If I ever owned a self-playing piano, figuring out how I could play custom songs of my own creation would be my top priority. It’s awesome you’ve found some success. Jmpman, what your post is missing is motivation. Why are you doing this and what is your goal?
If you sell your decoder or encoder the company will, eventually, kick your butt. Getting money involved raises the stakes.
If you distribute a file that is sold by the company, even if it was transformed by a decoder, the company will, eventually, kick your butt. (A recording or sample of how it sounds post-transformation for demonstration purposes would be reasonable.)
If your software requires files that must be paid for in order to function, then it’s critical that you do not bundle those files with your decoder or encoder. That would be piracy.
How your software was made matters. Did you have access to non-public information about anything involved? It seems like the answer is no, so you might be fine. It sounds like you legally obtained a copy of the file, hardware that runs it, and figured out how they work.
What terms of service did you agree to? While not everything listed may hold up in court (which gets determined BY a court IN a court so don’t think that’s an easy win), the company is surely within their rights to ban you from their online service.
If you want some relevant legal advice, check out the GameCube Dolphin emulator and how the team stays legal. I love learning about how stuff works, so I’ve followed lots of console jailbreaking and reverse engineering news for years. There is a way to do this stuff legally. HN is focused more on finance than hacking. So talk to some hackers (who aren’t trying to break the law).
I saw you ask about contacting the company. If this was a blog, I’d love a followup about what they say and do, but alas I’ll probably never see it. (I guess the worst outcome is that they spend more money on making their proprietary stuff more locked down?) Regardless of what they say, their word is not the law. Know the law, know your rights, and know when it’s safe to stick your neck out and when it’s not. I am obviously not a lawyer.
Oh, and which US state you are in and what they are based in will be relevant.
Thanks for the pointers. My goal - I really didn't like the Erik Satie Gymnopedie #1 version I'd just bought, and wanted to generate a new version. With the recent Astra release, I wanted to see how it and Fable did on creating their own versions based upon a standard MIDI. The encoding was actually just to make the PianoDisc player work better. Their iPad app will actually play MIDI directly without encoding, but they feel like second class citizens in the app, and there's some weird Bluetooth audio and a second Bluetooth MIDI interface on the app. I was having problems with the MIDI one, but the mp3 encoded connection seemed to work reliably.
When Fable came back with the decoder, I knew something was off. The decoy notes... even more evidence of wonkiness. Mostly posted it to HN out of disbelief that Fable just hacked my piano and had I blindly pushed it to a public repo, I would likely have broken some law.
Btw, the version I like is performed by Pascal Roge back in the 1970s. The AIs don't quite match his performance, and I keep trying to figure out how to guide them. I don't think his version has a delay between the melody and the chords, while the AIs were both convinced that was desirable. They seem to be lacking some taste in that area, but overall I prefer their version to the one I bought.
Spitballing an idea. I don’t use e-ink stuff but had my hands on it back when personal readers were new to the market.
When scrolling arbitrary text on a computer via keyboard, I generally become mildly frustrated hitting Spacebar, PageUp, and/or PageDown because I lose continuity with what I’m reading. (Perhaps the momentary 60hz blur makes it worse?) I attribute that to having a hard time identifying where I last read.
If there’s a dedicated button to scrolling, consider having an adjustable distance. EX: 100% screen height down, 95% screen width down (keeps a sliver of the last page), or 80% screen width down (keeps a chunk of the last page).
If you’re working with a touch display, perhaps a hold-and-drag-to-scroll feature could work? Have no indicator when pressed and only refresh the screen when the user lifts their finger. (It’s certainly not ideal to provide no feedback that it’s being used. But it may be useful to a user aware of how it works. Would probably need a training demonstration in-device like what older operating systems had.)
Perhaps a dedicated scroll undo button? For when one makes a mis-input and wants it back where it was. I know I’ve seen my grandma get frustrated at that sort of thing on desktop/phone where it’s quick to fix.
I used Oberon [1] in school, and it had a bunch of funky UI ideas. One I liked it if you clicked on the scrollbar then it would scroll that position to the top. Like if you click the exact middle of the scrollbar then it would scroll up exactly half a page. Right click went the opposite direction, and middle click went to an absolute position. When reading that means you can choose a paragraph as the break point, click next to it, and that paragraph is now at the top of the page. It's nice too when you reach a heading that might be only a little way down the page, but you can reliably scroll so it's at the top of the page and feel like you are really "starting" a new section.
It could work well with e-ink because it's basically not interactive; you don't press and hold and move around to adjust it just right, instead you can confidently get an exact scroll position with one tap.
Interesting - that definitely seems like a more useful approach than "click to advance one page in that direction, but only if you don't click on the bar itself". I kinda wonder if that's possible to do OS wide nowadays...
You could have a scroll-down bar on one side and a scroll-up bar on the other side that work that way (given the lack of left/right click options). That could be pretty intuitive for touch.
In some cases (linux) you can middle click the scroll bar to jump to that position. Do some searches for "gnome xwindows scrollbar warp" for more references.
Yeah, drag-scrolling and page-jumping on eink is solidly in the "not great" category.
Maybe you could draw a line showing where [some line of text] is moving to? Like starting from where the finger starts, draw a "timeline" of locations as they move their finger, and when they release you draw the whole page:
(wow, lol, mobile Firefox renders that horribly. I wonder if I'm missing a font...)
You can do small-bounding-box "draw black on top" extremely quickly, it's how reMarkable tablets get their near-20ms pen-to-display latency.
I'd probably also like a "this is where the previous top/bottom/where you dragged is now" temporary underline across the screen at the end, for easier visibility. Just clear it a second later.
There’s a lot of patterns in TUI due to slow terminals that can be reused, especially with full/half page scrolling instead of line by line. And like less and emacs (vim may have that too), the full screen scroll may be minus a configurable amount of line.
There can be also a configurable wait time for refreshing the screen (like top) instead of assuming 60hz
> If you’re working with a touch display, perhaps a hold-and-drag-to-scroll feature could work? Have no indicator when pressed and only refresh the screen when the user lifts their finger.
I like this idea, definitely going to test it out.
Riffing of the predictability of an adjustable distance, a similar option might be something like a marker/inverse colour applied to a line immediately before the scroll. The marker would help orientation after the scroll and disappear after some time. You could also scan the text of course but a marker would be much faster.
Though it makes me mourn for life lost when I read it even now, I never cared much for “There Will Come Soft Rains”. It’s a story exploring how what we make could continue on without us (for a time). But “The Pedestrian” (1951) is included at the end. It’s the last two pages out of that six page PDF. I think that one’s more apt to modern life. I read that one ages ago and it unsettled me.
I relate strongly with The Pedestrian. I love going for long walks at odd hours.
In the United State police's defence once I was walking all by myself at 3 in the morning in Mountain View, peeking and crouching among the bushes for good shots with my camera. A police car approached me. It ended up being a non-threatening conversation. It was early 2002. All in all quite surprising given my brown skin and then long beard.
I once sat on the side of a busy path - not a road! - remote controlling a silly Halloween decoration on the other side. Three times police officers checked I was okay. One person stole the battery out of it.
What's the most unsettling to me is that the one thing that makes it less apt to modern life is the implication that at 8 PM, everyone is at home. Nobody still working or commuting.
There Will Come the Soft Rains feels like it was written right after a visit to the World's Fair back in the Atomic Era. A critique of the unlimited promises about the future but virtually no thought put towards the possible consequences of said future. It's a very post-war story.
I think he reposts them on his consulting page https://www.sh.consulting/blog and no, I am not affiliated. Just keeping an eye on the email deliverability topic as a hoppy.
Had to jump in here to say: Don’t show children gore videos if you can help it. They’ll remember the horror more than the lesson. All it’ll do is make them calloused (or scared).
If you want something with a gut punch related to car safety, check out British vehicle PSA advertisements. Holy moly are those grim! They’re memorable, focused, and unflinching.
Personally, I’d go with some mini-documentaries or after-the-fact breakdowns put out by local American TV stations. They take it slow, film on location, and try to have a takeaway lesson.
Having soon a lot of real gore from a relatively young age, I may be calloused but in a good way - when something really fucked up happens that actually involves gore, death, violence or really scary, unpredictable or urgent things, I am quite calm and am able to handle situation much better than people who feel like vomiting at the sight of blood or a worm on an infection. Sure, some of the stuff I saw was in my mind for days, but I got used to it. Not to say I'm desensitized to it in a way that makes me not care about it. I'm still very empathetical to anyone who's suffered even the smallest of wounds or hardships.
I was exposed to violence first from movies (my parents let me watch anything and I thank them for that), then from shock sites, 4chan, liveleak, /r/watchpeopledie and so on.
I think I've really internalized how dangerous the road is, how dangerous machines are, how horrible war really is, how you can get killed by just saying the wrong thing, how there's always a chance you can die from anything at any moment. I still sometimes cross on reds and mouth off at someone who might be dangerous - I'm not scared of anything to an unnecessary degree, although being "scared" in a rational way is good IMO. I think I have a better way to assess risk than the average person, though.
I found some of the PSAs and they involve mild injuries or death without the injury itself:
I bet if you show kids actual footage of road accidents, it will burn into their memory for a few days, long enough for them to think it over a few times. The PSAs are really forgettable here.
I really like this PSA about safety conditions as it made me recall it for a few days:
reply