I'm a bit flabbergasted by all the "wow this person just wasted all his free time fixing a nonexistent problem instead of just getting an iPhone" on Hacker News of all places. Yes there's an ideological bent to the whole exercise but that's precisely the kind of passion you need to deep dive into creating your own audio device over a minor annoyance. Yes it's clunky and expensive to maintain but you have to admire the commitment and technical expertise to build a working product from scratch.. It was an entertaining read and I'm sure a good mental jog for the author.
Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
121–130 of 429 posts
Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
#122I’ll happily pay the “apple tax” so I can live my life and not have to deal with all the bullshit you did just to listen to some music. Good lord. I’d rather experience the world then mess around with the tech that’s supposed to be helping me live better.
That's such a straw-man it hurts. You're concluding, from the fact that a user has found one obscure bug, that android is a broken mess that only Arch Linux types should dare mess with, while Apple products are bastions of stability. The reality is that Apple products are (it appears) no more bug-free than the rest. Have you tried testing this very same thing on an iPhone? Maybe it even has the same bug!
The above comment is reacting directly to a quote in the article, not jumping to any new conclusions.
“If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.”
Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Smart and biased . Drinking the Apple hate juice in particular. I envy the people who have the free time to tinker but what they keep forgetting, time and time again, is that they are the minority. Many people have happy family lives and prefer to spend most of their leisure time with people -- or non-tech hobbies. I do enough programming already, thank you. (EDIT to add: and not everybody is in perfect health shape…
+1 on "hate doesn't work". Just adding a perspective that you might be missing. The stuff that OP described doesn't really feel like "work" to him. To him its the exact thing you described - it helps him recharge - so that he can go back to "work" the next day :) [P.S. "I do enough programming already, thank you." doesn't help as well. To get an idea of how sad it is to read, imagine if someone tells an artist "I do…
Yep, I know it helps them recharge. But I find it sad how oblivious they sometimes are that others might be so beat up that they need an almost passive recharge. :(
As for my programming, I actually do some small work outside of work hours on my own enthusiastic basis. But I have to tell you, even this minor 4-5h a week thing took me years of recharging and healing before I felt the passion for the first time in years and years.
(As an aside, we the techies need non-tech hobbies but that's just an opinion.)
Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those apps are making a conscious decision to exclude phones/roms not certified by Google. That's their choice. Generally hardware warranty will remain if it's purely a hardware issue - you can always flash back anyway. Android is free software in the sense that you can make and distribute modified versions. If app vendors choose to discriminate against those versions that doesn't make it unfree any more than softwar…
> Those apps are making a conscious decision to exclude phones/roms not certified by Google. That's their choice. Isn’t the entire point of Google’s certification process to encourage app vendors to make that choice?
No, only for apps that value certified behavior over accessibility. Typically this is payments (high liability for fraud, higher fraud rates from non-certified users), DRM, and multiplayer gaming (prevent cheating).
Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
#125> Right now I'm absolutely astonished at how difficult it appears to be to just listen to music with a good pair of headphones. Is it not 2018? The media is full of talk about preposterously ambitious ideas such as AI and self-driving cars and yet I can't even listen to a fuck-damn music track? O_o I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read: > If any…
I'm not sure why Apple is receiving any sort of praise here. I was constantly assaulted by an "explosion of noise" glitch when working with Logic Pro in OS X. I could have the system volume level set to the lowest possible setting (25% of 1 notch), and yet I'd still occasionally get deafening explosions of noise as if I had the system volume set to the full 16 notches. The explosion is just short enough that there's…
That sounds like a hardware problem or drivers issue. If it was a software problem, why give up on music when there are other options both free and paid like Reaper, Ableton, etc. which run perfectly fine?
I have not had any of the issues you are complaining about in Logic Pro X, FWIW, on multiple laptops and hardware audio interfaces over ~6 years of use.
Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
#126Pro tip: There are enough PCB shops now that small designs like this can just be done in free EDA software in minutes, 10 boards in your hand with a stencil 9 real days later for less than $50 shipped. The stencil lets you paste the board all at once, you place parts and hit it with a heat gun until everything sets. For audio stuff you get the advantage of keeping everything nice and tight with lower noise. I barely…
Any recommendations for the US? All the circuits I’ve ever made were breadboarded, this could be a fun direction to take.
Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
#127Is this actually a bug in Android (confirmed by someone else on a different phone) or is it a bug in the implementation by this OEM? I haven't experienced it but I also do not use this writer's particular sound files.
I think the underlying point is very important. It does seem like quality has been sacrificed in many products to shave a few pennies off the BOM. Why should today's portable CD players be substantially worse than the ones available in 1995? I get that they are asking $25 instead of $115. But SONY and Panasonic have left the market, leaving it to the drugstore quality ones, and they don't appear to want to make a product that plays a clear sound.
As far as circuits are concerned, I can't help but notice that a TI TPA6100A2 costs $1.11 at qty 1, and outputs stereo from a 1.6-5.5V single supply drawing a max of 50mw. This would substantially reduce the weight and power draw of his mini amp. A couple rechargable AA batteries would do.
Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
#128I’ll happily pay the “apple tax” so I can live my life and not have to deal with all the bullshit you did just to listen to some music. Good lord. I’d rather experience the world then mess around with the tech that’s supposed to be helping me live better.
Seriously, people, do you get paid for this marketing in every topic that doesn't directly concern Apple? You didn't even seem to read the article to understand it.
Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
#129> _It turns out that all music players on Android actually play music using the Android-media-player-service._ This is inaccurate. Neutron music player bypasses Android's Media Player APIs and talks directly to your DAC and plays music without resampling (if the DAC supports it). Never had any audio popping or explosions using Neutron, and I've tried it on 6 different devices so far without any issues (LG G3, Nexus 6…
The downside of that is, of course, greater battery consumption. MediaPlayer API will offload music playing to a separate DSP (if available) and that allows the main application processor to go to sleep. There is some nuance here, but that usually significantly reduces battery consumption while playing music with the screen off.
Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
#130I’ll happily pay the “apple tax” so I can live my life and not have to deal with all the bullshit you did just to listen to some music. Good lord. I’d rather experience the world then mess around with the tech that’s supposed to be helping me live better.
It’s amusing to still hear “Apple tax” in 2018, as if there is no additional value in better hardware, software and support for many people’s use cases.
I always thought of the apple-tax not as the cost of the product but the additional costs, like fifty dollar dongles because the new version doesn't use the same connectors as the old, or being forced to use iTunes, itself a montrosity of painful design, to put some mp3s on your mp3 player. As far as I can tell, Apple still charges $50 for a $2 wire dongle.