bushelpeck - Slashdot User

The Deceptive Perfection of Auto-Tune 437

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday February 07, 2009 @11:16AM from the hitting-all-the-right-notes dept.

theodp writes "For a medium in which mediocre singing has never been a bar to entry, a lot of pop vocals suddenly sound better than great — they're note- and pitch-perfect. It's all thanks to Auto-Tune, the brainchild of Andy Hildebrand, who realized that the wonders of autocorrelation — which he once used to map drilling sites for the oil industry — could also be used to bestow perfect pitch upon the Britney Spears of the world. While Auto-Tune was intended to be used unnoticed, musicians are growing fond of adjusting the program's retune speed to eliminate the natural transition between notes, which yield jumpy and automated-sounding vocals. 'I never figured anyone in their right mind would want to do that,' says Hildebrand." As these techniques improve and become more popular, it makes me wonder what music produced twenty or fifty years from now will sound like, and how much authenticity will be left.

Microsoft Zunes Committing Mass Suicide 785

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday December 31, 2008 @11:04AM from the i-bet-a-bricked-zune-is-still-warm dept.

jddeluxe writes "There are multiple reports springing up all over the internet of a mass suicide of Microsoft 30GB Zune players globally. Check Zune forums, Gizmodo, or other such sites; the reports are spreading rapidly, except apparently to the Microsoft official Zune site."

Windows 7 To Dial Down UAC 390

Posted by kdawson on Friday October 10, 2008 @02:38PM from the cancel-or-allow dept.

Barence writes "Engineers working on Windows 7 have admitted Vista's User Account Control was too intrusive, and are promising to tone it down in the forthcoming Windows 7. 'We've heard loud and clear that you are frustrated,' says Microsoft engineer Ben Fathi. 'You find the prompts too frequent, annoying, and confusing. We still want to provide you control over what changes can happen to your system, but we want to provide you a better overall experience.' According to Fathi, when Vista first launched, 775,312 unique applications were producing prompts — so some may be annoyed that it won't be scrapped entirely, but at least Microsoft is listening. The comments echo those of Steve Ballmer, who admitted at a conference in London that 'the biggest trade-off we made was sacrificing security for compatibility. I'm not sure the end-users really appreciated that trade-off.'"

Comment Cart before the horse - a designer's perspective (Score 1) 690

by bushelpeck on Sunday August 03, 2008 @04:21PM (#24458653) Attached to: How To Fix the Poor Usability of Free Software

Want to make usable software? Start from the human user perspective. Ask what the person does, not what the software does. Adapt the software to the (generalized) user/person. Sounds simple but it is so rarely done especially with non-commercial, custom proprietary and open source software. Usually it's done exactly backwards with software function first and usability bolted or cobbled on at the end, if at all.

Ask the kinds of questions about software that most developers dismiss as "stupid:" What is it? Who uses it and how? Why?

I have been quite surprised to find that these questions had never been previously asked and answered for a lot of the (paid) projects I've been involved with. "It's obvious" isn't an answer - obvious to you is not enough. If I could get one usability concept through developers' heads, it would be that the software you're writing is not about you.

Unfortunately, such suggestions are often met with the reaction that designers are idiots and nobody cares what some Photoshop moron thinks anyway. Hence the reluctance of designers to get involved in the first place, especially with volunteer projects. I would love to contribute to certain open source projects if I thought my contributions would be welcomed.

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