Mystery Machine

Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus

What follows is an exact repost/mirror of Steve Yegge’s 2012 post “Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus” from Google+ on the software risk aversion axis. It’s not even accessible from the WaybackMachine. Enjoy. Notes from the Mystery Machine Bus I’ve spent the past eight years (starting back in June 2004) writing elaborate rants about a bunch of vaguely related software engineering issues. I was doing all that ranting because I’ve been genuinely perplexed by a set of “bizarre” world-views held dear by – as far as I can tell – about half of all programmers I encounter, whether online or in person....

September 6, 2019 · 36 min · Steve Yegge

Why FFmpeg Loudness & Normalization Guides Are All Wrong, Evil & Immoral!

The Wrong Way There are SEVERAL guides online telling you how to normalize audio to provide a great listening experience by using FFmpeg’s “loudnorm” filter. Most walk you through a simple process called “track normalization.” You set a goal loudness, and adjust every piece of audio up or down to match that loudness. This is evil and immoral and I’ll tell you why: Loudnorm changes the way things sound! Loudnorm crushes dynamics!...

October 18, 2018 · 3 min · Luis

The Only 4 Deep Learning Frameworks That Matter

Let me get this off my chest right off the bat: Keras is all you need for 90% of neural network tasks. Before jumping in, you should understand what is going on with neural networks(watch 3Blue1Brown’s videos). Ideally, you can understand all the math behind them and code a basic one from scratch (read Nielsen’s Neural Networks and Deep Learning). But for most cases, even understanding is unnecessary with all the pretrained models frameworks ship with nowadays....

October 10, 2018 · 4 min · Luis Gomez

How I Built My Own Guitar

Why? I wanted a faster, more efficient way to make music. My solution? Stick a Launchpad in a guitar Sadly, no electric guitars I found had the room for a launchpad. My solution (pt 2)? Build my own guitar with correct dimensions. My advice? DON’T DO IT. It was really hard and time consuming. Unless you NEED to do this to get specific dimensions & realize some crazy idea of your own, just buy a nice used guitar....

May 23, 2018 · 3 min · Luis Gomez
Compressor Knobs

Learn Compression —— Without A Ph.D. —— +Cheatsheet

Index Here are quick links to each section. If you don’t know where to start, go to Downloads. DownloadsVideoTranscriptionCompressor ControlsThresholdRatioAttackReleaseExample SettingsFIN (comment section) Downloads - Start Here Download the FREE [Compressor Cheatsheet](/downloads/compression-tut/Compression Cheatsheet.pdf) for an easy, one-page summary of compressor fundamentals. Note: the PDF above is A4 sized & optimized for web. For a great looking printout and files good for print, please go to the shop. ![cheatsheet](/downloads/compression-tut/Compression Cheatsheet....

May 23, 2018 · 7 min · Luis Gomez