ティージェーグレェ on Nostr: I haven't really explored opus tbh. I think once I had systems capable of handling ...
I haven't really explored opus tbh. I think once I had systems capable of handling FLAC in real-time (and for the longest time Serato only offered ALAC and avoided FLAC which was annoying a.f.) I was pretty happy.
I think WavPack seemed vaguely fascinating insomuch as it is a hybrid lossy/lossless codec, but again I haven't explored it more or less at all.
For some histrionics, personally by 2007, when I was the only deejay I knew with a Rane TTM57SL (which basically was the first mixer with a built-in DVS/Serato sound card) I was working in my "day" job for the company which was the first company that was doing HD live video streaming on the web, and so the battles I was trying to fight (and losing, miserably) were advocating for use of lossless video codecs (e.g. Dirac; one of the authors whom I know personally and I at least managed to get some of my co-workers to go out to lunch with before they rejected the premise of pushing that needle forward at all). Around that time, I remember being invited to deejay at some house party in Santa Cruz, owned by a guy I knew from deejayin at The Box (a gothdustrial "weekly" at the Blue Lagoon on Pacific Avenue) who had a day job working for Seagate. One of the other deejays he invited brought his mixer (a Rane TTM56) + SL1 (Rane DVS interface) and he seemed skeptical of my mixer (which was basically the iterated/integrated version of what he had). That guy's "day job" at that time was working for Apple on Fairplay (and its DRM) IIRC? sigh Weird and terribly small world sometimes. In a weird way, mixers with integrated sound cards now are common place, but at that time, Vestax had the TUB-1 audio interface which could be used with some of its mixers (e.g. PMC-05Pro) and tbh, I kind of like that "modular" design? Though unfortunately for everyone, Vestax went from being one of the biggest skratch deejay friendly hardware companies, to bankrupt by 2014. Meanwhile a lot of the other hardware vendors/brands have merged (e.g. Rane and Denon are both part of the inMusic conglomerate, AFAIK there's currently an injunction blocking the acquisition of Serato by AlphaTheta [which is the company behind Pioneer DJ/Rekordbox) to say nothing of the it.sh show that Apple and such have had on the commercial music industry.
But, circa 2007? In that era I even remember encountering a fellow DVS/Serato user (which circa 2007 we still seemed like outliers, even though my "day" job had CDJs and even DVJs which I have encountered more or less no where else before or since) who insisted on using AIFFs (and IIRC, was still rockin a G4 PowerBook despite Intel MacBook Pros having been around for some years) and I realized that if we were the ones "pushing the edge" and there were still many deejays who were vinyl purists and hadn't even tried CDJs, let alone DVS? I kind of gave up on most deejays as innovating much of anything at all.
That wasn't always the case. Indeed, it probably still isn't but those who revel in and push technology forward are mostly outliers. There's DJ Hardrich who collaborated on the Invader Mixer (now forever a prototype) with Jesse Dean Designs and ThudRumble (DJ QBert et al) and I have affinity and personal connections with those folks (ironically, I haven't met hardrich personally, just the others); but there's also a lot of folks who glommed onto deejayin and deejay "culture" and insist on "keepin it real" by seemingly, to me, being stuck in the past? I'm not sure what is real about that? sigh* But then I routinely encounter folks who drank the Apple kool-aid hook line and sinker and are insufferable while they think their it.sh doesn't stink. ;(
DJ Abattoir (RIP) aka kma, aka Kevin Archibald I befriended via IRC in the early 1990s and he would mail me mix tapes of stuff that broadened my horizons. He was also friends with DJ Statik (of Das Bunker/Midnight★Mess) who at least for part of the time in the 1990s, worked for Pioneer and sold DJ Abattoir the first pair of CDJs I ever saw and touched. Eventually DJ Abattoir I think sold his CDJs off to Tristan von Wasserspeier whom I deejayed with in Santa Cruz circa 2005/2006 at Defiance! But even back then CDJs seemed almost transgressive among the mainstream deejays, and DVS was beyond a lot of deejays' periphery entirely. Whereas I settled on Serato (mostly because I realized that specific mixer I purchased I could also use with Traktor and Ableton Live and more; something more or less unimaginable today given all the vendor/brand in fighting), but among my peers, was also debating the relative merits of Final Scratch, Ms. Pinky (still my favorite control vinyl, at least for its era) and Traktor (which never really felt like my jamm).
I may have been too far ahead of the curve since to me at that time, it felt as if video mixin seemed as if it was going to be the next "big" thing, but very few (myself included, aside from dabbling with Serato Scratch Live's video plugin and knowing someone else who was telling me how Ms. Pinky beat Serato to that punch) ever did much with that (for reference one of the last club nights I remember acting as a VJ, I was using LaserDiscs and as happens, when deejayin, someone stole some of mine when I wasn't looking and I collect rare LaserDiscs too and I remain bitter about that).
I know that nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqmt7srtspqpp9u2g9pwf4qykxxza0xaulthpx7e342aapfj38757qmpgygc (nprofile…gygc) has done some outstanding VJ sets (mostly relying on Virtual DJ I think? To say nothing of decades of avant-garde artistic collection curating that have been inspiring me ever since I was first blessed to attend House of Usher in SF in the early 1990s) but a lot of deejays these days, seem as if they have "caught up" to CDJs that don't even have CD drives in them anymore! ;) I'm still trying to push the needle forward, and mostly failing, or seeing the ripples of stuff I thought no one was paying attention to finally start to take root years/decades after I was thinking that stuff was hip.
TL;DR I don't think opus was released until 2012? By then I was already struggling to try to figure out how to make lossless video codecs more viable (spoiler: apparently I and that Dirac person I know are outliers and most people still don't care), and definitely not really paying attention to newer developments in lossy audio codecs too closely.
It's entirely possible that opus is rad!
But, I was deejayin MODs over the radio airwaves in the early 1990s with Tetsuo Shima on the WWWA Techno Jamms on 91.9FM KSPB "Radio Stevenson in Pebble Beach!" ;) and to date, I don't think I've ever encountered anything as disk space efficient and audio quality resplendent as tracker music? I guess maybe someone could take something like WavePack or Opus or Speex or whatever highly compressed lossy codec and combine it with tracker techniques and gobs of CPU and RAM to make something more impressive in some ways than MOD or S3M or whatever today?
But that was one of the charms of MODs: it didn't require gobs of CPU or RAM and still sounded incredible (well for its era at least) and as Hoffman (nprofile…sus4) et al demonstrated with PT1210 (https://github.com/djh0ffman/PT1210), even capable of being pitch shifted in real time on such modest hardware. Once you start throwing compression (lossy or otherwise) into the mix, getting real-time playback is going to be a challenge (I don't even want to think about how long it took to trans-code MP3s to AIFFs on my stock Amiga 1200 anymore; but I am guessing opus trans-coding would take a spell as well?)
I think WavPack seemed vaguely fascinating insomuch as it is a hybrid lossy/lossless codec, but again I haven't explored it more or less at all.
For some histrionics, personally by 2007, when I was the only deejay I knew with a Rane TTM57SL (which basically was the first mixer with a built-in DVS/Serato sound card) I was working in my "day" job for the company which was the first company that was doing HD live video streaming on the web, and so the battles I was trying to fight (and losing, miserably) were advocating for use of lossless video codecs (e.g. Dirac; one of the authors whom I know personally and I at least managed to get some of my co-workers to go out to lunch with before they rejected the premise of pushing that needle forward at all). Around that time, I remember being invited to deejay at some house party in Santa Cruz, owned by a guy I knew from deejayin at The Box (a gothdustrial "weekly" at the Blue Lagoon on Pacific Avenue) who had a day job working for Seagate. One of the other deejays he invited brought his mixer (a Rane TTM56) + SL1 (Rane DVS interface) and he seemed skeptical of my mixer (which was basically the iterated/integrated version of what he had). That guy's "day job" at that time was working for Apple on Fairplay (and its DRM) IIRC? sigh Weird and terribly small world sometimes. In a weird way, mixers with integrated sound cards now are common place, but at that time, Vestax had the TUB-1 audio interface which could be used with some of its mixers (e.g. PMC-05Pro) and tbh, I kind of like that "modular" design? Though unfortunately for everyone, Vestax went from being one of the biggest skratch deejay friendly hardware companies, to bankrupt by 2014. Meanwhile a lot of the other hardware vendors/brands have merged (e.g. Rane and Denon are both part of the inMusic conglomerate, AFAIK there's currently an injunction blocking the acquisition of Serato by AlphaTheta [which is the company behind Pioneer DJ/Rekordbox) to say nothing of the it.sh show that Apple and such have had on the commercial music industry.
But, circa 2007? In that era I even remember encountering a fellow DVS/Serato user (which circa 2007 we still seemed like outliers, even though my "day" job had CDJs and even DVJs which I have encountered more or less no where else before or since) who insisted on using AIFFs (and IIRC, was still rockin a G4 PowerBook despite Intel MacBook Pros having been around for some years) and I realized that if we were the ones "pushing the edge" and there were still many deejays who were vinyl purists and hadn't even tried CDJs, let alone DVS? I kind of gave up on most deejays as innovating much of anything at all.
That wasn't always the case. Indeed, it probably still isn't but those who revel in and push technology forward are mostly outliers. There's DJ Hardrich who collaborated on the Invader Mixer (now forever a prototype) with Jesse Dean Designs and ThudRumble (DJ QBert et al) and I have affinity and personal connections with those folks (ironically, I haven't met hardrich personally, just the others); but there's also a lot of folks who glommed onto deejayin and deejay "culture" and insist on "keepin it real" by seemingly, to me, being stuck in the past? I'm not sure what is real about that? sigh* But then I routinely encounter folks who drank the Apple kool-aid hook line and sinker and are insufferable while they think their it.sh doesn't stink. ;(
DJ Abattoir (RIP) aka kma, aka Kevin Archibald I befriended via IRC in the early 1990s and he would mail me mix tapes of stuff that broadened my horizons. He was also friends with DJ Statik (of Das Bunker/Midnight★Mess) who at least for part of the time in the 1990s, worked for Pioneer and sold DJ Abattoir the first pair of CDJs I ever saw and touched. Eventually DJ Abattoir I think sold his CDJs off to Tristan von Wasserspeier whom I deejayed with in Santa Cruz circa 2005/2006 at Defiance! But even back then CDJs seemed almost transgressive among the mainstream deejays, and DVS was beyond a lot of deejays' periphery entirely. Whereas I settled on Serato (mostly because I realized that specific mixer I purchased I could also use with Traktor and Ableton Live and more; something more or less unimaginable today given all the vendor/brand in fighting), but among my peers, was also debating the relative merits of Final Scratch, Ms. Pinky (still my favorite control vinyl, at least for its era) and Traktor (which never really felt like my jamm).
I may have been too far ahead of the curve since to me at that time, it felt as if video mixin seemed as if it was going to be the next "big" thing, but very few (myself included, aside from dabbling with Serato Scratch Live's video plugin and knowing someone else who was telling me how Ms. Pinky beat Serato to that punch) ever did much with that (for reference one of the last club nights I remember acting as a VJ, I was using LaserDiscs and as happens, when deejayin, someone stole some of mine when I wasn't looking and I collect rare LaserDiscs too and I remain bitter about that).
I know that nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqmt7srtspqpp9u2g9pwf4qykxxza0xaulthpx7e342aapfj38757qmpgygc (nprofile…gygc) has done some outstanding VJ sets (mostly relying on Virtual DJ I think? To say nothing of decades of avant-garde artistic collection curating that have been inspiring me ever since I was first blessed to attend House of Usher in SF in the early 1990s) but a lot of deejays these days, seem as if they have "caught up" to CDJs that don't even have CD drives in them anymore! ;) I'm still trying to push the needle forward, and mostly failing, or seeing the ripples of stuff I thought no one was paying attention to finally start to take root years/decades after I was thinking that stuff was hip.
TL;DR I don't think opus was released until 2012? By then I was already struggling to try to figure out how to make lossless video codecs more viable (spoiler: apparently I and that Dirac person I know are outliers and most people still don't care), and definitely not really paying attention to newer developments in lossy audio codecs too closely.
It's entirely possible that opus is rad!
But, I was deejayin MODs over the radio airwaves in the early 1990s with Tetsuo Shima on the WWWA Techno Jamms on 91.9FM KSPB "Radio Stevenson in Pebble Beach!" ;) and to date, I don't think I've ever encountered anything as disk space efficient and audio quality resplendent as tracker music? I guess maybe someone could take something like WavePack or Opus or Speex or whatever highly compressed lossy codec and combine it with tracker techniques and gobs of CPU and RAM to make something more impressive in some ways than MOD or S3M or whatever today?
But that was one of the charms of MODs: it didn't require gobs of CPU or RAM and still sounded incredible (well for its era at least) and as Hoffman (nprofile…sus4) et al demonstrated with PT1210 (https://github.com/djh0ffman/PT1210), even capable of being pitch shifted in real time on such modest hardware. Once you start throwing compression (lossy or otherwise) into the mix, getting real-time playback is going to be a challenge (I don't even want to think about how long it took to trans-code MP3s to AIFFs on my stock Amiga 1200 anymore; but I am guessing opus trans-coding would take a spell as well?)