I just installed Native Instruments Bandstand on my computer, and I now understand why it got discontinued 4 years after it's release. To put a long story short, the intentions were good, however the product itself not so much.
Wellp, perfect timing, Keychron, thanks for releasing keyboards on the day I decided I needed a new keyboard. Pretty fucking cheap too. Grabbed their new numpad one, the B6 Pro Ultra-Slim Wireless Keyboard. Am excited. It has everything I want in a keyboard, USBC, 2.4 ghz wireless and bluetooth. Boom! Job done.
@KaraLG84@FluidEscence It is a decent board in my opinion. The only thing that took me a while to get used to was the locations of the Alt and Windows keys were switched around.
It suddenly occurs to me that tremendous amounts of programmer culture are just various, mostly-failed attempts at managing the work associated with keeping pace with a changing world. Specifically: SemVer, LTSes, “commercial support” funding models for OSS, Win32’s “Old New Thing”-style compatibility, SaaS interface versioning, and, arguably, the popularity of the x86/amd64 architectures themselves are all aspects of a fantasy world where you build something once and have it work forever.
@matt@glyph The version of DECtalk in System Access (4.51) is from late 1998, and Window Eyes used a newer version that is based on 4.60 R008, which was initially completed in December of 1999. In 2003, a fix was applied to the audio driver code for GW Micro.
@matt Got it. How did the version of 4.60 you get access to suck? There is a later version of 4.60 (R011) that sounds different than the one included with Window Eyes, and I am curious if that is what you ended up getting. I am attaching an audio file of the 2 versions for comparison.
@matt Not that it really matters, I would be more than happy to produce a static library of 4.60 with a custom registry key for the dictionary location, such as HKLM\SOFTWARE\Pneuma Solutions\DECtalk-OEM\4.60. This is what the build that ships with Window Eyes does, as it stores the dictionary location in HKLM\SOFTWARE\GW Micro, Inc.\DECtalk-OEM\4.60.
@bryansmart@matt The reason for the faint electronic beeps at the end of phrases is because of rounding errors in the fixed point version of the vocal tract model. Later versions of DECtalk simply apply a gate to the output to minimize the audibility of these artifacts, as it is mathematically impossible to get rid of them.
Some of you may remember that my keyboard has a control key that likes to randomly get stuck in weird positions? Well, it's now taken to randomly completely popping off. I swear, I'm going to lose the damn thing one of these days now.