[louthy]

Not sure what to make of it. It clearly does what it says on the tin, and from that point of view it’s impressive; but personally it’s a deeply undesirable effect. Maybe it’s bringing back PTSD of performing on Groovetech radio, streamed over RealPlayer! :D

I guess im not the audience as I prefer analogue distortion, but I also like the sound of low bit rate digital artefacts (bit crushing and the sound of old samplers) - however unlike those distortion effects this produces quite tricky resonances that I wouldn’t want to apply to audio sources in a track (because then I’d need to spend time EQing them out to make it sit well in a mix), so I’m not sure of the use case?

Bravo on the name though! (and for making it open-source)

[0xdada]

Quoting Brian Eno: "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart"

[Nition]

I remember first seeing that quote on a Kotaku article, where they had unfortunately misinterpreted "the crap sound of 8-bit" as referring to retro videogame music made on 8-bit CPUs, rather than (what he was actually referring to) 8-bit audio[0].

[0] i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_bit_depth

[rob74]

Funnily enough, to get the "crap sound of 8-bit" you usually needed a 16-bit computer (the Amiga). But that's nothing compared to the "crap sound of 1-bit", i.e. playing sampled sound using the PC speaker. I still remember thinking "how is this even possible?!" when I first heard it...

[Nition]

Yeah, it's amazing what you can do with just a 1-bit pulse. You can even do multiple instruments[0] or win the loudness war[1].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV9PfEFw78I

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_ANEQu5Lto

[weinzierl]

I think this is to a degree a generational thing. I guess between 15 and 25 we are imprinted with what lo-fi means to us.

My prediction is that after low quality compression we will see good, but noticeable auto-tune as a retro effect. I don't mean the early, late 90s overdone Cher-like auto-tune, but the one that's used seriously for pitch correction but is still noticeable.

After that, I think, bad vocal synths are a good candidate. To my old ears many are right there in uncanny valley - too human for a synth, but not human enough not to be creepy.

[dylan604]

> streamed over RealPlayer!

does it keep pausing/stuttering while displaying "buffering"? in my neck of the woods, it was hard to buffer enough data that played long enough to hear how shitty it sounded.

[brnt]

Xing encodes from Napster, baby!

[dylan604]

I used to record broadcast radio to a SLP VHS tape. Just imagine how that sounded!