Everyone I know who is a casual jazz musician / student uses iReal Pro for practicing soloing. It does an okay job. The styles are mediocre and mechanical, and not as good as Band-in-a-Box or as rich as JJazzLab with its ability to plug in Yamaha styles.

I also own 4 editions of a new entrant called "Quartet" that uses carefully recorded, individually tracked, time annotated recordings of jazz standards by a real band. Solo sections can be repeated an arbitrary number of times and within fairly constrained limits tunes can be transposed, sped up, or slowed down. Of course the more you stretch or pitch bend the recordings, the more it sounds like garbage.

Something like iReal Pro, where you can key in your chord changes, configure repeats, specify instrumentation, etc. but generate high quality backing would be almost a holy grail for musicians' solo practice.

I also imagine this kind of thing would be a near perfect case to demonstrate "neurosymbolic AI". Backing tracks are constrained by actual constraints, not vibes. Suno does some impressive things, but was useless in my experience for trying to create a backing track.

"iReal, but with AI-generated backing band" is an idea I've even considered trying to build, but honestly I'd be just as happy to buy this app (or contribute to an open source version). Someone build this!

Most instruments tend to pitch sharp or flat depending on the partial. I don't recall any music teachers giving advice that specific positions should routinely get adjustments, but instead that notes in a particular partial should be adjusted. For example, F above middle C should be flattened when played in 1st position to compensate for 6th partial tending sharp. Or the G in 2nd position above that F needing to be pulled in a bit to compensate for 7th partial tending flat.

Manufacturers have different philosophies around this as well. I have a vintage mid-1960s King 3b whose partials line up differently and require different adjustment from my modern XO 1634... and both of those horns are extremely similar .508 bore tenor trombones.

I like how you say 6th partial is "tending sharp" and 7th partial is "tending flat", like they're comparable. I don't know about your horn, but on every one I've played that 6th partial is pretty close but the 7th partial is so far out that we refer to positions on the 7th as half positions. Euphoniums don't even play the 7th partial because it's so far off. They'll play the F# and G from 8th partial.

(Didn't mean to imply you didn't know that, I just was humored by you using the same term for both).

That advice makes more sense according to my understanding of the physics -- the entire partial might be slightly off and every position in the partial should be adjusted similarly.

The just/equal temperament thing lead me to suspect that it was the 5th partial (a major 3rd partial, the D) that would be the one most likely to be off, but a trombone is neither a perfect cylinder nor a perfect cone so simplified models might be off. The perfect 5th (aka both the F partials) is pretty exact on an ideal model, but a real trombone isn't ideal.

Curious what you're looking for in that position as the aperture for what DS do at AWS is quite broad (my current role). DM me if you want to chat—contact info in profile.

If you buy their brushless line, you can add a few decent tools to your lineup while using the cheap stuff for everything else. Same battery platform generally. I have a lot of their cheap stuff, plus a few good ones that see more use.

You can buy or make adapters so there is no battery platforms. If we had a functioning FTC there would be no battery platform.

Didn't realize adapters were common! I agree on the FTC / standardization point.

I have many cheap ryobi niche tools, but use Makita batteries in them.

That would suck, because even the same company might have 2 or more different battery platforms. I, for one, have Milwaukee tools from both M12 and M18 platforms. They are for different applications and I specifically bought some M12 tools because their M18 equivalent was too big for my applications, and, on the other hand, I bought some tools in M18 because their M12 counterparts were underpowered for my applications. Imagine running a driver to assemble your PC and an SDS MAX hammer off the same battery?

When I watched Incubus I remember him sounding very much like he was trying to speak Italian. My only basis for comparison are some podcasts in Esperanto I've listened to, and completion of the duolingo course (I've forgotten everything).

I worry about the Slate truck being DOA with expiration of incentives for EVs. Someone please tell me I'm wrong, because if they do deliver as promised, I'll be excited to buy one.

For me, I'm hoping it fills the mid-90s Isuzu Pup sized hole in my heart.

From the papers I've read, the stem separation models all seem to train off what seems like a fairly small dataset that doesn't have great instrument representation.

I wonder if you could assemble a big corpus of individual solo instruments, then permute a cacophonous mix of them. IIRC the main training dataset is comprised of a limited number of real songs. But I think a model trained on real songs might struggle with more "out there" harmonies and mixes.

MuseScore is good enough that I haven't bothered to check back with commercial vendors. I'm pretty novice with it, however, so perhaps Sibelius power users will disagree.

Have you seen the classic?... https://youtu.be/dKx1wnXClcI

Tunable transparency mode sounds great, and I wish Apple would do something like this as first-party support.

As a casual trombone player, who often plays in louder settings, the airpods pro are almost excellent hearing protection. Passive (even "audiophile" or "concert") earplugs make me feel like I'm under water. Airpods Pro attenuate a lot of sound but don't feel so unnatural.

Unfortunately, they tend to drop my own sound out of the mix when sounds around me get louder.

I'd love a mode that selectively let in more trombone frequencies, or better, that mixed noise cancellation and transparency to give me more of a studio monitor effect. Maybe the airpods could figure out which sounds were mine via the buzzing sounds that propagate through my head from my lips.

apple doesn't allow much customization, only the 9 presets under accessibility>hearing>headphone accomodation. this eq then also applies to the audio played and transparency settings both. maybe one of those nine presets suits your needs?

I think the answer here involves licensing and Apple control of the infrastructure, but my first thought was, "I historically trust Apple with my data a bit more than I trust Google, how is this not just trusting Google with my data?"

Apple previously pitched a vision of local-first AI for privacy, but seems to have badly miscalculated the kind of customer experience they could provide. My personal experience is that Siri has suffered greatly.

Case in point, I like to listen to music in the car, and Siri now confidently starts playing artists whose names sound nothing like what I requested. Also maddening "Play [x] on Apple Music" "You'll need to authorize me to use Youtube Music"

Still I live with / pay for so much that is broken based on a kind of Apple privacy vibes inertia. Siri being wired up to more of my personal information plus Apple maybe shipping that data to Google is going to make me reevaluate that.