For years I was adamant that I didn’t like ambient, I think because I’d only been exposed to very boring drone stuff. Then I discovered Solar Fields / Carbon Based Lifeforms and it changed my musical world.

I’m quite horrible at self-promo so sadly it’s just gathering digital dust, but after 20+ years of writing dance music for myself and others, I decided to get heavily into writing ambient / chill. Made a load of trippy animation videos and setup a youtube… if you love Solar Fields, without meaning to sound bigheaded I think you’d enjoy them.

Ambient / Chill by Ain

I love anything by Solar Fields for tasks requiring concentrating, it’s especially good for reading scifi.

Whenever he releases a new album though I have to listen to it a few times, before I can have it on in the background… It’s very beautiful and intricate.

Yep has to have no lyrics or I get pulled into the song!

“Don’t say things about someone behind their back, if you wouldn’t be prepared to say it to their face”

I learned not to say things about people behind their back, that you’d not be prepared to say to their face, aged 14.

Cost me a black eye & split lip, also some pride. Valuable lesson though that stuck with me to this day over 2 decades later.

Knoble, sorry for calling you Knobless.

And if you ever get close to him? … he’ll betray you, too.

It’s a hard question to answer I know! Racking my brains here, the most novel thing I can think of is Portal.

You make excellent points. Personally, I rarely have a problem paying for proper DLC (and buy proper DLC I mean, additional story content that wasn’t obviously cynically cut from the OG game). Notable past examples for GTA, stuff like ‘The Ballad of Gay Tony’ were amazing expansions.

Also sticking with GTA, they’re a good example of bad practice nowadays (imo). They pivoted to online-only DLC once they realised how lucrative a pay-to-play system can be when leveraged against not being bullied by players with more disposable income. There was amazing single-player content in dev for GTA5 and they cut it to focus on MP. Worse, they left the dregs of that content in the game, allowed a ‘GTA5 mystery’ concept to flourish and left people hunting for the mystery thinking they were going to find something like GTA4’s bigfoot. Knowing all along it didn’t exist. But of course, happy that people were still playing and hoping they would get bored and try online mode.

Yep, it’s a real quandary. I’m not sure what the solution is, or if there is one from our perspective… it’s no point voting with my wallet when there’s millions of others who won’t.

This was what I meant. It’s these smaller devs that seem to be innovating to any extent at the moment!

Maybe I’m just a bit jaded due to being an old fart nowadays… I remember playing the original Doom / Wolfenstein so especially FPS feel so overdone to me. When was the last time you saw a truly novel game concept? I’m sure I’ve seen a few over the last few years but can’t remember (see, old fart).

This is the big problem with modern gaming. Too many companies are now in hock to investors and publishers. To those at the top of the hierarchy, making a game is an investment, a bet. Innovation is stifled in favour 9f ‘safe bets’, no wonder gaming is stagnating.

It’s not all doom and gloom, there are still exceptions to the rule. But it’s certainly not looking good for fantastic single player games.

I’m expecting gta 6 to have a much shorter single player campaign with most of the focus towards online (and more obscene earnings from shark cards 2.0).

‘American Thinker’. Isn’t every American not on life support an American thinker?

Yeah I’m the same. I’ve got DDG set as my default search, if the results aren’t useful then I go to google as backup.

Is it just me, or has autocorrect on phones also gotten way, way worse? When would I ever want to type ‘thbnks’?

Well this doesn’t sound appealing! And this just speaks to what I was trying to explain to the person at the start of this thread… Linux may be growing rapidly but there’s still giant holes in the driverset etc for many tasks.

I think prob the best solution will be to perform a hard reset / clean on the laptop, remove any bloatware, keep it offline once I’ve installed necessary updates / plugins, and only have live PA software installed.

This is interesting and concerning… I don’t need a lot of plugins for live stuff, but I was definitely planning to use my Maschine!

So is that confirmed completely inoperable in Linux? No idea how I’d trigger parts without it.

Yep I definitely took it wrong, one of the problems with text only communication… No body language or audio cues! No worries.

The devs of my audio interface have definitely been asked a fair bit about Linux compatibility… But considering they’ve not even bothered bringing their new DAW to PC, it seems they’re strongly focussed on mac ecosystems only for the foreseeable.

Personally I think compatibility should be a two way street pun not intended! But unfortunately companies tend to vote with our wallets, so until Linux becomes even more established I doubt they will dedicate much if any resources to making their devices work on it. Shame.

I bought a new audio interface for live work a few months back, went for an audient id24 partly because it’s Linux compatible (although no native drivers). So I will get stuck in at some point. I started using PCs back when floppy disks were actually floppy so I’m not afraid of command line stuff!

None of the main adobe suite works on Linux either, so let’s not pretend my use case is so narrow. Literally none of the programs I use to work (Cubase, Audition, After Effects, Illustrator, Premiere, yes I can install a virtual windows machine but that completely defeats the purpose) works with Linux. And from what I gather last time I researched this, hardly any audio interfaces are Linux compatible. Most of the games I want to play also are not Linux-compatible.

Fact of the matter is, despite the large dedicated userbase (which I appreciate), it still has a giant gap where many prosumers and casual users cannot utilise it. It’s no good saying “ahhh well YOU’RE not compatible with US! No u!”. I’d love to switch and tbh am strongly considering a setup for live PA that’s Linux based, in the hope that it brings greater stability. But it’s going to be a large investment of time, and I’ll have to buy a different audio interface if I have a hope of making it work.

You see it across all kinds of media; whether it’s a song you like, or a game, or a film, or a TV show… If you dare to say online you’re a fan, someone will swiftly be along to inform you that your opinion is wrong, your show is bad, your taste is bad, and you should feel bad

I’ve started to give way less of a fuck about comments like that. Some people are very sad / small, and can only make themselves feel less so for a brief moment by trying to ruin the enjoyment of others. It’s OK not to like things, there’s plenty of things I don’t like 😁 but it’s fine to me if other people like those things, different strokes for different folks.

Linux doesn’t support my DAW or audio interface. I’m not throwing away thousands of pounds of software and equipment to use Linux.

I would happily give it a go if cubase / uad interfaces were supported.