I believe Minuum is the only app I ever paid for on the Play Store, after having followed it since the Kickstarter campaign. It was the only option that made typing on a small touchscreen feel mostly frictionless for me, contrary to the varying degrees of frustration of other options. As a result, I now hardly type on my phone.
For the past decade or so my bookmark has been set to /feed/subscriptions and I can only recommend that. The one or two times a year I end up on the front page act as proof it should remain that way.
Not everyone enjoys composing music, and for a large group of people paying an artist is not an option. There's a lot to critizise about current AI tech, saying of all things this has no net benefit seems like the wrong thing to call out, and incredibly short sighted for HN.
You're not composing music with an AI generator either: you're pushing a button with a few, limited instructions, and expect something that rewards your perception of what makes good music for your intention.
If you don't enjoy composing music, just don't do it, and give it to someone who does, and has the experience/knowledge/culture/practice/gut to do it.
> If you don't enjoy composing music, just don't do it
This supposes that the music is the end goal, and the very point of my comment is that it doesn't always have to be, and in those cases "just don't do it" also means not doing whatever comes after.
Just as you state below, this doesn't replace creating music for the creation's sake. I don't believe it will, or should. It merely replaces having nothing at all, or having the 100,000th video with the same upbeat stock sound.
What an incredibly elitist, smug attitude. You're basically saying people only have the right to hear the music that professionals think they should hear.
That's not smug at all. That's not what I'm saying either.
It's just that.. you can't master something you don't practice and understand. It's true in every single thing in life you do, sports, literature, maths, music, cuisine, kindness, etc.
If you don't like to compose music, why suffer this and even submit to the randomness of some computer program, rather than giving the opportunity to another fellow human to open your ears and your mind to what they appreciate doing?
You can generate your music if you like. It just cannot compare to something a human really did on her own, and invested of her desire, time, practice, research, even a beginner.
It's not a matter of being professional or not. The best musicians I know are not professionals, they all have a day job.
For every famous star for one given instrument, you have 10s of undiscovered/local better musicians that just are carpenters, cooks, painters, drivers, factory workers.
I don't understand the "give it [the task?] to someone who does" part. Obtaining a hobbyist composer who is available at short notice and obeys instructions for free is not usually an option. Maybe there's a website for this, but it would have to be humming with idle composers in order to offer quick and satisfactory results.
I think "stop not enjoying it" is a better line to take. Like with AI illustrations (where I'd much rather see a blog author's crappy biro drawings instead), terrible amateur efforts with some online 808 emulator or whatever would be more entertaining and interesting than AI output.
"Stop not enjoying it" is indeed a way better take!
"Giving it someone who does" is also an opportunity to socialise and grow a mutual understanding of said music desire. That's sometimes even how collaborations start. But that's not on short notice...
Perhaps generators could be also seen as some kind of introductory instruments to wet the appetite of becoming musicians?
So putting paid humans out of business is your position then? Please explain why you believe in the long sighted view AI reducing already poverty level wages to zero is beneficial.
Do you not see how your argument could be applied to steam engines putting human laborers out of work? Or computers putting (human) calculators out of work? Do you think inventing the steam machine or computers was a mistake too?
What new jobs are going to be created when AI does everything humans currently do? In the past when new technologies were created, new jobs and industries were also created, but with AI, jobs are already being lost but I don't see many new jobs being created to replace them, other than "people who know how to talk to an AI to get what they want" and I have a feeling this will be a rather miniscule number of jobs.
Steam engines and computers solve problems to improve human life. They more efficiently perform tasks to free up time for humans to do other things they would rather be doing.
These API composers perform a task many humans want to do. And there are roughly zero consumers of music saying "you know what's missing from the music market? music made with no human input."
This strictly serves capital. The goal is to destroy more artists livelihood to marginally increase the wealth of already wealthy people.
If you're trying to maximize employment, composers aren't the first, second, or tenth place to go looking. If you're trying to say artists will bleed income, they already have for decades, and will continue to. The ones that make a living out of it mostly get their income from live performances and merch, and maybe adtech on social media platforms.
By the same logic synthesizers shouldn't have been invented that allowed people to make advanced sounds without tediously learning an instrument first, consumers should remain priced out of microphones and editing software, etc.
Like I said, I am not trying to feign ignorance on the drawbacks of the tech which is very real and far from negligible. I am not a tech bro AI maximalist. I just do believe that hyperbole will not put the djinn back into the bottle, and pretending like there isn't a real market between nothing and paying or being a composer isn't adding anything to the conversation.
In this particular case it is totally black and white.
Prove me wrong.
Tell me one example how music gen in any way benefits anybody to the level that is worth putting out of business the last few artists that make ends meet?
The difference between today and the hypothetical case of not one artist making ends meet from their music is what, 0.1%? 0.01%?
We would be better off if the other 99.9% didn't have worry about making ends meet, than if we do whatever it takes to keep the status quo of the 0.1% intact. That does not only go for artists.
I think there could be, sort of. I am currently using Migadu, which works great and I don't plan on leaving. Their selling point is that the amount of domains you add is not limited. It's affordable and reasonable, and a great option as indie dev with multiple projects. No fictional per-seat pricing that does not correlate with costs to the provider.
What I think is outside their target market, but what would be a great next step for projects with slightly more needs would be a Google Workspace/Outlook sort of service with a similar approach. Simple CRM features, shared contact management, calendars, signatures, etc.
Roughly what Proton is doing without the Silicon Valley pricing, or maybe even Hubspot.
I use Migadu, mostly for people who just want a couple of domain emails when we host their site. It works good for that and I like the accessibility of the logging. Needs a user-accessible out of office I don't want users emailing me to be their personal assistant. I did try to use it for transactional type emails, sending forms from Wordpress or scanners etc but it wasn't so good for that because the emails were too spammy and the accounts kept getting deactivated. autodiscover was a bit hit and miss, nobody likes talking people through imap servers over the phone, but it seems a bit better now.
Yup. Everything left and right of being an email inbox is a bit iffy, and that makes it feel a bit incomplete at times. Like I said, I like it a lot, and it provides a lot of value for the price I pay for it, but I wouldn't mind an option with just a slightly wider feature scope.
The big advantage with Google Workspace/Outlook is its accompanying products - calendar, word/spreadsheet processing, cloud storage, etc. Problem with starting only email service won't make the cut, but starting with email + other services make the project way more complex. Not forgetting answering the question "how each product (i.e. word processing, cloud drive, etc.) is better than Google/Outlook's?"
Yeah, you're right. Just a hosted inbox alone would be hard to differentiate in the market and I have no answer for that. For hosted email with auxiliary services there is room to carve out a market. At least that's where I see some value. As for being better: It really doesn't have to be. It just has to appeal to a different audience. I think non-VC funded SMBs that don't have Silicon Valley funds to spend on a dozen different per-seat products is a pretty big market.
What I am thinking doesn't have to compete with the whole Office or Google Docs suite, or HubSpot. There is imo enough value in being an economic all-in-one email solution for "the rest of us". Point DNS there, get email, CRM, maybe even a small transactional mail quota and some marketing email features.
I have two projects I would onboard yesterday if this existed, and I have spent more than a hot minute thinking about going for it myself, just to scratch my own itch. The main reason so far that I haven't is that Migadu + Resend is enough for my needs at this time, and I can do without CRM for now.
Looks like I have some experiments to run soon.
reply