So my late stepfather, Gary, he’s been dead for 12 years. Late doesn’t really sound. But, um. he was the first and only person I’ve ever seen to diligently maintain and insist others maintain the practices of in one’s cell phone contacts, the people who should be contacted in case of emergency, whatever that might be, to prepend the acronym ICE, capital ICE, in case of emergency, I. Um. And this should be a long forgotten thing. Uh. But due to the magic of the way that Apple services work.. I, for an extended period of time, but not very often, so like, very intermittently, maybe, like, once every 18 months on average. I think it happened twice, two or three times.. I don’t remember why my contacts were synced with Gary’s. That is going back too far. But for whatever reason we had, shared contacts, I don’t know if that was the practice, back then. Um. But.. I swear to you, uh, for some unknown reason without provocation that I could ever figure out, my iCloud contacts, uh, would change back to having the fucking ice acronym in the beginning, which, as you can probably imagine,. Um, in any sort of modern contact system, just really fucks things up. Uh It’s very cute and earnest because if anything, for like the sheer amount of contacts that he. did that for, like, uh. all of his stepchildren, and by stepchildren, I don’t even know what the term is. He married. Yeah, I guess it is stepchildren. Adult, stepchildren. It was more than ten. More than 10 contacts had ice the beginning. And. Um. You know, now I think you can designate one emergency contact, I think.. on iOS now. But, um.. Yeah, I guess here’s the.. It’s just funny. That’s the whole story. I. There are a lot of things I feel like, generally, if you wanted to know um. My selfish lament regarding my stepfather’s death, the most self centered one, is that, like.. I was a very like, tolerant kid and stuff and found him very amusing when a lot of people found him really irritating. But like,. I was almost to the age, almost there, where I would have really started to appreciate, all of his particular eccentricities to go on about that, but… And one of the things, like, you know, basically at what I’m trying to say is,.. regardless of what caused it,, the few times that that happened were somehow really nice, like being haunted by fucking., like the way that you discover such a thing, by the way, is like you’re I’m searching for a contact in a search bar that I, you know, like my sister and I don’t see it. Like, it doesn’t appear. Searching for, uh, you know, Amy. It’s not on the fucking list. Uh. And then you go through the whole thing and see that, actually acronym. But yeah, Being Haunted by Gary’s.. You know, I’ve never looked it up. I’m not going to, actually. I hope it’s just something that he did.

Long-Awaited, Elegantly-Executed

Somehow, this 1.4 MB, virtually inconfigurable, single-use application manages to be one of the most powerful audio manipulation tools on iOS. Those who remember maintaining a GarageBand install just because they occasionally needed to trim audio files will celebrate. One of very few apps I’ve come across that I absolutely wouldn’t change at all but would pay much more for.

Extraordinarily accurate (especially compared to any of its “competition”) and astonishingly robust.

(Forgot to conclude the story: I just immediately left the server.)

Anecdotally…

An opportunity to compare transcript generation between Microblog’s and the “Apple Intelligence” transcripts now available in Voice Memos:

I guess it must have been um in 2021. I don’t know why it feels like it was so long ago uh when I first heard about well, not, but I first heard of Of course the the name blues sky had been tossed around for a long time. That’s why I had heard about it. uh The first time anything that I ever saw anything tangible, it was a discordite, of course, and what I did was that I immediately went in there and uh I think, well, the discussion that was happening that I remember it was about the protocol specifically. um and I literally just linked to activity to the main activity pub site. I think I linked to activity pub. rocks uh, and and it was just like, you guys know about this, right? Um, and I swear to you, like, uh and it was kind of like frantic. It was like sincere like wait, hang on a second because that’s the way that that uh activity pub shit. um the actual foundation of to centralized social that’s been around for um I was going to say decades. I guess it’s probably pushing it a little bit, but a decade and more. um It’s been developed on and refined to a point where it is like it is the thing. The technology, like is a and I guess I should appreciate that more. I guess the technology had already been established and from my perspective, it continues to be I mean the dream of social media seeing the first time I said this before a million times, but like seeing a pixel fed post in line on a masted on feed I remember that that thought like holy shit, this is literally what I wished for all along. um like shit. I wish that like the the technology barrier that um proprietary barriers between me and and whatever I wanted to express in the service, I wish that I could um barriers maybe not the right word, but actually is just like the dream. And like I don’t know anything technically about the AT protocol because I am not like enough anything that’s kind of intentional. I just don’t have ruin my brain, but, you know, all these years, what I’ve heard from people again about their hesitants, so mast it on their their bad experiences on mastodon have been because it was difficult. uh but like seeing some of those same people um literally have their username, their bluesray username stop resolving for a second. uh But I don’t know. I don’t understand. And I guess it it’s just and it just fucking sends me and I don’t know why. I don’t know why. um but redundancy, I guess, is just really alarming and also I don’t know. um I heard a friend got their account their blue sky account suspended uh and I didn’t follow up with him so I probably should actually the other day, but it seemed like he that that happened without explanation um and uh there’s just no meaning behind calling yourself open source and if if that sort of thing is going to happen um also like practically speaking, if decentralization is what anyone in the in the blue sky project genuinely want it I still have yet to hear an explanation as for why they wouldn’t have there just is none there is none other than money and the difference between m Macedon and blue sky is that blue sky took ventures money. uh and it’s just strange to me and irritating a hell to hear um I don’t know I don’t know anything about Jake Raber, but uh, like hearing her go on about uh the things they’re doing in a meive Patel interview that he did recently. um and he just I love Neai. But like once again, that was I mean, and and decoder is his business podcast. So like I can’t even like that’s is very explicitly about business. uh so and organs or whatever. um so I guess I can’t but like you got to interrupt her. Anyway, so okay, so what happened with that disord thing? I went in there, uh linked activity pub dot rocks and was like, guys, you know about this, right? Like woo, hold on. wait a second. uh and then like the response was I mean, I remember it being I didn’t read it because it began with you know, the essence was uh well, but and I was just like, yeah, I got Bill, thank you to everyone who created activity problem. And I’m like not it is not loyalty for the sake of I just really love the brand um because I it’s just I don’t understand. I don’t understand um and I and I suspect once again that literally your only barrier, I guess I should just be more explicit about it. Those of you who um found herself migrating this blue sky. Okay, I’m gonna exempt anyone who has to do social media, for their livelihood, okay? Because that just doesn’t count, then you have to go with other people. There are people. That has to be that’s a whole different consideration. But like uh like you definitely what you mean by it’s it was hard is that it’s genuinely nonprofit and you get the same sickness that I suppose still have um but like damn uh it’s so disappointing. and uh isolating, I guess. And frustrating, but, um yeah. I’m sure it’s gonna grow great. Um

With Voice Memos, two tracks can be layered on top of one another. There's also an option to separate layers and edit layer mixes.

Two-track projects can be imported directly into Logic Pro on the iPhone 16 Pro and ‌iPhone 16 Pro‌ Max.

Hypothes.is

Why/how in God’s name of the fuck would it be limited to (effectively) a single device??

…Voice Memos does not need to be a DAW.

wondering why Last.fm’s “Obsessions” have [their own permalinks]Ihttps://www.last.fm/user/neoyokel/obsessions/8172412).

…but why am I wondering that???

thanks.

Just a reminder that I continue to put all of my music curatiorial energy into a single discovery playlist, basically, which is designed to make … contact.

And how do you do all of that on top of migrating the entire Onion website to WordPress?

If you, too, immediately thought “well what the hell was it, then, if not The ‘Press???,” the answer is… fucking Kinja.

The Editorial Process

Ben Collins: …I just want to walk through their daily process for writing headlines. They come in every day. There’s either one or two meetings depending on the day, and then they write — usually, it’s around 190 headlines. They are put into a Google form and completely anonymized. Then, from there, it’s trimmed down a little bit by one of the editors per day. Then, they go in the room, and they read them out loud, all of them, and if it gets a laugh or if it’s like that’s something that’s a character we’re going to bring back or they got to talk through it, they check it off, and then they whittle those down over and over and over again. And by the end of the meeting, there’s usually — what, Danielle? — like 10 max, 5 to 10?

Danielle Strle: Yeah, tops.

BC: Around there. And then, those get written out, and if the copy’s not good or if it’s just a nib or something, that gets whittled down to three or four per day. And that comes from that contributor network that has legit famous people in it, or it comes from the people in the room. And then only after all that did they go back, and they’re like, “That guy wrote that thing.” That’s how meritocratic this is.

• iCloud Shared Project File

• iCloud Shared Project File

Aiko Transcript

All right folks, it’s your favorite thing, favorite time.

It’s time to play around with the changes to audio capture specifically, an iPadOS 18.1 beta 2.

I don’t actually, I don’t know if this is as a beta 2.

Two things I noticed, the thing that they introduced in 16 I believe, which is called mic modes, where you could switch between standard wide spectrum and voice isolation.

I say you could switch.

This was in control center, it’s still in control center, they redesigned where it is, and the interface is very pretty, but they didn’t fucking fix it, and by fix that I just mean have it, I don’t know, it’s an API thing I guess.

I really just need to put on a list of things that I go down and make a mock-up fucking app so that I can see what the actual control is, the actual fucking backend code.

Not that I’m capable of this, or at least it doesn’t come easily, because um, in order to switch mic modes, and I don’t know if I’m recording in voice isolation or standard or wide spectrum right now, this is in voice memos, which is a native app which has transcription now, which is very cool, except even as I’m recording right now I don’t have access to that mic modes menu.

I had to start a live stream on Telegram.

Telegram, of course, is the one app that semi-reliably gives me access to the mic modes thing, but it still sticks as in you make a selection.

There was no selection at first.

Anyway, this is voice memos recording in lossless.

I don’t know if stereo voice memos is a new capability, but if you go to the app specific menu for voice memos in iPadOS 18, there was a toggle that was default off, just called stereo, and it’s on now.

Good morning.

All right, same device, same setting, but this is ferrite.

Ferrite being, well, the closest that we’ve ever come, really, to a professional audio capture app on this device.

Um, let’s see, do I have access to mic modes?

Nope, that’s okay.

Um, but uh, yeah, I, notably, one thing that ferrite recently added, and I know it’s silly, but uh, when I was in high school growing up around musicians and audio stuff, uh, FLAC files were basically a fucking meme because, um, you know, I explored all the drywall stuff in FLAC, which is, which is, if you know what I’m talking about, kind of funny.

Anyway, you can export it to FLAC now in ferrite.

And finally, recording in 96 kilohertz directly into Logic Pro for iPad.

Same microphone array, I think.

Um, yeah.

Oh, I guess it’d be very weird if I had access to mic modes here.

But I, so I listened back to, um, at least the voice memos recording, uh, and I’m almost positive that that was indeed in voice isolation.

Um, I guess the last subject would be, uh, I’m gonna see if I can, I’ll have a go at putting this together in fucking Logic Pro. Oh wait, actually, no, I’ll put it in, I’ll put it in ferrite and export it to WIP because WIP does 320 playback.

Uh, transcription.

I, um, think that on-device transcription is really cool, you know, native.

Uh, I would just like to mention that Cinder’s sword, his sword, who’s, wow, I actually know how to pronounce his name, but I’m not going to continue to fail.

Uh, his app, ICO, which is free, A-I-K-O, um, at least for my recordings so far, it’s just fucking better.

And you can import anything, video files.

Uh, I try to, the weirdest fucking file format, I think I did a WebM and it was fine and allows you to immediately copy, uh, and also export into all, uh, a bunch of different text formats and it’s free.

And it is also on-device and it’s bizarrely fast, but, uh, you know, I’ve got the newest chips.

Yeah.

Just buy a Shure SM57 and a Sema and a used, buy a used Shure SM57, uh, and a USB audio interface, a relatively good quality one.

Um, just do that.

Don’t buy an iPad.