on my old pentium II. Hopefully it'll replace XP. It seems fitting, as that computer is nothing more than a toy for making art.

</comment><comment><USER14> I remember installing BeOS back in the day. I was very impressed. Glad to see continued interest. Anyone running with AmigaOS ?

</comment><comment><USER15> And no furries! Ahh, I love every OSS project that spares me another furry on my app launcher.

</comment><comment><USER16> Is it just me, or are haikus getting hyped and hyped and hyped even more?</comment>


Zuckerberg Wants Facebook to Build a Mind-Reading Machine - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/zuckerberg-wants-facebook-to-build-mind-reading-machine/ <comment><USER2> They could just use my girlfriend instead</comment>


Double Fine launched a new game on Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doublefine/double-fines-massive-chalice <comment><USER2> I'd be extremely hesitant to trust these guys with a single cent right now. They requested $400k in their last Kickstarter and received over $3.3 million, but that project (now called Broken Age) is STILL overbudget and delayed [1]. They're funneling profits from other games into it already, and now they're asking for more money so they can work on a new game? Or is this just their way of getting a much needed cash infusion after all other avenues have failed, so they can fund their ailing project and then worry about this one later?

All this on top of the fact that their most recently released game, The Cave, was mediocre at best [2].

[1] [http://www.gameinformer.com/games/broken_age/b/pc/archive/20...](http://www.gameinformer.com/games/broken_age/b/pc/archive/2013/04/26/double- fine-breaks-tradition-with-a-modern-adventure.aspx)

> Broken Age was originally planned to be completed in April, but according to > the documentary the schedule has been extended until September. The costs of > a lengthened development have forced Double Fine to search for more money. > Double Fine still welcomes supporters that missed the Kickstarter deadline, > but in the documentary Isa Stamos, director of product development, affirms > that the studio either has to dramatically increase funding or reduce the > scope of the game. In Episode 8, Double Fine's vice president of business > development, Justin Bailey, reveals that profits from the release of Brütal > Legend for PC will almost entirely feed into Broken Age.

> Despite the desire to stick within the confines of the Kickstarter money, > Double Fine is facing the reality many developers face in the middle of > production. Facing setbacks and asking publishers for more time or money is > common in the video game industry, but possibly going over budget with loads > of crowd-funded money is new territory.

[2] <http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-cave>

<comment><USER3> If you'll allow me to be a bit rude, why do you care?

I mean, it's $20 dude.

I understand the anger and skepticism a person feels when they make $30k a year and back a project for $50 that fails. But I don't understand it on HN. We're _programmers and entrepreneurs_. We know that timelines and resources are difficult to forecast. We know that companies and projects fail, even when they have millions of dollars to spend. We also generally make enough that $20 lost is negligible.

Yet everytime I look at the comments section for a Kickstarter I see mostly permutations of this comment.

<comment><USER4> >fraud is totally cool because we're _programmers and entrepreneurs_

No, it really isn't. This is not a kickstarter to make a game, this is a kickstarter to help pay for the game they already made a kickstarter for before. It isn't about risk, it is about fraud.

<comment><USER5> Interesting how a lot of people in here assume this is a fraud to support their previous project. Why couldn't they honestly be starting a new project with a separate team?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because there is nothing controversial in that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I like that it looks like they learned a lot from the last kickstarter. Some noteable differences:

\- Using an existing engine they're familiar with

\- Asking for lots more money

\- Cutting on shipping costs for rewards by moving them to higher tiers

\- Targeting fewer platforms, initially

</comment><comment><USER7> I've wanted a replacement for Final Fantasy Tactics forever. That was a really amazing, cerebral game. I think that Advanced Wars is kind of the epitome of this genre, but I'd love to see what they can do.

These games are all about the execution; really easy to overcomplicate the interface.

<comment><USER8> If you're looking entirely for the gameplay (or if you also enjoy Japanese themes, art, and humor), try the _Disgaea_ games. _Vastly_ better gameplay than _FF: Tactics_ , though the art and tone are almost polar opposites.

<comment><USER7> Loved Disgaea but I feel like the endgame is too repetitive and boring. Like, in one of the games, if you wanna go to the penguin world you're looking at like 150+ hours of grinding. It's not World of Warcraft you know?

So I guess I'm looking for depth, but not depth for the sake of depth, more like real continuous flow. I liked Disgaea a lot though back in the day.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I listened to Tim at NordicGame last week, and one thing was obvious, although it seems he does not realize it yet: So far, he has been constrained by the publishers to release the game.

During his talk, he said something like: "When do you release? When you run out of money". When you see the publisher as only viable source of money, you know that it has to be DONE, NOW. In that case, it's easy to cut the feature list and just do essential things and release. As 37 signals guys would say: do less ;)

Now, that they see they have many avenues to get money and still don't see the end of it, it's hard to constrain the scope of the project. There is no publisher to do the reality check.

</comment><comment><USER10> I was going to make a cynical reply about them not finishing their first project, but this looks FANTASTIC.

I guess I'm a funder now instead :)

<comment><USER11> What? Not finished? I guess you are technically correct, but I got my money's worth a long, long time ago. They have been delivering kick-ass videos all the damn time. This documentary is fucking awesome.

I think only non-backers or very confused backers could say something weird like it not being finished. I don't think I want them to ever finish, I want to get my documentary fix.

<comment><USER12> "I think only non-backers or very confused backers could "say something weird like it not being finished."

I backed it. I do not have a copy of the game to play.

That means it is not finished.

If I am wrong in that please do tell me how.

<comment><USER11> You are an annoying pedant who takes everything way too literal and you should think long and hard about that but not wrong.

<comment><USER13> You're just wrong. It's not pedantry to say they did not finish their project if the product has not been released, especially in light of huge delays and extreme budget excess. Maybe you're content with documentary videos instead of the promised product but it's certainly a fair assessment to say that the project is not finished.

<comment><USER14> KickStarter is not for buying products. Hence, the concept of a "promised product" doesn't exist within KickStarter backed projects. That people confuse KickStarter with a store does not make KickStarter a store.

People that are upset at the project "being late" completely are people that are treating KickStarter merely as a pre-ordering system. It's not.

<comment><USER13> Irrelevant. The project is not complete; that has nothing to do with Kickstarter's purported use case or anybody's expectations, it's simply a fact.

Five months delayed. Millions of dollars over budget. No product.

I can't think of a better example of unfinished.

<comment><USER11> I'm honestly confused why you think they are millions (plural!) over budget. Their budget was obviously the $3.3m, the funding they received. That's what they planned with. To act like their budget was $400,000 the whole time is just weird and not true at all.

So if their budget is $3.3m I'm not sure where you are getting the info from that they are (already) millions over budget. When all is said and done the game will probably cost more than $3.3m, sure, but I'm also not sure why that matters. It's not like putting their own money into it is somehow wrong. It's their game, they can do what they want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This just pisses me right off. You do one kickstarter, get huge support and then claim the rest of your company needs more. Get real, release the game and give more back to your fans with this game, stop asking us to fund your ideas! I develop games for a living and having the bloody luxury of a kickstarter because of who you were doesn't mean your going to make a great game. This has actually really annoyed me and I for one will not be supporting it but ill be supporting one of the many other indie devs who work there asses off on a single game because they love what they do!

<comment><USER16> Because obviously putting more people on Broken Age will make it release faster. Man-months, right?!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've always noted that it was interesting that link selling (in a non-obvious manner) was not an incentive for these Kickstarter projects. Donate $20 and get your name and link to your website on our contributors page! Shrug.

</comment><comment><USER18> Wow, the campaign was launched just a while ago, and while I was watching the video it already gathered $35,000. Insane momentum.

Edit: After I wrote this comment it already had $39,000.

<comment><USER19> Many repeat Kickstarters get very quick surges when they launch. They usually send a blast out to supporters of the first Kickstarter, so they have a captive list of hot leads ready to go. (This shows the power of email lists btw)

Also,I believe the media is more eager to cover them, as it is bigger news when a past KS success launches follow-up projects, as opposed to an unknown launching a new project.

<comment><USER20> that and, double fine was never an unknown in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> While reading 1000 years on english history on wikipedia one day, I was thinking of a game just like this! I really like the whole legacy and bloodline idea. I hope they have a historical recap so you can see the epic history of your kingdom.

</comment><comment><USER22> [http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/doublefine/double-fines- mas...](http://www.kicktraq.com/projects/doublefine/double-fines-massive- chalice/)

</comment><comment><USER23> is it me or this new projects sounds a lot like Rogue Legacy?</comment>


Simone Giertz on her brain tumour [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpa4kp4lK60 <comment><USER2> Wow, talk about curveballs. That's a terrifying prospect, and I wish Simone the best for her surgery. I'm glad to hear it's not malignant, and I hope that holds.

I've seen cancer show up unexpectedly among two friends. One discovered she had leukemia, and underwent chemo and a bone marrow transplant. She died from a lung infection because of her weakened immune system after the transplant, not even a year after the initial diagnosis. She had just turned 27.

Another friend discovered they had an extremely rare form of mesothelioma, the asbestos-caused lung cancer, except theirs isn't due to asbestos and isn't in the lung. There are less than 300 documented cases, rare enough that there are no experts, and they're a case study. They're currently living with the uncertainty in their mid-30s.

Both friends were in great physical health (the former made the regional swim team, the latter climbs the highest peaks in North America for fun) until the diagnostic.

Seeing this has reinforced my nihilism (there is no meaning to life but the one you apply to it), and gave me greater understanding that our multicellular bodies are a peace treaty among cells that is likely to break down at any moment.

<comment><USER3> A close friend of mine, when we were 21, had heart attack and passed away. No family history of heart attacks, he was in excellent shape (cycling was his life) and just randomly out of the blue.

I do try to stay fit and eat healthy but there are times that I realize that I have no control over randomness or my genes. That is humbling and scary at the same time.

<comment><USER4> >A close friend of mine, when we were 21, had heart attack and passed away. No family history of heart attacks, he was in excellent shape (cycling was his life) and just randomly out of the blue.

Not sure if this is the case here, but fatal heart attacks in healthy physically active young adults are often the result of Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

This is a fairly common (~ 1 in 500) inheritable condition that can be _easily diagnosed by ultrasound_. Everybody do yourself a favour and get at least a routine checkup in every few years. It prevents deaths.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This makes me very sad, but I've also gotta highlight her skill at perfectly nailing the tone of that video. Humor, sadness, gratitude, and fear, in excellent measure.

Plus, I'm thrilled to see somebody else with a nice sense of gallows humor. Sometimes, we have to laugh so we don't have to cry.

<comment><USER6> > Plus, I'm thrilled to see somebody else with a nice sense of gallows humor.

I was honesty expecting her to wheel out her robot arm holding a scalpel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Well that blows. I guess it is a reminder to watch for the little things on your head and how you feel. My cousin is going through the same "not cancer" but problematic brain tumor problems. He was further hampered by the learning he had a brain tumor from the billing department as opposed to his (now former) doctor. His only warning was a stiff neck for days on end.

Here's hoping that her Paetreon [https://www.patreon.com/simonegiertz](https://www.patreon.com/simonegiertz) holds her over. Maybe some folks will sponsor some projects.

<comment><USER8> This is a great time to become a patron. Simone and her team are going to be relying on the income from Patreon for at least the next several months.

I'm so glad that Patreon exists for moments like this, when a person just needs some time to deal with a health or a family issue and cannot focus on creating new material to maintain their finances.

<comment><USER9> There's something deeply wrong with a society when everytime someone gets diagnosed there is a call for money to be sent via patreon/gofundme

I'm not opposed to the concept really but you get that dumping more money to a middleman is more of a symptom than a solution

<comment><USER10> Huh? People like the stuff Simone creates, and want her to be able to continue creating stuff. There's going to be a period of time where it will be tough for her to make money, and by supporting her on Patreon you make it more likely she will be able to return to making stuff after her recovery.

<comment><USER11> I completely agree with you - but crunchlibrarian is right.

This is exactly the sort of thing the social safety net _should_ cover. Otherwise only popular/beautiful people get the help they need.

There's a whole bunch of other people out there facing equally rough times, and because they don't have a million youtube subscribers they are not going to have any chance of riding it out on Patreon donations.

100% support Simone - but don't do it pretending there's nothing wrong with society and the way our governments treat _most_ people in awful situations.

<comment><USER12> I don't know if Simone is a citizen or Permanent Resident in the US (if not, she should seek government support from her home nation), but anyone who is a citizen or Permanent Resident in the US is eligible for >1yr of temporary Unemployment insurance, as well as Medicare (age 65), Medicaid, CHIP, and SNAP.

<comment><USER11> That's good to know. (For the record, I'm from Australia - and most of what we hear about healthcare costs and social security in the US are staggeringly frightening.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> :-( I really hope Simone Giertz pulls through on this. I really like her videos and she has been an inspiration for me to make shitty arduino projects.

<comment><USER14> well I guess she does. non cancerous tumor. but it could probably have wierd side effects on her while removing it.

I just looked into her videos and some stuff is really funny. like where she had a robot that served her a soup. it also was an ad for google home and at the end she said, google home probably won't come with a robot that will serve soup, which is probably a good thing :D

<comment><USER13> You can still die during surgery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It's good that her tumor isn't cancerous, but she's going to be out of action for at least a year. I see other people saying that she can make a full recovery, but this is not the type of thing you ever fully recover from. Two of my girlfriends had brain tumors, both in their 20s. It's life changing, if not life shattering.

<comment><USER16> Sen. John McCain returned to the senate 10 days after "minimally invasive" brain surgery above his left eye, and he is 81.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Brain_tumor_diagno...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain#Brain_tumor_diagnosis_and_surgery)

<comment><USER17> He's also John McCain. Say what you want about his politics but that guy is tough.

"John McCain survived this" is not a pitch I want to hear from anyone, especially a doctor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a big fan of Simone, and I'm a big fan or her morbid sense of humor. #tumorhumor

Obviously I can't predict the future, but it seems like she's going to be okay.

</comment><comment><USER19> It sucks but if it's not malignant it's a huge relief (even if it's a hugely bad news).

<comment><USER20> While not exactly good news it's a huge relief it doesn't appear malignant. I have worked as an anesthesiologist in neurosurgery and these patients generally make a full recovery.

<comment><USER21> [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/193749.When_the_Air_Hits...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/193749.When_the_Air_Hits_Your_Brain)

<comment><USER22> Fantastic book, and if anyone liked this, this one is also fantastic (though better in audiobook, I feel, as the narrator was so emotive): [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21086818-do-no- harm](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21086818-do-no-harm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Gah that sucks. She's pretty brave for putting this out there. And incredible how she's able to have a sense of humor in this situation, I'm pretty sure I'd be mean as hell for a while.

</comment><comment><USER24> Oh damn, she's an inspiring person, and I hope that this goes as well as possible for her. No matter how tough and funny you are, a curveball like this is always going to be a terrible shock, but the strength and humor will definitely help with recovery. I'm confident that her many fans (myself included) will wish her well and be waiting for her return when she's ready,

</comment><comment><USER25> I can only imagine how she must be feeling right now. But, tumors are such nasty conditions, almost unpredictable consequences. I hope her operation goes well.

</comment><comment><USER26> Oh wow. Feel super bad for her and wish her the best of luck and speedy recovery.

At the same time this absolutely terrifies me and shows how fragile life is. Thankfully Simone is in Sweden so she does not have to worry about the financial impact (she has enough to worry about). I am self employed here in the US and pay for my insurance plan 100% out of pocket (don't qualify for any subsidies). The plan is frankly god-awful with something like an annual max out of pocket of $10,000 and $7,000 deductible. A cancer diagnosis would financially ruin me even though I pay nearly $400 a month in health insurance premiums. If I was diagnosed with cancer, the last thing I should have to worry about is how I am going to pay for it (especially seeing as I pay more than my fair share). The reality is I have way more of financial burden even though I am paying full price than somebody who get's their plan subsidized from Obama Care. They pay significantly less (sometimes nothing), yet have better care than me.

I can truthful say, I would fear the financial impact more than the cancer which is a scary reality.

<comment><USER27> She has posted on twitter that she is staying in the US for treatment.

[https://twitter.com/SimoneGiertz/status/990983271705018368](https://twitter.com/SimoneGiertz/status/990983271705018368)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I hope people and technology can fix her completely and this ends up just being a bump in the road of her life. She's already made the world better (yet again) by sharing this experience. We all need to be reminded of how precious life is and how important it is to improve medical technology.

Good luck Simone!

</comment><comment><USER29> Currently people in my life left and right get diagnosed with cancer and it's awful.

I wonder what one can do to make sure to not run into the same surprise. I am guessing because of the many kinds of cancer that you can't just do a "cancer checkup" twice a year?

<comment><USER30> Cancer cells pop up in everyone's body all the time, and your immune system is fighting them off on a regular basis. It becomes a problem when your body is either overwhelmed or these things come up so often that it no longer recognizes the threat.

If you don't want to run into the same problem, the absolute best thing you can do is to keep your body in the best shape possible. Physical exercise often, not overeating, getting an appropriate amount of rest.

Everyones' bodies are different and YMMV, but the tools to prevention are well known, they just sometimes don't coincide with people's chosen lifestyles.

You might want to also consider adding a little more olive oil to your food, and/or researching it more. It's really quite impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'm still jealous of Simone's natural voice and cadence lending itself to her style of humour. You know, just one of those people that just by the way they talk, funny stuff is amplified.

</comment><comment><USER32> Thank God it's not a glioblastoma. Had an acquaintance die from it after years of resections and chemo. She'll pull through.

</comment><comment><USER33> Sad news. I'm glad I waited 'til the end of work before I watched this and turned into a crying mess.

</comment><comment><USER34> Wow, it is crazy how unpredictable life is. I hope she will be okay.

</comment><comment><USER35> Hesitated whether to share this or not, in case Simone would read it...

My (then 70yo) mom got diagnosed with something very similar three years ago (golfball-sized tumor just behind one of the eyeballs). It was super scary for everyone involved.

The surgeon (in Linköping, Sweden) was one of the top specialists globally on this type of procedure - I did a ton of research before the surgery.

Recovery took a few days. They were wonderful at the hospital.

She's fine now, but her eye-sight on the affected eye is like 30%. I think the reason for this is that it was diagnosed quite late.

I'm quite surprised that such a young person like Simone (she's 27 according to wikipedia) has a golf-ball sized tumor.</comment>