Yes, the piping in my parents’ house is all lead, but not worth replacing due to the above. It’s pretty common in old houses in Britain

Very interesting. I recently found out the house I grew up in in the UK over 15+ years had lead pipes that were never replaced, and I always wondered why they were not replaced and if it had some cognitive impact. This lining effect likely explains the reason, and offers at least some reassurance.

If the water PH changes, the value in replacing those pipes might become more apparent.

But my sweet water!

I wonder how did you figure out this is the case, did you make any tests of the water?

I can hardly imagine living in a house with lead pipes. I mean even if water if provably safe today, what if tomorrow PH shifts to acidity.

absolutely. i have an sy99 and they often go for less or equal to a dx7, and they are much more of a powerhouse. can't recommend enough

Have you tried the Yoto player? Our daughter loves hers and they are pretty cheap. You can load them with your own mp3s too, which we download from BBC Sounds.

My favourite part of this is when they apply their new words to things that technically make sense, but don't. My daughter proudly pointed at a king wearing a crown as "sharp king" after learning about knives, saws, etc.

This is really sad, MixesDB is one of the best products I use on an almost daily basis.

One side effect of this I remember was that, for a little while, there was a blackmarket of buying MP3s on CD at car boots and flea markets. My dad came home once with a CD with all the Beatles songs. He had paid something like £15 and thought he'd got a deal of his life.

I also wonder which year it stopped being an acceptable Christmas present to give someone a burned CD.

Soulseek is absolutely awesome at this. Why don't the record labels shut it down? Have they just given up on P2P?

Oh man I totally did this. I got really nice emails back from Jello Biafra and Sole from Anticon as an angsty teenager.

Awesome work! One thing I'm curious about in this space is why people generally generate the sound form directly. I always imagined you'd get better results teaching the model to output parameters which you could feed into synths (wavetable/fm/granular/VA), samplers, and effects, alongside MIDI.

You'd imagine you could estimate most music with this with less compute and higher determinism and introspection. Is it because there isn't enough training data for the above?

Thank you! There has been a lot of work on midi generation in the past and many people have gotten great results using the approach that you describe. The reason why modern music generators like ours create audio files directly is because midi can't represent all of the nuances of acoustic instruments (vocals, violin, trombone, etc). The allure of modern generative AI (diffusion networks and autoregressive models) is that they are finally capable of generating high quality audio which sounds natural.

If you're interested in really exciting work on applying AI to creating synthesizer patches, I recommend you check out synplant2: https://soniccharge.com/synplant2. Their tool can load in any audio and then create a synth patch which sounds nearly identical to the input audio.

That's a solid point about the limitations of MIDI, @kantthpel. Synplant2 sounds like a neat bridge between traditional synthesis and AI's capabilities. Wonder if it could lead to a hybrid approach where AI-generated parameters enhance MIDI compositions, making them sound more natural without fully ditching the efficiency of MIDI. Could be a game-changer for composers looking to blend electronic and acoustic sounds.

Thank you so much I'll check that out.