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I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I'm getting tired of having everything good replaced by a mediocre version that offers debatable convenience. A meh guit
by JasonFruit 5y ago
I know this is a bit of a tangent, but I'm getting tired of having everything good replaced by a mediocre version that offers debatable convenience. A meh guitar tuner, a phone tree that usually understands my spoken choices, the opportunity to enter my claim information online and be questioned by an impersonal overseas operator later instead of just talking with my agent — none of these are developments that improve my life, though they do a lot to help the companies that want my business.
P.S. Get off my lawn.
- jholman 5y agoThat's disruption, in the sense intended by Clayton M. Christensen. Walmart was never going to provide a better service than Whole Foods (or some equivalent-to-WF store that predates Walmart, since I'm sure there are some). But it might provide a service that's 80% as good, at 20% of the price. And if it does, you might buy it. Are you under the impression that it's no longer possible to install a dedicated guitar-tuning Android app, or indeed that it's no longer possible to buy a dedicated guitar tuner?
- bjt 5y agoOK but, is Google really trying to disrupt the guitar tuner market? This isn't them trying to disrupt an incumbent. It's a neat hack from a company with more money than they know what to do with.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoThe top result on the Play store for "Guitar Tuner" is GuitarTuna, which is around 200 MB in size if memory serves me well. The second result's reviews indicate that it's full of extremely disruptive ads. So whatever Google is trying to do, for me it has disrupted that "market" by providing an easy-to-find, clean alternative.
- jcoq 5y agoI've been using Guitar Tuna for years. It's extremely effective and I don't really notice the ads.
- asdff 5y agoNo, but they want permission to use your microphone.
- xeromal 5y agoIt's most likely from Google's dev time program where a dev gets to work on a pet project 20%(?) of their time. That's why a ton of new projects come out of google but get canned in a few years.
- harry8 5y agoDoes that still exist as a policy?
- hn_go_brrrrr 5y agoThe policy still exists. The practice is dying out, however.
- harry8 5y agoI don't understand. People would rather spend a day per week working on google's stuff than their own project?
- thesimon 5y agoWorking on your own projects won't get you promoted I would guess.
- mkr-hn 5y agoUnless that project is a messaging app.
- iamevn 5y agoProjects aren't typically scheduled to account for it in my experience. If I took that much time to work on something that's not an OKR then I'd just be falling behind.
- harry8 5y agoSo you totally can work on your own project for 20% of your time but you won't get 20% of your time to work on your project. Right. So the policy is dead with only a dishonest echo remaining..? Doesn't even qualify as evil anymore on google's standards, but when google hired freelance recruiters were ringing me several times a week it really would have. Those were the days, we used to think microsoft were horrible. And they were!
- analog31 5y agoIf you look for a tuner app in the Android app store, there are like thousands of choices. Most of them are adware, or they don't register my double bass very well. I would have no idea where to begin looking for an app that is better in some way, or that even works. That market has pretty much disrupted itself. Fortunately I learned to tune by ear, so a tuner app is really a first world problem.
- lucas_membrane 5y agoWith on-line music sessions now spanning the globe, and only a small minority of people able to achieve perfect absolute pitch, standard pitch is the lingua franca of internet music, and should be widely useful.
- asdff 5y agoWhat is standard pitch?
- YZF 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A440_(pitch_standard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A440_(pitch_standard) Most people that tune by ear tune relatively, e.g. they tune each string to another string. If there's no standard reference then it'll sound fine but you can't play with anyone else who is tuned to the standard... Though many people can tune to a reference pitch as well without using a tuner.
- asdff 5y agoOh yeah, my chromatic tuner is set to 440 hz. My guitar stays in pretty good tune to my ears at least but I would retune it with the tuner if playing with other instruments for sure or if it were to get out of tune (never seems to). When I change strings I do check my intonation too. Pretty easy to set on stratocasters. I think a lot of guitars especially are not set up well and intonation is probably off even if the open strings are in tune.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoThis is merely a result of the democratization of basic services- now everybody can receive the same level of mediocrity.
- JasonFruit 5y agoLike Andy Warhol put it: > What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.
- egypturnash 5y agoAnd then Coke begat New Coke which begat “Old” Coke which was actually a new drink based on corn syrup instead of cane sugar and then people started importing cane sugar Coke from Mexico because they don’t have insane corn subsidies that make corn syrup stupid cheap compared to sugar and now, yeah, there is a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. Unless he, too, chose to spend like a buck thirty for a 12oz bottle of the Good Stuff at a store that has it instead of two bucks for a 20oz bottle of the corn syrup.
- zarzavat 5y agoI imagine this is just some Google engineer's 20% project, and that they are really enthusiastic about guitars. Also I can see this being useful in many cases, in case my battery was flat and I had to borrow someone's phone to tune up. I don't think that musicians will stop buying tuner apps because Google has one, a good tuner app is indispensable.
- smelendez 5y agoThey may also get some interesting data about microphone distortions across devices and browsers.
- analog31 5y agoI look forward to receiving personalized ads for books on how to improve my intonation. ;-)
- skybrian 5y agoI don’t think there’s anything about it that’s specific to guitars.
- asdff 5y agoMost musicians probably are using a clip on or chromatic tuner rather than their phone to be fair
- monkeybutton 5y agoWhere I work is all in on Google cloud and the "meh but convenient" factor of GCP services is starting to really grate on me. "X 3rd party service has great reviews and is cheaper" suddenly becomes contestable and a debate because we'd have to deal with a bit of additional complexity and pay for data transfer out of GCP.
- spaetzleesser 5y agoThat’s the problem with tech giants. They tie you into a mediocre environment that makes it easy to use mediocre products . My company is using MS Teams because it comes with Office. But when you start to use it you quickly realize how bad it is. We would be much better off if we had more small tech companies instead of giants like Apple, MS and Google.
- dehrmann 5y agoI'm guessing you're looking at something like B2? Doing multi-cloud like that really is a hassle.
- lucas_membrane 5y ago> meh I agree. The in-tune reading is about plus/minus 5 cents (1 cent = 0.01 half steps). It is not nearly as precise or even as quick to determine the pitch as wtuner or lingot or the $14 D'addario clip-on tuner or even the korg vocal pitch trainer.
- mhh__ 5y agoBut who doesn't own one of those if they care? The last time I used a crummy app based guitar tuner was on a guitar at a friend's house that was basically a prop and no one played (so no tuner, also thank you Brian may for using a coin as a pick).
- yreg 5y agoA tuner built by people who are not you for people who are not you is not on your lawn.
- mkr-hn 5y agoWorkaround: You can force most of those phone trees into a failsafe button pressing mode by pressing 0 until it gives up on voice. You shouldn't have to play the system to make it work reasonably, but...