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No it is not.

Oh something in my niche ! I produce French pipe organ sample sets for a living : https://www.jeuxdorgues.com

It's an extroardinary journey to record an organ, process the thousands of WAV files and design a virtual organ model.


I know what a WAV file is, and I've even made some electronic music myself.

Yet my brain errored out and for a while I thought you made samples of pipe organs: little mini-organs to take home with you, to try out before you buy the big one.

"Hello! Can I interest you in trying one of our sample organs?"


You've reinvented the portative!


Very cool! I'd be curious what you think of Modartt's recent attempts at physical models of organs and how they compare to more traditional sampler approaches.

https://www.modartt.com/organteq_physical_modeling


Not OP, but I've worked on programming my own organ software before. I'd say physical modelling really cool tech, but the question is whether it makes a significant auditory difference.

The thing is organs are a lot easier to sample compared to something like a violin. I'm oversimplifying, but it's mainly just note on, note off, vs lots of articulations where physical modelling is more beneficial. (Yes, there's wind sag, and wind delay, and regulators, but most organs specifically have things to avoid those artifacts so they'd only show up on more niche organs imo.) I've had great success simulating tremulants by just using FM demodulation to reconstruct the pitch and volume effects from tremmed samples[1]. Release samples are also difficult to match with the current phase, but I was also able to mitigate that with a single bin DFT + crossfaded.

Another issue with physical modelling is it's decently CPU intensive, which is tricky when you have 700 simultaneous notes on bigger organs. So, it's definitely cool, but the question is whether it's significantly better than current sample-based technology. It could potentially reproduce some of the more strange interactions, but those interactions aren't necessarily wanted in the first place.

EDIT: one thing that is nice about physical modelling is it's a lot easier to voice (modify) a pipe to the sound one wants. I think with some special filtering (comb filter for even harmonic attenuation, shelf for augmenting the harmonic series trajectory) voicing could also be satisfactory with traditional sampling (hauptwerk does some of this, but I think I could make it even more flexible).

[1] https://github.com/smj-edison/sample-analysis


Physical modeling seems to work really well for guitar/bass amplifiers. The Fractal Audio products are all based around simulating the various components of an amp and the ways they interact with each other, often with very unexpected results. They've been pushing in this direction for quite awhile, but I think it is more promising than capture-based tech ultimately.

The modeling is so accurate that it ends up replicating even the unintended side effects of amps, such as ghost notes (false notes being produced due to the power supply). The tech note explains it better than I can: https://forum.fractalaudio.com/threads/ghost-notes.126903/


From my experience with the piano one, the "tweaking the sound" aspect is where I've got the most out of it. Even just for awareness. But yeah, the physical modelling approach is probably better suited to something like piano with all its interacting resonances (and the way a tuner can change things around on a real piano).


Not the one you asked, but I have both Hauptwerk and Organteq, and the former beats the latter on everything expect cost, memory usage, start-up time. Organteq sounds artificial, and its reverb doesn't make it any better. Ok, you can tweak a lot, but the ensemble sound is unconvincing, and the registration choices are too limited.


What! For a living? Say more!


People do that with pianos and other instruments too. Some of these sample packs are very expensive. It is a small market though, I suppose.


I'm interested in your choice to focus on French organs. Do you specifically aim to focus on French organs and not those of German type? Or is it more like a matter of convenience due to geography?


Let's hear more!


You can hear many MP3 examples here: https://www.jeuxdorgues.com/jeux-d-orgues-4-lachaisedieu/

All are played with the virtual organ, what do you think?

I'll do a post soon with more stories about this project itself (that I started long ago)!


What?? That’s such a specific thing to do!


I've done a similar tool a few years ago, with "contenteditable". It's great. Especially for non-tech people who want to quickly edit articles on a website. (that was an experiment).

The problem I had: when people copy/paste HTML from external sources, after a few edits, a few months later, you see that the HTML is just a horrible mix of various mixed up tags, the structure is lost, you have

    <div><div><div><div><p><div>
everywhere and it's impossible to clean it in WYSIWYG.

OP, did you find a satisfying solution to this problem? A good compromise for sanitizing of copy/paste content? TL;DR: not remove the images, but clean the

    <table class="cf gJ" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr class="acZ"><td class="gF gK"><table class="cf ix" cellpadding="0"><tbody><tr><td class="c2"><h3 class="iw gFxsud"><span class="qu" role="gridcell" tabindex="-1">
stuff when copy/pasting?


(Curious about HN readers' views about this!)


I think your choice is very appropriate.

And it is open source.

Probably not OSI-open source or FSF-open source but it is open source, period.


"It's not recognized as Open Source by the Open Source body, and doesn't meet the criteria of Free/Open Source Software, but is Open Source" is a bit like saying "I used GMO and petroleum based pesticides, but my produce is all organic."


But here the source is open!

Why should we restrict the meaning of Opel Source, a societal mouvement since decades, to a list of criteria that FSF or OSI decided?

Open source is not a trade mark by FSF or OSI.

OP did not say it is free/libre software, but just open source, which it is.

We don't need "source available", just open source is correct.

PS: can you define the open source body in your previous comment?


Why should words like "organic" in relation to food mean without pesticides? I mean all carbon and water based life forms are organic, right?

I can define Open Source easily, using the OSI definition.

There is not a trademark for Open Source because they failed to secure the trademark, but we have decades of use for the term meaning something specific.


> CC wasn't suitable for software

This is wrong. CC is perfectly fine for software in some cases, such as here.

Ok, CC is not tailored specifically for software, thus the general advice "you should use something else" but I do not see why CC would not be suitable here to achieve OP's goals.

Can someone explain?


Creative Commons' FAQ addresses this

    Unlike software-specific licenses, CC licenses do 
    not contain specific terms about the distribution 
    of source code, which is often important to ensuring 
    the free reuse and modifiability of software. 
    Many software licenses also address patent rights, 
    which are important to software but may not be 
    applicable to other copyrightable works. Additionally,
    our licenses are currently not compatible with the 
    major software licenses, so it would be difficult to 
    integrate CC-licensed work with other free software. 
    Existing software licenses were designed specifically
    for use with software and offer a similar set of 
    rights to the Creative Commons licenses.


Software licenses, especially the more "advanced" licences such as the GPL, MPL, and others include very specific language around the issue of what is use, what is distribution, what is is connecting to, derived works, and importantly, around patents.

The CC licenses do an amazing job when it comes to artistic work such as books, movies, music, etc. but you don't have the same issues there, and that's why even CC says that they don't recommend using them for software.


I disagree.

Ok, a non-commercial Creative Common license is not "OSI-open source" or "FSF-open source", but it is technically "open source". The source is open.

The open source societal movement is much broader than the narrow definition given by OSI or FSF.

OP, your tool is perfectly fine with a non-commercial creative common license. The fact that CC licenses are not specific for software does not imply it is a bad choice for software.

Here I find it is a very appropriate license for OP's needs : he wants to open the source code, but prevent that someone else takes it and makes money with it under another name. This is totally fine.


Then say source available, not open source, because the latter connotes the freedoms as mentioned in the OSI definition, for most people who use that phrase.


Open source is not trademarked by FSF or OSI. I think it is ok to call it open source since the source is open.


Let's not redefine words based on what you personally think is correct when people en masse have been using them to mean a certain specific concept. It does not have to be trademarked, it can have a de facto meaning that everyone generally understands to be what it means.


That's because "open source" is a bad name, since it only focuses on source code availability rather than three other essential freedoms. "Free/libre software" always made more sense, but "open source" got significantly more popular.


Congrats ! I don't have an iPhone or Mac. Can I buy an AirTag, initialize it with the help of a friend who has an iPhone, and then locate the AirTag or ring it from my PC with this Python lib?


I responded to your other comment, but for other people who have the same question:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42482974


I don't see how you would get the private key for the airtag off the iPhone without jailbreaking it. The readme of the project implies you can do this but the docs are completely lacking


Sorry for the lacking docs; this has just been a little side project of mine and isn't supposed to be ready for the large public yet. Hence why I'm not the original submitter :-)

You don't need a jailbroken iPhone; a Mac or hackintosh should be sufficient. Some pointers to public discussions:

- https://github.com/malmeloo/FindMy.py/issues/4

- https://github.com/malmeloo/FindMy.py/issues/31

In the long term I would like to be able to pull the shared secrets directly from the iCloud keychain without having to use a mac, but the reverse engineering efforts are not quite there yet.


I don't have an iPhone or Mac. Can I buy an AirTag, initialize it with the help of a friend who has an iPhone, and then locate the AirTag or ring it from my PC with this Python lib?

It would be awesome.


I bought some $8 third-party AirTags from AliExpress, flashed them with some firmware, and used Macless Haystack to track them without owning any Apple devices.

https://notes.stavros.io/programming/third-party-airtags-res...

Google have also launched their own network, Find, which is turned off by default and useless for now.


Note that, locating airtags and making them play sound requires them to be near some other iDevice (the battery is a standard CR2032), so if you live in a remote ranch or something and nobody around you has an iphone, they might not be very useful.


It wouldn't even need to be a remote ranch—everything I'm seeing suggests they have a range of between 30-100 feet depending on walls and whatnot, which means even in a typical suburb you've got pretty high odds that none of your neighbors have a device within range at the moment you need it.


My experience is that this is rarely true in reality. I live in a freestanding house in a suburban area (not in the US, let alone SF). I’ve moved a couple of times since I’ve started using AirTags. Even when none of my own devices have been around, I still manage to get quite frequent location updates.


How frequent is frequent?

For the use case of identifying where they are on a map, I can certainly believe that an iPhone will connect more often than you move the object the tag is attached to. But when it comes time to actually trigger a sound to find it stuck under a cushion or what have you, is there going to be an iPhone within range at that moment?


That's a very unusual use case. When one of my airtags is in my building I can locate it with ~0.1ft precision using UWB. No matter how many other iPhones are in the building I can't get <100ft precision without UWB.

The difference between "airtag is in under the top left corner of the couch cushion" and "airtag might be in the same building as you" is so large that I wonder why you don't get a old used iPhone and swap the battery to create a functional phone.


I'm not OP. I've got an iPhone and two iPads and a Mac in the house. I'm asking for OP, who has no i-devices and wants to know if an airtag would be useful anyway.

> Can I buy an AirTag, initialize it with the help of a friend who has an iPhone, and then locate the AirTag or ring it from my PC with this Python lib?

Ringing it might be an unusual case for you, but it's exactly what OP was asking about.

(It's also by far the most common use case for this category of device for me. I misplace things all the time and it's super convenient to not have to wander all over the house looking for it.)


Theoretically yes, once the AirTag is deployed the keys should be static and you should be ready to go. Apple should also not be able to "ban" the tag at some later point in time.

I would suggest signing into a separate Apple account that's under your control to pair the AirTag, however. Not due to the risk of being banned, but because I have the suspicion that removing an AirTag from your (friend's) account may prompt the device to instruct the AirTag to reset. But if you sign into another account, pair it using an iDevice and then log out, that shouldn't be an issue.


Tile Tracker already has that. I wouldn't relying on Apple being merciful.


These new Nokia models/re-issues are of very poor quality, see my other comment.

They are not made by Nokia, but by HMD which has very low standards of product quality.


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