So this is an excellent question, because no joke I have noticed the same thing testing with Spotify. Apple Music does not have that issue.
Makes me wonder: do different streaming services get different masters? Or, is Spotify having playback issues? To the app, they both should sound the same. I intend to do some research with that when the fog clears out a bit and the Android version is out.
Unfortunately a lot of mid-range tables nowadays don't have the strobe (mine included), most likely for aesthetic reasons... Even just looking at online shopping right now I only see a handful that do have it.
As for being skeptical, good! That means I'm doing something great according to Clarke's third law.
Building a "strobe" is just a matter of putting an LED, some diodes, a resistor, and (optionally) a transformer together.
The idea is that the LED reaches peak brightness (and darkness) at twice the line frequency, just as ye olde fluorescent tubes did. (Or: Skip the extra diodes and have it work at 1x line frequency. I'm not your boss.)
But little neons are getting scarce (they aren't dear -- they're just much, much less common than they used to be). And working fluorescents (with magnetic ballasts that actually run at line frequency) are pretty much that way are too.
LEDs and resistors, though? Bright, cheaper than chips, and ready for all kinds of modern digital shenanigans.
Thank you so much! I spoke about why I'm not flat out saying how it works in another comment but let me answer your questions:
1) It actually might! Worth a shot I guess, but I don't have any comedy albums to try it out. I was able to get drum solos working fine
2) Was answered better by somebody else
3) I was able to get it to detect speed issues up to 9% off, beyond that it just stops working completely. Though that was in controlled environment so YMMV. If you see the sample vid I posted above, my player is roughly 4% off which is a lot but I genuinely believe a whole lot of people wouldn't notice that
Is this the aforementioned comment about _why_ you aren't being specific about the implementation?
> Eventually I decided to see if I could find a novel, more user-friendly approach that doesn't require you to put a thousand-dollars phone on a fast moving spinning thingie, and that's how Grooved came to be.
If it isn't then I couldn't find it. I was very curious about that too (both how it worked, and then the incentive for secrecy--totally your prerogative but again curious given the veiled-to-me explanation) but didn't seem to find such a comment. Protecting novelty seems like the implied reason.
Essentially I don't want to have somebody swoop in, replicate the same thing, be better at marketing, and charge money for it. I'm both protecting users because they shouldn't be charged for something that is free, but also protecting my ego because I spent time and effort and as far as I can tell I'm the first one to build an app that works this way and it sucks when somebody takes a community thing and paywalls it.
Once the Android version is out and everything blows over I might consider making the apps open-source so that anyone can see and learn how it works, then potentially make derivative works.
That makes sense and seems like a justified concern. Sorry for what you experienced with Boop. And thanks for the reply and direction to the comment, I overlooked it.
Usually when an app comes out on iPhone but not Android the excuse is that "Android users don't pay for apps so it wasn't a priority", despite it being way more difficult and a bit more expensive to develop for iPhone over Android.
But in your case you don't plan on monetizing, so why iPhone first?
Well I have been developing native apps for both for over a decade, and I don't think either is particularly more difficult than the other.
What it came down to is that I use an iPhone as my daily driver, and when I pulled my Android test device out of a drawer the battery was twice the size so I immediately brought it to an electronics recycling center.
Which means that in order to complete the Android version, I need to shell out $400 for a new phone I'm only gonna use once for a non-commercial project. So my idea was, let's release iOS first, see if people care, and then I'll spend the remaining time and money to finish up the Android build!
I think if I did try to finish Android at the same time, I would have given up on both and released nothing.
I've developed for both as well and would say getting _started_ with iOS development is about 10x more time consuming and complicated than Android -- or at least it was about 8 years ago.
I know you know this, but you don't need to own an Android phone to develop for Android (and you don't have to spend anywhere near $400 on one if you do want one).
Looks like it'll be a pretty great app and hope you do manage to get the Android version up and running.
That's odd, could you share an example of a record you use? Are those fairly popular/common records?
Also, do you see the little disk outline moving during the analysis? This would confirm that your phone can hear the sound coming out of your record player (just to be safe: you need to play the song out loud)
That's super odd. So it's not even rotating? There might be an issue that occurs before the analysis starts.
If you don't mind, do you have any special setting on? Lockdown mode or something? Are you able to play the music back if you use the Voice Memo app to record a bit of it?
Sorry about all that, hopefully we can figure out what's wrong!
Basically it's a setting for people who are concerned about being targeted by 0days.
> Lockdown Mode is an optional, extreme protection that’s designed for the very few individuals who, because of who they are or what they do, might be personally targeted by some of the most sophisticated digital threats.
Very strange... Best I can offer is to delete and reinstall the app to reset the microphone permissions, or if you'd like you can send me an email via my website (okat.best) and we can try to troubleshoot it
I'm gonna be honest, using the accelerometer will definitely be more accurate because you can take more samples over a longer period of time. That's how this project started, but I also felt uncomfortable putting my brand new phone on a fragile player and even more so asking other people to do the same.
Grooved is still very accurate, especially if you run multiple measurements to confirm on multiple songs/records. The threshold for "perfection" in the app is 0.01%, which to me anything beyond that is a rounding error and I could not tell the difference in my tests. This is equal to a drift of about a third of a second over an hour of listening.
This is how this project started! I thought I was super smart figuring out I could do that, then I realized there are many apps that already do the same thing. Eventually I decided to see if I could find a novel, more user-friendly approach that doesn't require you to put a thousand-dollars phone on a fast moving spinning thingie, and that's how Grooved came to be.
Hey that's very odd, would you mind telling me which country/region you are located in?
I actually released the app yesterday but didn't post about it til today because it wasn't being indexed properly on the App Store yet, it's possible that it's still not live everywhere. I have an image link to the listing in the first section of the web page and if on iPhone it should show you the classic "this website has an app" banner at the top.
If you're searching for it, "Grooved" has many results but if you accept the suggestion of "Grooved: turntable calibration" it'll come up.
I figured that the site breaks with apple lockdown mode on. I think that appstore links usually work still, but might be that that’s one of the lockdown mode protections. The spinning animation also was not there so I didn’t see the app logo there.
That is fair criticism, I expected for the website itself to be polarizing. At the end of the day because this is a tiny free app I made for fun, I am willing to throw some people off of the sake of the joke, and judging by a lot of the comments I have succeeded!
Overall, my assumption is that by the time you make it to the website, you'll already know what the app does, and most people will link to the App Store directly (which is why the store listing is much clearer on what the app is/does). if not, my second assumption is that people will scroll right past that giant block of text and go to the last line which does explain what the app is in one sentence, because there isn't much more to say about it in my opinion.
If I made money off of the app I'd have a widely different approach, but in this case all I get paid with is strangers' attention and it is _very_ funny to me to spend that attention on a useless 2AM irrelevant tirade.
Probably a smart idea to be suspicious of new apps, though I will say I am someone who care deeply about privacy. You can take a look at my previous project Boop ( https://boop.okat.best/ ), which is open source and has been on the App Store for 6 years, yet I still don't have any analytics or data collection in it. I have no clue how many people use it beyond download figures I get from Apple.
I have considered making this app open source, and it may still happen in the future, but I do want to release the Android version first. I'm worried that somebody will see my code, repackage it with a new name, beat me with better SEO (which would be easy considering how dumb the copy is on my website) and sell it for profit before I have a chance to reach a wider audience. This is something that did happen with Boop, not a hypothetical.
The reality is that this app cannot collect anything valuable either way. It's a simple serving app that only uses your microphone for a couple of seconds at a time, and I assume most people will delete it once it serves its purpose. If I wanted to monetize it, the best way would be to add a "Pro" version with a subscription or to add ads, but I have no interest in doing either. This is a fun side project/portfolio piece, and I'd rather collect internet love distributing a ton of free copies, rather than sell a small fraction of that number of paid copies for $0.99 and have to deal with things like marketing, taxes, and customer support.
I understand your hesitation in opening the code. Still, the idea seems really great, low complexity (quick local processing, no database of songs needed) and robust (any reasonable vinyl could work).
I suggest considering writing about it. Maybe a whitepaper? A publication? A patent application? May be colab with audio researchers? Or get sponsored from an audiophile record player manufacturer?
But you're not worried that HN folks might run the app through a decompiler and find something approximately as revealing as your source code would be? The results might not be ideal depending on how much obfuscation you use, but I think it would be enough for someone to get the gist of how to replicate.
I have no issue with people decompiling my code for fun or curiosity. I often put easter eggs in my code or built files for this specific purpose. I never use obfuscation unless there is a security component.
The important part is the rest of that sentence, I have an issue with people who steal the code (or concepts) and charge money for it. If I do end up open-sourcing the code later, people will see the code and I have no issue with that.
https://twitter.com/OKatBest/status/1795453042994680148
Then listen to the original:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NplyW8TF18
Maybe it's just me, but as soon as the guitar starts I can tell it's way too high pitched.