Do yourself a favour, go get the new OSARA snapshot where Jamie made the parameters dialog about a thousand times better. It's even better on Mac. Imagine that.

If I was to take a drink every time a question that makes me want to drink came in here...

I'd be much better hydrated. Must try that.

Today I taught Google Docs to a new screen reader user.

Someone at Google owes me and that student a fucking apology.

Got some sand and a box no longer being used if anyone needs those...

My buddy Rachel put a new album out recently. Kinda jazzy/fusiony/proggy tunes. She's playing most of the things and self-producing/mixing. Essentially uses the computer like a tape recorder, mixes about as much as you would with a basic hardware board and that's that. It's astounding to me that one person can do all this without any of the mischief I rely on every time I open the DAW.

Give your earsies a puff of this and pass it along.

https://rachelflowers.bandcamp.com/album/all-that

I follow a post that got boosted by someone who relies on accessibility, which lands on an accessible website, where every product is accessible.

Every page I visit highlights how accessibility is front and centre, how every product is designed by someone who uses accessibility all day every day, how nobody else is doing accessibility like this, how other accessibility efforts in this space fall short.

Then I go to the page containing their accessibility statement, which is... *drum roll*... out of date.

Out of date and inaccurate, at odds with everything else I've spent 15 minutes reading. Just like on any other site I could throw a stone at.

I laugh, and I leave.

Hey OSARA Mac/VO users, I'm looking for some info about REAPER's Preferences screen. How do you find navigating the categories table thingy? Does it work well or is there anything that trips you up on the regular? Are there any quirks I might not know about as someone who's only a part-time Mac mucker-upper? I'm gauging how that navigation feels ahead of possibly putting the same control type in an OSARA dialog. Help with reach appreciated.

Please drop me a DM if you use NVDA and REAPER, you don't have any Native Instruments hardware and you'd like to help me open up access to way more instruments without being strongarmed into buying hardware. Think I've figured out something cool. I need a machine that hasn't ever had a Native Instruments controller connected to verify whether my prototype works.

Do I know anyone who uses Studio Recorder for its silence detection feature? I've eventually figured out how to get something like it going in REAPER that can analyze long stretches of audio wicked fast. I'm reading cached peaks so it feels pretty much instant. As things stand it's got configurable threshold and length of silence, with keystrokes to move to start of previous, start of next, end of previous and end of next silence.

Questions:
I'm told SR has different length silences. How many variations are there? Are they configurable? Would you use multiple lengths?

If I add multiple lengths, I'm thinking it'll be four keystrokes for navigation and a single key to cycle through the lengths you've chosen on the fly. Thoughts?

Asking for a friend, notably a friend who doesn't want to use Kontakt, not even Player. They're looking for a decent free piano, bass and drums for sketching jazz arrangements to solo over. Recommendations much appreciated, I don't know diddly squat about jazz.

Do I know anyone who's got a good source they can search for music stems? Back in 2020 Orla Gartland released legit stems for her song Pretending, they were uploaded for anyone to use in a cover/remix competition. Trouble is she used Google Drive and now that link is deaded. I'd love to get hold of these for educational use. Word up if you can hook a nerd up. Boosts appreciated for reach.

Today being what it is, I want to say it's cool how Cockos handles accessibility. No special events, no grandstanding, just making REAPER better one day at a time, the same way they handle other development. If you want to make music or do anything around audio production with a screen reader, give REAPER and OSARA a shot. You'll only find smart, hard working people on both teams (except for some of the times when I'm around).

And now, back to the annual influx of noise nobody believes...

Names of controls in the equivalent GoldWave feature would also be interesting to see, maybe I can land on a sort of middle ground.

Who do I know that uses an old ish version of Sound Forge with the good auto-ducker? If that's you, can you make a list or a recording of yourself moving through its controls? I've had requests to try making something similar for REAPER, have got a thing going, but I'd like the controls to feel familiar and I don't have SF here for comparrison.

GitHub/screen reader users, how do you copy a link to a code snippet accessibly? The way I just got it done wasn't that great, and apropos of nothing I'm about 5 seconds away from having a fucking aneurysm. Please tell me there's a nice accessible workflow that I missed.

Do I know anyone who's got a reliable virtual machine with recent Mac OS running on Ryzen CPUs? Performance doesn't need to be great, I'll only spin it up to check where an option is, verify keystrokes are accurate etc. I'm working on a thing where there are too many of those questions to make asking around practical, but last I looked it was stupidly difficult to get this running on Ryzen. If I know anyone who has it going, please get in touch with details of how you did it.

No pressure, all I'm saying is that acquiring a Neo just to verify keystrokes would be utterly ridiculous and I can feel a wreckless feeling brewing...

I've added a fun mode to this that I'm calling Shuffle-o-matic. You pick a trigger note and all selected samples get assigned to it with roulette style playback. It's not truly random (can't do that with RS5K's parameters) but the more samples you throw into the selection pool, the less repetition there is/the more random it feels. Good for folks who want variation, less predictability, some textural sounds that shift over time etc.

I'm putting together a simpler, more accessible script for managing samples in REAPER with RS5K. Aiming to publish a single script without any dependencies, everything stems from a popup menu with keyboard accelerators, a couple of clear prompts covering loads of functionality.

But, I need a name for it. Suggestions welcome. Will shout you out along with all the other people I've ripped off along the way. :P

Looks like Blueprint Electric Keys might do it for free, if I can just figure out why it isn't making any noise in Kontakt 8 here. Ugh.

I need to find a good and accessible (preferably cheap) Rhodes VSTI, something that sounds silky smooth with light touches but can also get pretty grunty with low voicings when you hit those harder. Was using a thing called LoFi Keys but it keeps crashing on load and I'm over it. Whatcha got?