I’m currently working on a sequencer DAW plug-in (MIDI, audio) with multiple voices & precise timing/articulation controls, including a templating system & transformations to apply these changes to several steps/voices at the same time. Will also support importing/exporting tempo maps.
Can be used for everything from slightly skewed beat-making to generating undulating waves of sound!
I don’t believe this is true? I’m pretty sure that you’re prohibited from making money from that fan fiction, not from writing it at all. So I don’t understand the claim that copyright “massively stifles” creativity. There are of course examples of people not being able to make money on specific “ideas” because of copyright laws, but that doesn’t seem to me to be “massively stifling” creativity itself, especially given that it also protects and supports many people generating these ideas. And if we got rid of copyright law, wouldn’t we be in that exact place, where people wouldn’t be allowed to make money off of creative endeavors?
I mean, owning an idea is kinda gross, I agree. I also personally think that owning land is kinda gross. But we live in a capitalist society right now. If we allow AI companies to train LLMs on copyrighted works without paying for that access, we are choosing to reward these companies instead of the humans who created the data upon which these companies are utterly reliant for said LLMs. Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and all the other tech CEOs will benefit in place of all of the artists I love and admire.
I will also add: there are tons of examples of companies taking down not for profit fanction or fan creation of stuff. Nintendo is very aggressive about this. The publisher of Harry Potter has also aggressively taken down not for profit fanfiction.
> If we allow AI companies to train LLMs on copyrighted works without paying for that access, we are choosing to reward these companies instead of the humans who created the data upon which these companies are utterly reliant for said LLMs.
It's interesting how much parallel there is here to the idea that company owners reap the rewards of their employee's labor when doing no additional work themselves. The fruits of labors should go to the individuals who labor, I 100% agree.
Copyright isn't about distribution, it's about creation. In reality the chances of getting in trouble is basically zero if you don't distribute it - who would know? But technically any creation, even in private, is violating copyright. Doesn't matter if you make money or put it on the internet.
There is fair use, but fair is an affirmative defense to infringing copyright. By claiming fair use you are simultaneously admitting infringement. The idea that you have to defend your own private expression of ideas based on other ideas is still wrong in my view.
> Copyright isn't about distribution, it's about creation
This is exactly wrong. You can copy all of Harry Potter into your journal as many times as you want legally (creating copies) so long as you do not distribute it.
"copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly"
"The owner of a copyright has the exclusive right to do and authorize others to do the following: To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;To prepare derivative works based upon the work;"
"Commonly, this involves someone creating or distributing"
"U.S. copyright law provides copyright owners with the following exclusive rights: Reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords. Prepare derivative works based upon the work."
"Copyright infringement occurs when a work is reproduced, distributed, displayed, performed or altered without the creator’s permission."
There are endless legitimate sources for this. Copyright protects many things, not just distribution. It very clearly disallows the creation and production of copyrighted works.
Thank you! It was really helpful to be reminded of this truth such an unexpected context. I am finally beginning to grab that “ordinary person’s life” & getting there has indeed been _the path_.
Very well put. I’m open to a future in which nothing is copyrighted & everything is in the public domain, but the byproduct of that public domain material should _also_ be owned by the public.
Otherwise, we’re making the judgement that the originators of the IP should not be compensated for their labor, while the AI labs should be. Of course, training & running the models take compute resources, but the ultimate aim of these companies is to profit above & beyond those costs, just as artists hope to be compensated above & beyond the training & resources required to make the art in the first place.
as an artist, I totally agree with this approach. the whole idea of trying to pay artists for their contributions in training data is just impractical.
if the data’s pulled from the public domain, the model built from this human knowledge should be shared with all creators too, meaning everyone should get access to it
I feel you on a lot of this! But out of the box Python support? Does anybody actually want that? It’s pretty darn quick & straightforward to get a Python environment up & running on MacOS. Maybe I’m misunderstanding what you mean here.
>it’ll run reliably on other people’s machines a few years from now
That's optimistic. What if the system Python gets upgraded? For some reason, Python libraries tend to be super picky about the Python versions they support (not just Python 2 vs 3).
As opposed to using JavaScript on the front end & back end? That benefit of JS has always seemed a bit overrated to me—the context for front-end & server-side JS is pretty darn different, too.
Anyway, Ruby & Rails are such a joy to use that, at least for me, the fact that it’s written in a different language than the one we need in the browser is a non-issue.
What leads you to believe that Logic has been shedding users? What little information I can find on this suggests that Logic has in fact been growing slightly & has significant market share. I also think it’s a huge driver of Mac sales.
Yeah, this is mainly based on Ableton Live clearly eating everyone's lunch on the electronic music front, and myself following Logic's new features added over the last five to ten years (e.g., combination of copying Live-style looping/sampling features, and the ML session player stuff). Just from my observation these new features have been hitting very lukewarm with their audience. Logic (and Cubase) seem stuck between Pro Tools for live music recording and arranging, and Live for electronic music. The one area Logic still seems super strong to me is composing and arranging sample-based instruments, e.g., like you might do for a soundtrack. But that just seems like a small market.
Curious if you have any counter information here? There's definitely a ton of room for me to be wrong on this.
I think we both have a lot of room for being wrong! There seem to be no reliable sources for DAW market share, and I imagine all of these companies consider it in their interests to keep the number of active users of their software to themselves. So anything I have to say here is purely anecdotal.
From my vantage point (Brooklyn-based creative music-maker regularly recording & performing), it’s a growing market and both Ableton _and_ Logic are doing pretty well. Ableton has some obvious strengths—its scene-based workflow & M4L in particular—but it’s also got a very opinionated UI & is a bit less intuitive/fluid for editing (at least from my perspective as a Logic user!). I know many people who use Logic to make creative music that involves both live recording and electronic instruments, and a lot of those people have switched away from Pro Tools because of its hideous UI, the subscription pricing, & the annoyance of iLok. I even know several professional, touring musicians who perform with MainStage & swear by it.
In other words, I think that Logic has found a pretty broad audience of creative musicians who straddle the songwriting & electronic music worlds (which is more & more people every day).
What makes you think that Ableton is eating everyone’s lunch in electronic music? I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong, honestly, & I’d in particular point to their purchase of Cycling ‘74 & successful hardware products like Push & Move, but I’m curious to hear details from your perspective.
Definitely hoping that Gruber is wrong here & Logic stays the fantastic loss-leader it’s been for the last decade or so.
> What makes you think that Ableton is eating everyone’s lunch in electronic music? I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong, honestly, & I’d in particular point to their purchase of Cycling ‘74 & successful hardware products like Push & Move, but I’m curious to hear details from your perspective.
This is purely just from reading opinions of folks online, they seem to think Live has advantages for being more tailored for electronic music, and Logic is more dated, and some of the more entry-level features (e.g., ML session players) rub people the wrong way.
Also awesome to hear the love for Cycling 74! Max is perhaps my personal favorite piece of software ever, and that same group I follow I mainly see actually complaining about it in Live! I maintain a couple of Max for Live plugins:
Feel you on the entry-level features making people worried that Apple is prosumer-izing their baby. I worry about that sometimes.
Yes, Max is amazing. Thanks for sharing your instruments! Sidewinder looks particularly cool.
I also got into building in there for a while (& still do sometimes), though not specifically M4L: https://github.com/flats/max-instruments. Even wrote a couple of externals back in the day.
What I _really_ want is some sort of a hybrid between a DAW and something like Csound—fully graphical but also fully scriptable/automatable. Live w/ M4L is _kinda_ close, but we’re not quite there yet…
>Logic (and Cubase) seem stuck between Pro Tools for live music recording and arranging, and Live for electronic music
Which is the best place to be to do both - which is what a huge number of musicians need - not just (or ever) recording 16 channel drums and 10 musicians in some big studio like with Pro Tools, nor doing just EDM and working off just a laptop (as with Ableton).
High end studios will use Pro Tools for legacy reasons. EDM and electronica musicians will usually opt for Ableton (and many for FL too, hugely popular as well).
But the 10s of millions of people recording and producing music however, will either be fully electronic and opt for something like Live, or will be (even more common) in the place you descrive Logic and Cubase being stuck in (Studio Pro and Reaper too).
That's "stuck place" between the two case is a much bigger market. The Pro Tools market is tiny in comparison. Which is perhaps also why the go from bankcruptcy to bankcruptcy.
Can be used for everything from slightly skewed beat-making to generating undulating waves of sound!