I have a 7.1 system, unfortunately, this is an issue here as well, that I will argue grew worse since Atmos started becoming mainstream.
Particularly in the mid-to-late 00's, centre speaker dialogue was very bombastic and stood out very well even in high action scenes. Yes the volume was still sometimes mismatched, but not to the point a discreet multi-channel setup needed to constantly adjust volume. Films from the previous two decades had even less issues just thanks to the simplicity.
Atmos feels like a huge wasted potential to me personally. With the added height channels, you can create some amazing effects and absurd imaging that was never possible before, but the reliance on this kind of swerved sounds and vocals to overlap each other in more awkward ways that makes it feel like everything is originating from a reverberation chamber. Particularly with dialogue, Atmos helps create positional ambiance with indoor scenes, so vocals often sound muddier than they should be.
Even worse, streaming services provide a mix that obviously caters to handheld devices, TVs and soundbars, while being Atmos 7.1.4, sounding particularly terrible for both kinds of watchers. Blu-ray's thankfully still often directly target home theatres and sound much better for the latter.
That's just been my experience so far. Going from a simple 5.1 Jamo from 2007 to an upgraded Atmos setup, I've been blown away far less by action films these days. It's even amazing if you hear the rears getting utilised at all.
Yeah, I have 11.1 with sound treatments and a receiver that does room correction, and some movies are just annoyingly mixed. Dune (2021) has the voices mumbled and so low that when I turned it up enough to hear them it caused the explosions to be so loud that my cat jumped off my lap and ran out of the room, which I don't think he's ever done before.
Christopher Nolan is probably the most infamous offender; he's said even other filmmakers contact him and complain about his mixes. It's apparently how he wants it to sound, and he's said things like he sometimes treats dialogue as a sound effect and mixes it low on purpose, despite the many many articles and such about how much audiences hate it. I could swear at one point he even countered with something like "you shouldn't need to hear all the dialogue to understand what's going on". Ugh.
Same here, I've noticed that mostly since the point Atmos started becoming mainstream, movies just aren't mixed like standard films from the late 90's to 00's. Sure, we didn't have overhead sound sources or admittedly fantastic imaging for the few films that do it right, but overall, everything sort of feels like a narrow, bland tunnel tuned for soundbars / TVs, for which neither Home Theatre nor Soundbar owners enjoy ironically.
The "Enhance Dialogue / Reduce Loud Sounds" feature on the Apple TV has been amazing for helping to rectify this, but I would prefer to leave the dynamic range of the track alone.
I share the same experience with Snapdrop-like websites, self hosted or otherwise, where establishing connections would have a 30% failure rate, speeds progressively deteriorate on very large files, and bundling files together would need them to zipped first which can waste time. LocalSend has none of these issues and has been rock solid in my year of use so far, and I also like that it can send plaintext easily, which fills the gap sites like SimpleSavr and Pushbullet would normally cover.
The only caveat is that you need to have the application installed on all the devices you want to use it with (so it's not a true universal AirDrop or QuickShare alternative) but for your own devices, this is fine.
This is my dream scenario, stock Android and iOS having the feature to disable network access for apps.
It's such a simple, quality of life improvement for certain apps that I know I never want to phone home for any reason outside of 'cloud centric' features. Blocking traffic and DNS requests by hand is time-consuming, and new servers / connections can prop up at anytime without one's knowledge, not to mention you might block a domain for a specific app but need it for another (star.c10r.facebook.com for example, which also blocks Meta AI research websites).
I kind of get why they wouldn't, such as unexpected behaviour, sweet data collection and license checking, but man. At least a handful of custom ROMs and local-VPN privacy apps on Android allows for this.
Yes, this is what I meant by local VPN privacy app (didn't find the right words admittedly, as it's not a standalone firewall per say and unfortunately cannot be used in tandem with a real VPN tunnel), excellent one though!
Agreed. If I need the best performance out of a Remote Desktop, thankfully there is Sunshine⁽¹⁾ and KASM,⁽²⁾ though it requires significant setup beforehand and bugs do crop up on certain desktops + window protocols.
RDP as a regular or quick solution is actually really decent in this respect.
KasmVNC has worked great for me to setup development VMs which require GUI work. Kasm Workspaces is an interesting product which allows you to create disposable desktop sessions. I use it to test software, setup a particular configuration, then throw it away.
The Audio-to-Audio samples sound more like the model trying to construct a similar enough instrumental and vocoding the difference using the original sample rather than drums and strums being generated identically to match the intent. Still interesting though, and I certainly imagine we're not far off from improved versions.
Yattee aims to fit more in line as a native Apple subscription organizer and player application suite, with native window controls and tighter integrations, but it's mostly up to you to decide how'd you like your setup to be.
Ideally, you could self host only the Piped framework and connect this to Yattee without hosting the WebUI frontend, but without the latter, you cannot create a user for yourself to store subscriptions, and using the provided AIO Docker Images is overkill for self hosting as you are required to purchase and point to DNS records for this system (mostly to the benefit of publically hosting an instance of Piped).
Invidious is more suited for this regard, but has issues with parsing some videos and their metadata (usually new uploads for a week, Vevo Music Videos etc.)
I can attest to coffeeri's consumption, albeit on pure server use-case only. I own a OptiPlex 3080 with an i5-10500T and under default BIOS settings (power states and whatnot), I was very surprised to see a 1.7-2.5w power draw on idle, but under typical desktop use, this becomes 6-8w. If this is your draw under a server deployment as well, unfortunately I don't know of any methods to rectify this personally.
When it has to roar however, the draw is substantial compared to my ODroid, but since it idles the majority of the time, I'll take it.
It also has nice privacy centric and QoL features that strip tracking URLs, removes "Open in App" banners and AMP pages + redirects (e.g. old.reddit) for mobile, fingerprint randomisation and of course, will probably be the best Chromium-based browser adblocker post Manifest V3, but yeah you can also spin these features into a bundled Firefox or use one of those Libre* forks which already does most of this afaik.
When I (and many others) first started out using Linux, this was when the most trouble was likely to crop up. Over time, one learns and adapts to certain intricacies, hardware or methodologies used, and hopefully good practises, such as avoiding utterly rubbish or quaint distributions. Of course no scenario is bound to be 100% trouble free, but this is a far cry from an inexperienced user.
Even if I were to accept the premise that the other users are simply "doing nothing interesting", what would your idea of interesting be? Is it heavily exotic in nature (which I do agree in this case), or things that fall outside the purview of web browsing, document editing and leisurely activities? These things can also cause trouble outside the fault of a user for any reason, but this doesn't necessarily mean that they are inexperienced or do nothing interesting.
If you can elaborate more, I'd be interested to gauge if I agree in a new context.
Particularly in the mid-to-late 00's, centre speaker dialogue was very bombastic and stood out very well even in high action scenes. Yes the volume was still sometimes mismatched, but not to the point a discreet multi-channel setup needed to constantly adjust volume. Films from the previous two decades had even less issues just thanks to the simplicity.
Atmos feels like a huge wasted potential to me personally. With the added height channels, you can create some amazing effects and absurd imaging that was never possible before, but the reliance on this kind of swerved sounds and vocals to overlap each other in more awkward ways that makes it feel like everything is originating from a reverberation chamber. Particularly with dialogue, Atmos helps create positional ambiance with indoor scenes, so vocals often sound muddier than they should be.
Even worse, streaming services provide a mix that obviously caters to handheld devices, TVs and soundbars, while being Atmos 7.1.4, sounding particularly terrible for both kinds of watchers. Blu-ray's thankfully still often directly target home theatres and sound much better for the latter.
That's just been my experience so far. Going from a simple 5.1 Jamo from 2007 to an upgraded Atmos setup, I've been blown away far less by action films these days. It's even amazing if you hear the rears getting utilised at all.