[MusicViz] Spectrochrome - ColorMaps Update

[Disclaimer:  Unfortunately this is still not the full fancy intro post that talks about what this is, and how it came to be... Maybe I'll get around to that someday, or maybe I'll just keep posting the updates, and forget to make that long deferred proper intro... who knows! I certainly don't anymore LOL 😜]

 

Yay! I've just pulled the trigger on getting a major bunch of upgrades done on my Spectrogram project that I've been chipping away at during my free time over the last few weeks.

https://aligorith.github.io/musicviz_playpen/spectrochrome.html

Specifically, I've upgraded the whole "Color Map" / "Legend" functionality so that it now allows all the different colours per pitch to be edited (with each one per pitch + octave now displayed in a nice fancy table in the UI). (I can also load/save these as JSON to test out the tweaks I want)

Technically I still haven't quite finished all this functionality (i.e. the table only shows things for the "common" default naming style, with the other accidentals that are not used unable to be edited, AND the names don't update to match the naming scheme chosen). But, that stuff isn't very fun, and it could've kept this update blocked for ages if not indefinitely (while killing motivation) if I kept waiting to finish it off before releasing it all...

So, who cares! It's my project! That functionality can remain as a "broken" (but well documented!)  TODO in the meantime, while I dive back into doing all the other fun bits that need doing! 😜

 

Linux Rant - Session Restore Not Working

It seems my ongoing quest to set my machines up to seamlessly maintain state through the inevitable forced updates that still need to happen will likely need to me step in and hack up my own solution!

Right now I need to solve this problem across 2-3 platforms TBH:

1) Gnome - For my work machines, where I've got a specific "6 + 4" window setup I want to have restored each time my VNC session restarts for whatever reason.  i.e. With that, I want a whole bunch of terminal + folder windows opened at specific sizes + positions, each one hosting a mix of some 3-4 different tabs set to specific folders, with specific commands pre-typed into each shell ready to be deployed with a single enter-key press, and/or each maintaining its own command history log.

2) KDE - This is the setup I'm trying to move to for all my personal machines. Currently just on my laptop and a bunch of VM's on my primary workstation. Annoyingly, it looks annoyingly close to doing what I want - but only on a surface glance!

3) Windows -  While in the future this will hopefully no longer be a concern, until then, I still am running Windows as my primary at home, at also have to go via that at work to get into my Linux VNC sessions at work. So, finding *any* way to streamline the process of automating a restore-setup-after-forced-restart is still very important to me...

Hobbies and Storage

Just saw a quote that was too good to not rsshare for posterity in case the original source (or at least the one I saw) goes away: 

"Every hobby starts with curiosity and ends with storage problems"

-- @vinterkarusell@saga.garden

https://saga.garden/@vinterkarusell/116868965992798187

PSA: You're doing wrong when your stuff-ups become a plot point

Jeez (Big)Tech industry! You're doing it very wrong when not only everyday folks are having to regularly warn each other about your antics, BUT you're also being used as a punching bag *PLOT POINT* in topical popular media, where they explicitly show your products as being in the wrong!

Yes, just the other night, I was watching a movie where a major plot point of the story is that an iOS update ended up inadvertently wiping out a whole bunch of precious and irreplaceable memories. And then just now, I'm greeted by a social media post where some everyday folk are warning that the newest iOS update may end up inadvertently deleting your "Shortcut Automations", as the "trigger mechanism has been rewritten to be part of each shortcut".  While I'm not an Apple user myself, this is still embarrassing to see!

Please do better!

🙄 

 

Memories of NZ's Milk Delivery System

The other day, I saw a post about a migrant to NZ who was surprised about the tokens we used for the milk delivery system that we used to have back when I was a kid.  This got me thinking back to a bunch of cool stories I could tell about this.

For instance:

* 1) My parents saved the last 2-3 glass milk bottles we ever got. I've got them now safely stowed away.  (Err... actually, in which cupboard exactly I can't remember just now, but I know I moved them a few years ago to a "safer" + "nicer" spot than I'd been storing them in. I might update this post with a photo when I find them)
 

I think I have the foil lids too, but kept in an old baby food jar (glass with metal lid)

Heck, IIRC, we used to keep the old white metal-wire caddy that these would come in for many years too - we got rid of that though as it was not looking too flash anymore, after years spent in a not so flash cupboard under the sink...

IIRC, some of these tokens at some point became plastic? (I vaguely remember seeing blue + white OR green + white disks / hoops)

* 2) I remember going to the Meadow Fresh factory on a tour in kindergarden, getting to see the section of the factory a massive fancy machine where they washed the bottles for reuse! I always thought that part of that system was so cool! (Take note, Big Recycling: That's my reference point for what true recycling should mean, and how it should work!)

(IIRC, they also had us walk on some clanky exposed gangway high above the factory floor when doing that... By the next time we visited in Primary School, they now had a glass enclosed viewing booth / tunnel instead... Same as with the ice cream factory next door, that we visited later that morning)

* 3) Mum and Dad say that I used to always bolt upright from my naps, Einstein hair + drool (err... not quite, but that's the best description right now) when the milk truck did its rounds in the early evening, blaring its "milk run" song and all!

"AI Smells" in 2026 Software Engineering

Just like how there used to be "Code Smells", there are some remarkably obvious "AI Smells" on code and interactions that feel less than savoury...

* 1) Comment blocks in code that are way more verbose than even most non-lazy humans would produce.  There's nothing quite "wrong" with it - and indeed, in some ways, some of the things it does are quite helpful even for whoever next has to try to unpick how it works - but it also just doesn't feel right...

* 2) Obvious markers and tells - like em-dashes and unicode arrows... (yeah, humans don't do those as they all require looking up the symbols as they're not on most keyboard layouts!)

* 3) Screeds of accompanying  documentation, more verbose than even the most prolific documenters out there (aka *me*!!!) would bother to produce, which also have a nasty habit of burying the lede / not making the key points very obvious to pick out

* 4) Code review comment responses that make you wonder if you should just start being less civil + helpful in your comments, and just more blunt / symbolic (i.e. to "maximise efficiency for the machines"), since it doesn't seem like there's gonna be a human on the other end actually reading those anymore...  

(Hmm... this last part I gotta say does sometimes make you feel a bit empty inside. 

Also, there was a time when I did comment on open source project that seemed to be going on the right track in many ways but had some annoying bugs, only for it to then transpire a few days later that the author admitted the whole thing was "an experiment in getting AI to fully do all the work"... Yeah, I think I swiftly stopped caring about that one right then and there...)

Meh...  😥️

Linux Tweaking - Firefox Scrollbars

Mwhahahaha! I think I've managed to figure out a bunch of settings to force Firefox on Linux to finally keep the scrollbars visible, AND to make them much thicker! (i.e. as seen to the side) 

 

 

Key Points:

*  widget.gtk.overlay-scrollbars.enabled  = false

    This seems to be the key to making them permanently visible, by forcing them to get their own space permanently allocated to them, removing their need to keep fading out

 

*  widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.thumb-size

*  widget.non-native-theme.gtk.scrollbar.size   

    These two are used to make the scrollbar a much more decently visible + clickable size.  (#SayNoToSkinny)

 

* widget.non-native-theme.scrollbar.style

    I'm not entirely sure what the various values here that can be used, but will note that the approach used by one commenter of setting it to "4" will give you a massive "square block" design (i.e. no rounded edges, and much thicker)

Projects Update - June 2026 Edition

While I've been relatively quiet here on my blog the past few weeks, "project wise", that couldn't be further from the truth!

 

1) Introducing "Spectrochrome" - The biggest news of course that I've finally made a great deal of progress on my MusicViz project again, for the first time in ages.  I plan to share more details about this in a dedicated post in a due course when I complete the last few major chunks of work on it, but before then, here's a brief sneak peak of what's been brewing:

 

Live link to the latest stable version:

 https://aligorith.github.io/musicviz_playpen/spectrochrome.html

What you have here, is a web-based spectrogram tool (built as a single-page tool, that runs completely in your browser on your own machine, using HTML5 technologies), that analyses any audio clip you throw at it (*1), renders each frequency / pitch with a unique colour (i.e. based on the colour scale I covered in the first edition of this series) using a "showcqt" like visualisation, and tries to figure out what the "dominant" pitch at any point is (so that we can then use that in future to drive the "next-step-up" visualisation that will try to do something with the main melodic line detected...

Other stuff it supports (but not really shown in that screenshot) includes:

 * Being able to playback and scrub the audio

 * Being able to render out a video of the spectrogram being progressively drawn as the audio plays

 * A bunch of interactive  adjustment + tweaking tools (i.e. these are some of the active areas of development currently under way)

 

 (*1)    Disclaimer:  It works best for short clips (about 1 - 1.5 minutes in length) - which are the typical ones it is designed to handle (i.e. that's the length of almost all the music I write + record, which is why I need this tool). I can however be used on standard pop-song like songs too (though the processing runs a bit longer, and the longer timeline means that fine details get horizontally compacted / compressed, making any melodic line features less legible.

Linux Annoyances Rant - Solutions for Rough UX Sought

This post covers 3 main annoyances I'm currently working on solving across various Linux machines I have to use. I'm mainly only talking about the issues that I haven't got solved on other machines I used...

 

1) Taskbars - Fully un-grouped windows, absolutely not ordered or grouped by window, and able to be freely reordered.

NOTE: I have long had this problem solved on Windows (i.e. using 7+ Taskbar Tweaker), and also on KDE (yay!  Those guys rock!), but on the RH 9 type Gnome-based Linux we're in the process of migrating to?  That's the one I'm currently seeking solutions!  Of course though, all of these could've been solved if everyone didn't do the stupid thing that they learned from Windows 7, OR perhaps they learned that from Apple first?!  Whatever...

2) Gnome Button Ordering

3) Kubuntu (Auto) Update Checks on Resume from Sleep

  

On Patterns and Chunks in Music

Sunday morning thoughts on music stuff (since this is the hour when I'd have violin lessons for over a decade)

Something I only really learned / realised in recent years, particularly after watching someone very skilled at sightreading demonstrate their skills [1], which maybe would've been better to know earlier:

Patterns, patterns, patterns.

While many of us of driven mad to the point of curling up in a crumpled mess a few bars in then barely holding on, what higher level performers do here is they are able to quickly deconstruct what they see into the building-block patterns the composer used.

What do I mean?

Scales + Arpeggios.

Ultimately, many composers are relatively "lazy" in that they will use runs of scales + arpeggios to "fill out space / make noise", acting as "connective tissue" between stretches of melody. This is especially true the more "showy" and "virtuostic" the piece is supposed to be...  [2]

This sort of ties into an interesting Ted talk from Benjamin Zander years ago where he talks about the progression of musical skill (i.e. The "one buttock playing" one - IYKYK). The central thesis here is that, what distinguishes beginners from more advanced players is the progression of skill away from trying to tackle things on a note by note basis (i.e. equivalent to kids learning to read having to spell out words letter by letter, stringing those together, then trying to make sense of them), they are instead looking more broadly at larger chunks, eventually focussing a phrase-level progressions.

Yes. These are pretty much the same same kind of fundamental insight as:

"What makes a piece of music memorable / easy for people to understand? Repetition. People need to hear ideas several times, and especially in different ways, for them to start picking up on them, and before recognising and/or even eventually liking them. It's not *boring* that something needs to be repeated several times - as long as you do it to establish a pattern that you then subvert to create some minor novelty / interest... That is just what needs to happen. To satisfy our stupid lizard brains."   [3]

Hopefully this helps unlock something for some music student out there sometime... 

MediaSlurper Updates - Launcher works on Linux now

Just a quick WIP teaser tonight:

Today I finally bit the bullet, and figured out all the necessary changes to get MediaSlurper running under Linux  (though to be fair, I'm only really testing this under Kubuntu currently, but may soon also test under Manjaro for good measure)!

MediaSlurper GUI running under Kubuntu, with the "Foreland" wallpaper from Manjaro

 

Reactions to Baldur Bjarnason's - "The Old World of Tech is Dying"

This morning, I read a fascinating essay from Baldur Bjarnason:

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-old-world-of-tech-is-dying/

A good few things resonated with me quite a bit, so I've pulled them out into a post here:

* 1)  On "Singular Revelatory Events" (aka "Silver Bullets That Fix / Change Everything")

* 2)  On what's rotten with the "Global Tech Industry"