Show HN: Defcon and HN, the only two audiences I might find
There are exactly two audiences that I can think of that might understand the punchlines which I am rather proud of one is in Las Vegas and the other is right here, which I can reach from my home in Texas. So please check it out.
https://killsignal.net/El_User/dj_defrag_and_uid_zero-el_use...
If there is any interest, I can say more. Enjoy!
This is pretty sick, say more. It may not all make sense, but it flows and makes sense musically/rhythmically. The line "my system's uptime longer than your whole career" had me rolling.
What did you use to generate this? This version is miles better than the "OG version". If you don't want to disclose, I'll take more of where this came from.
Oh, I guess I should have linked the reason I mention the limited target audience that will get the "punchlines", especially for those who don't feel like watching a video or listening to a 50+ year old white nerd's attempt at producing a "rap" diss track. Here's the lyrics I've been sitting on for a couoke of years trying to make this.
Incredible flow.
The captions are constantly lagging behind the audio and parts of them seem to be missing or corrupted.
what have my ears been blessed with??
That's a very kind way to phrase a review and I feel honored that you chose to write that.
Thanks!
apologies I answered the three of you all in this one reply. Hope it's of enough interest and easy enough to discern if something is not what you asked.*
OK, really? Y'all dig it; that's really cool. It is my first foray into creating something rap-adjacent (if you dont count the AI version mtlsnk discovered, and that was two years ago. I wrote the lyrics longer ago than that, slowly adding to them as new rhymes would come into my head. I really wanted it to exist but I don't have a typical voice you'd associate with rap (as you can hear even in this track's vocals.. Even with all the digitala help making it sound like I know what Im doing, the tone and tibre of my voice remain very much not a rap voice.) Oh and thanks for calling out a line that had you rolling; that's one o f my favorites. The bit about Hans Reiser might be a little risky, but very few people are going to have all the pieces to know what that;s (morbidly) funny as a diss.
I have basely zero natural flow really, and I was too self-conscious for many many takes to have anything worth keeping. That "incredible flow" you heard, zahlman, is the result of tedious manual slicing and moving and chopping of syllables in an old copy of Audobe Audition and to a lesser extent Audacity. And VocAlign is your friend. (I've seriously come to doubt that any recordewd rapper is as tight and precise as it sounds on the album and suspcet VocALign or something like it is the Auto-Tune (well, the other auto-tune, since they do use auto-tune too) of Hip Hop production.) I do most instrumental sequencing in an even older copy of Sony ACID Pro, but I'll have to put a little time and effort into listing the VSTs used if you're interested in that.
I'm actually working on documenting more of that production stuff that because the handful of people in the real world who have heard it aren't really familliar with a lot of the terms, but have told me that can tell that someone is geetting insulted and likely outclassed and they just really liked the track regardless. Amazing.
I'm curious, was I right that I could find enough folks who understand at least the surface "battle rap" style punch lines, or are you guys just saying you like the song? This is very, very different than anything I've made before.
Yeah I'm stil working on the subtitles. Subtitles are a solved problem, right? Well, not when you want to display something like /etc/passwd (and many such things) it becomes a pain.. The funny thing is that the main purpose in making a video was to maks e Lyric videom but that ended up the last thing I did insofar as editing the video, and it doesn't work right. I was tired from being up for two days trying to finish it.
I'm finishing up the lyric aligner I made for this video (which is why it's missing a section and starts to lag. But I was soo tired of editing and I wanted people to hear it so I took a break and upploaded it anyway I digress.) It let's you have a spoken lyric sheet for the aligner (whisper and stable_ts) to listen for, where you can put words in their phonetic spellings like you would for TTS, but the another lyrid sheet for presentation spellings that will be used in the subtitles. This was necessary due to all of the technical terms and acronyms that may not be pronounced in an expected way by the aligner tools. It zips (interleaves) the two together and creates a yaml file for hand editing tweaks suchas subtitle effects, then it generates the proper .ass file for that. I'll push the lyric aligner up to the repo when it's working 100%.
Thank you for the kind words. As I said, this is very different from what I've done before. A buddy and I put out a post-punk/new wave album in 2007 under the nema The Detached. It's free on the same site. Mostly we were doing pastiche of TubeWay Army, Devo, etc. You can find all of those tracks at https://killsignal.net/thedetached/ There's a couple of tracks the other half of the detached did not want to do, so they're solo efforts, like https://killsignal.net/thedetached/3.scottvr-every_day_I%20d...
Im on vocals, keys and occasional guitar. Dave Griggs played bass and guitar. Drums were all on my laptop.
Oh and I guess I released a video for an unfinished (sensing a theme?) cover of Black Sabbath's "Changes" you might enjoy, if you're info horror and such. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6btgKG0tWxg This is a different side of my limited vocal range and stylings. :-)
Rap is new to me; to get it to sound good takes surgery in a DAW slicing, moving, shifting, quantizing, etc. Even my Voice Live Rack can't make me sound like a rapper. Which is why the song maybe sounds more in the direction of 90's industrical club music (Front 242, Ogre from SkinnyPuppy, a lot of those guys were essentially "spoken word to rhythm, which one might call "rapping". Even if "El User" succeeds as "rap", I think we can all agree it is not so much "hip hop".
I'm so grateful you guys listened to it and enjoyed it. I just wanted a vehicle for the lyrics (which might be deeper or more layered than the nerd humor allows people to see. I don't know, which is why I wanted out in the world. I will get back to work on the multiple aligner tool and get the video perfect soon, and I'll let y'all know.. Oh also discoveref that the very last line, "#!bash" accidentlaly was elided from the final mix, so Ill have to tack that back on and make it not oend so abruptly.
Again thanks a lot for the feedback.
--Scott "UID Zer0" (I don't realy use that name; I just made up the DJ Defrag and UI Zero duo because I don't of course have a "rap name", but needed to be able to use some rap cliches like "first name x, last name y"
After finding the AI version I assumed you had generated this as well. It's been a hot minute since I've done anything creatively with audio/music, but would have been interesting to work with AI generated or AI-assisted vocals like that. Off-topic-ish: I have the beginnings of a modular/eurorack synth boxed up after a move, still. Also very much a noob with modular, but I've been playing with the idea to hook up the cv to real-time network monitoring to give my network a voice. It would take some time/tuning to get somewhere musically, if it would evolve from pure noise at all, but I'll take a packet powered pseudo-RNG noise box. Putting the ARP in arpeggio.
Having only heard the final edit of course, but I'd say your voice works well for rap/nerdcore. As with all things: if you put in the effort/time you'll improve. You may find yourself not having to correct the flow as much. And if you're not looking to perform live, why would you care when you get the flow/outcome you like through slicing/editing?
The lyrics to me seem like you put too much thought into referencing tools/tech in every line, which makes me fail to stay with the story/subtext. The deeper meaning is lost on me. That may mean I'm not the intended audience, and therefore be an N=1 answer to the question you were floating here on HN.
Tool/tech ref to word/line ratio is lower for artists like Ohm-I, Dual Core, ytcracker, making it easier to follow the "plot". More palatable with a hook as well, but if that makes it too clubby/hip hop/not you then don't, obviously.
Thanks for sharing.
Well, I'd disagree with the "too much thought" suggestion. Too many words? Oh probably so, but not much thought. Wait, that sounds dismissive or like faux-humility, but that isn't how I meant it.
Working as I have for over three decades continually in IT, spanning industries, skills, tools, languages, responsibilities, seeing the coming and going of many "next" generations, etc.. I suppose the pool of words to choose from and the range of things to use as metaphors is just pretty large and much deprecated, outside of the contrived use case of tech nerd battle rap.
Nerd flexing boast/diss tracks until now, I didn't know was already a thing. I kinda thought I was innovating. Lol, maybe I was from your description of it being too loaded with technical jargon, but the jargon, the word play, was the point. I was having fun with it. Some are shallow puns, others, like the ReiserFS lines were amusing to me because of the way they just wrote themselves. Hmm. There may be a distinction between real connections and patterns and apophenia, and there may be a way that it is missing in my head or blurred, in which case it may also be the case that the symbolism I find obvious and amusing just seems inane or pointless to everyone else. That would explain a lot of things now that I think about it. Heh.
I knew "nerdy white guy raps" was a thing from a show called "Dave" (I think) a year or so ago with a (I think) real rapper called Lil Dicky. (Again, "I think".) The show was good but I wasn't connected enough to modern pop culture to really know how much was fictionalized or otherwise. (I did recently see that Selena Gomez got married and was a little too excited, announcing to nobody "that's... that's! From the show!" I just looked it up and his name is Benny Blanco so that part of the show was at least accurate about him existing in real life and being a producer or somehow connected to hip hop. That said, your message is the second time in a handful of days someone has mentioned ytcracker but the first time had less context, and the context I did have (it was related to a video) caused me to assume it was a mangled or auto-corrected term and that ytcracker referred to some tool for downloading videos (like yt-dl/yt-dlp) and so I didn't look further. I guess this is signal that maybe I should.
I don't actually plan on making another track of this sort (though it has occurred to me a few times even though it wasn't on the table prior to putting it out there; I've never had so many people tell me they've had it on repeat - or maybe I've never had anyone ever tell me that about any music I've put out until this one, for which the response has been way more positive than expected.
On the audio output from network traffic (oh congrats on the developing eurorack habit btw) I did something enough in that zone that it causes me to want to recommend a rabbit hole to you (if it is not one you've already been down.) That rabbit hole is Sonification. My entrance was specifically parameter-mapped sonification and a search will find you many interesting papers. I might save you some time, or possibly send you straight into an ocean of time-suckage by suggesting you start with "The Sonification Handbook". On the plus side it will reference and was edited by one of the authors of one of the main papers I was about to have to look up until. i remembered the larger work so there's two birds to get started, on the down-side it references loads of stuff that are rabbit holes of specialization that could prolong your foray underground. I hope that is useful to you.
> apologies I answered the three of you all in this one reply. Hope it's of enough interest and easy enough to discern if something is not what you asked.
As a heads-up, you're lucky this time — it seems to be pretty rare on HN that people keep track of threads past their initial encounter, unless they get a direct reply (and even then it's far from guaranteed). It's not a great place to have a conversation (but then, where is?).
> Yeah I'm stil working on the subtitles. Subtitles are a solved problem, right? Well, not when you want to display something like /etc/passwd (and many such things) it becomes a pain.. The funny thing is that the main purpose in making a video was to maks e Lyric videom but that ended up the last thing I did insofar as editing the video, and it doesn't work right. I was tired from being up for two days trying to finish it.
> I'm finishing up the lyric aligner I made for this video (which is why it's missing a section and starts to lag. But I was soo tired of editing and I wanted people to hear it so I took a break and upploaded it anyway I digress.) It let's you have a spoken lyric sheet for the aligner (whisper and stable_ts) to listen for, where you can put words in their phonetic spellings like you would for TTS, but the another lyrid sheet for presentation spellings that will be used in the subtitles. This was necessary due to all of the technical terms and acronyms that may not be pronounced in an expected way by the aligner tools. It zips (interleaves) the two together and creates a yaml file for hand editing tweaks suchas subtitle effects, then it generates the proper .ass file for that. I'll push the lyric aligner up to the repo when it's working 100%.
I probably would have just fixed everything manually instead of trying to improve the system...
Yes, but maybe you know how it is... similar to that threshold where "I've done this three times before, if I had automated it, I'd maybe have spent the same amount of time writing the automation, but the fourth time on would be free" and doing the sort of quick on-the-fly gut-math cost/benefit analysis that either results in an eventual time savings to be celebrated, or a "dammit, I should have just done this by hand again" unique type of regret.
So for this particular set of words and timing, I found I really disliked eyeballing the lines and doing quick time arithmetic and sanity checks because there were no obvious errors the two or three passes I made. So I found myself making a quick script to return the differences, to try to see what odd combination might be triggering a bug, etc. plus although what you see now looks like just standard subtitles, the original burn of them used some of the ass format's unique rendering capabilities and, as with the one-off script type automation cost/benefit.. I think it's actually cool enough and potentially useful for other cases (generative TTS/ai vocals, etc) that even if I never make another "rap"-style track and video, someone else is likely to encounter the same problem and find this solution useful.
But probably mostly it's a combination of sunk cost fallacy and stubbornness, with some laziness and fatigue thrown on top that has now a video for a song I wanted to share with whoever it might reach with broken subtitles and an unfinished tool to correct them.