This has been my experience as well. Many owners want to know about issues before they fester.
I'm fortunate to have an attentive property manager and a landlord who is interested in doing the preventative maintenance to keep the units from degrading.
I inherited a mold and moisture problem under the kitchen sink when I moved in, one that I neglected for a while. As soon as I told my landlord they sent a crew out to tear down the wall, fix the plumbing, and rebuild it in a more robust manner.
I don't even have a particularly nice apartment. My apartment just turned 100 years old, but it's maintained well enough. I've been here seven years now. I keep my house clean, don't leave food out, and still see the occasional cockroach in the kitchen. Probably once every 1-2 months. Fine.
I intuitively put this much effort into asking good questions when I need help, and what I often find is that by spending time to formulate a question that makes it easy for others to help me I end up discovering the answer for myself or identifying a much more salient problem that I should be asking instead.
In this way, putting more effort into the question ends up putting me closer to the answer without actually receiving help.
There are tools to mitigate clipping artifacts, and tools to generate new transients for overly compressed files, but they're not a silver-bullet and the new material that is generated is more of a best guess than a true replacement for not over-compressing a mix in the first place.
These tools are most useful when used earlier in the process. Like when you just tracked an amazing vocal take, but the gain was too hot on one or two notes. The tools can mitigate some of the distortion artifacts to make it more usable. Applying these tools to complex material like a full mix will have some improvements, but at that stage there's less guarantee for convincing restoration of the record.
What I think non-professionals don't understand is that a record that is characterized by heavy compression is not something that happened at the very end with the mastering stage. It is an aesthetic choice that was made dozens of times along the way while recording, arranging, and mixing. Heavy compression is not necessarily a bad thing. Lots of amazing-sounding records harness it well. It's an art AND a craft. It takes audio engineers and producers years to do it well and with taste.
If you want an excellent explanation of why proposals for new notation systems like you’re suggesting have been developed (and failed) Tantacrul has made an excellent video describing the history and tradeoffs that lead us to our current system:
He’s product lead at MuseGroup developing notation software and his expertise lies at the intersection of music composition, UX design, and programming.
The reason it was backed off for the vinyl master is most likely due to physical limitations of the medium. If the audio channels are too loud (wide) there is risk that the needle will jump out of the groove.
And who, exactly, would approve that misguided proposal?
I suspect you’re not involved in contemporary record making. Like it or not, clipping is a technique and a color that producers, mixers, and mastering engineers all choose to impart for aesthetic and technical reasons. It has it’s uses.
If your proposal were passed all that would be left for consideration would be a handful lame DSD jazz records from those hi-fi enthusiasts who are disconnected from the reality around how most records are made these days.
If everything is at a “10” in linguistic intensity (“Incredible”, “Legendary”, “GOAT”) then nothing is exceptional.
It’s the linguistic equivalent of a Dorito chip.
I’m American and this marketing/corporate speak drives me up the wall. I have a harder time respecting the judgement of people who thoughtlessly speak this way.
Max/MSP has always been a paid tool. There was never a situation when you were going to be able to participate without paying.
This sounds a little like you're complaining that you cannot watch all of the free Youtube content because you don't want to pay for the device that will display it.
What it is, though, is a misguided attempt to move the goal posts on what I actually said, which is that a huge amount of the value of Ableton is gatekept behind paid addons.
If a DAW was structured like Blender or KiCAD and designed from the ground up to be extensible (or minimal!) then you wouldn't have any impetus to try to shame people who haven't paid a gate toll to execute software people have contributed to the public domain.
I'm annoyed because you keep referring to the cost of a license as "gate-keeping" or somehow "hiding away" your ability to use the software. Pay the cost for a license or don't. It's a reasonable price for the tools.
> I don't own Max for Live, so the large ecosystem of useful tools that I'd enjoy trying out is unavailable to me. t's not about special powers, just being forced to pay the gatekeeper to the otherwise free/OSS ecosystem.
You seem mistaken about Max/MSP being free or open source, which it has never been. Certainly not in the last eighteen years since I've been using it.
You seem to be saying that it would be a whole lot nicer if Ableton were an open source tool that we didn't have to pay for and could develop ourselves. Maybe that WOULD be an improvement in some ways. It would at least be free. A lot of things might be better. Some things not so much.
But it's not. Live is a paid product. And so is Max/MSP. And I'm very happy to continue paying these developers to keep doing a great job because they make tools that are tremendously helpful to me and they don't abuse that relationship with things like monthly subscriptions or unreasonable restrictions. In many ways Ableton is a model company that is self-governed and largely free of outside influence like private equity. I want them to succeed and I want more companies like them to thrive.
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There is a free and open-sourced alternative to Max/MSP: Pure Data. If you think open-sourcing this type of software is such a great idea, then you should develop in Pure Data instead of Max/MSP. There are probably open-sourced DAW projects out there too that you can integrate into as well.
Maybe then you'll realize that Live and Max/MSP's asking price is not so high after all.
That's actually exactly what I do! And I highly recommend it as a viable alternative to Max/MSP. It's the native way to create patches for the Organelle and many other instruments.
PlugData in particular has been a real joy to play around with.
I'm glad that your tools are working out well for you. I do reject the idea that I should STFU about being annoyed that I can't run Max for Live scripts, though. Native Instruments Kontakt isn't my favourite piece of software (or company) but at least they understood from early on that making the player free drastically increases the value of a paid license for the people who make content on that platform.
It's 2026. I'd hoped that we were well past needing to debate whether OSS is good or not. Apparently we're not!
Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.
I'm not talking about manually tagging, setting up, and filtering all incoming email before my inbox can self-organize. I mean automatically. Only show me the true primary items in my inbox from the jump. Everything else can wait.
In the absence of this feature my inbox becomes a torrent of incoming mail that is far harder to manage and prioritize. I keep my inbox at "zero" and I can completely understand why other people give up and let their inbox be overrun. This feature is essential for me.
One of the handy things that Fastmail (among other providers) lets you do is set up a wildcard email address, so literallyanything@mydomain goes to a specific folder. Any time I want to sign up for some service I don't trust, I'll give them a specific email address. Long-standing practice, blah blah. Also, as my sibling said, "mash that unsubscribe button".
Less practically, it is pretty obnoxious for you to act superior about inbox 0, while pretending not to judge people who "let their inbox be overrun", and at the same time refuse to accept any solution to your inbox that isn't fully automatic. There are lots of options available to you besides leaning entirely on Google's machines of loving grace watching over your inbox.
I think seeing superiority or obnoxiousness in the comment you replied to was a pretty large reading error on your part. The tone was sympathetic to people whose inboxes receive more than they can handle.
The last sentence of your comment sounds quite condescending.
The part of their comment I quoted is not particularly subtle in my opinion. It undercuts the superficially "sympathetic" tone. If they actually intended it to be sympathetic they should be more careful in their phrasing. I'm skeptical.
GP post is correct; you are reading way too far into it. Zero superiority intended.
I'm stating it as a style of how I manage my inbox. It's not some big achievement on my part. It's how I stop from feeling overwhelmed by my inbox. Everyone else can do whatever they want.
It's not like I'm that loyal to Gmail. But I've yet to find an alternative that replaces this functionality that I've become accustomed to. It's why I'm asking so many questions of people in this thread.
I had to turn off that gmail feature, because to enable it you also have to enable the horrible AI stuff. So gmail is less useful to me now than it used to be. You can't have the good features (automatic categorization, reminders of plane flights) without the intrusive son-of-Clippy crap I can't stand.
> Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates?
This is where email MUAs[0] shine. Mail user agents such as Thunderbird[1], KMail[2], Apple Mail[3], and nmh[4] (for hard-core Unix command-line aficionados) support filtering and automatic categorization to varying degrees.
I've tried Thunderbird, Kmail, and Apple's client, and maybe I just have too many emails, but these apps completely crumble under my inbox. I don't see any "shine" with these third-party clients. Mimestream, my favorite email client on macOS, "just works" because it uses the Gmail API. It seems like Fastmail made JMAP, but this doesn't seem widely supported.
Are there mail clients that actually support things like priority inbox and categorization that don't simply crumble for large inboxes?
> Are there mail clients that actually support things like priority inbox and categorization that don't simply crumble for large inboxes?
Of the exemplars listed, nmh is by far the most flexible and capable of handling large inboxes. The reason why is that it is a set of command-line executables which can be scripted with whatever language you prefer. So prioritization and/or categorization is a matter of how one wants each to be defined.
I used IMAP via fetchmail[0] with nmh to allow multiple MUAs (on different machines and/or OSs) access/management to the same email accounts with great success. IIRC, for nmh I used lynx to render HTML messages and xview to display image attachments. Other attachments were processed separately but had similar workflows.
Thunderbird does not seem to have auto-categorization from what I see, just filtering. Neither does KMail. Unless you’re referring to some addons? For apple mail you have to add it on each client. And a lot of comments are about how to disable it because it categorizes wrong.
Frankly I've tried quite a few clients and haven't found one I can settle for. I used Mailspring for a while because it was close to being a gmail experience, but that went some kind of bad way I don't remember and I don't think is developed anymore.
I want a client that is simple but flexible by default, extensible, themeable would be nice, and for the love of god has key shortcuts for everything THAT CAN BE CHANGED. LOOKING AT YOU, THUNDERBIRD.
Thunderbird is almost usable for me, but the UI is just absolutely abysmal. The kicker is not being able to change key shortcuts, making Thunderbird unusable for me.
Interesting to see people have such strong faith in Google's ability to filter. My experience is email from addresses marked safe ends up in the spam category. Wish you luck.
Ironically my experience with Fastmail was that every email ended up in spam. This included emails from myself, others from my own gmail, and even replies from people I'd emailed first. It was literally sending 100% of emails to spam. The spam filter setting was set to the most basic level, nothing aggressive, so I was forced to disable spam filtering completely. Luckily it was a new email so spam hasn't been an issue but that has slowly been changing.
I still love fastmail though. Top choice. But they do have quirks to work out even this many years in.
> every email ended up in spam. This included emails from myself, others from my own gmail, and even replies from people I'd emailed first.
It should go without saying, but that's definitely not the common (or expected!) experience. Our support team would be very happy to look into it for you: https://www.fastmail.com/support/
Normally when people see this kind of behaviour, it's because of one of the following:
* They've connected an IMAP client that has its own spam filter turned on, and it's actually this moving all the messages to Spam, not Fastmail's spam filter.
* They've accidentally mis-trained their personal filter by reporting email they want as spam.
Having said that, of course we can have issues on our end too — that's why we have a real human support team with the power to escalate to the relevant engineers.
I want to second this. Love Fastmail but I'm seeing the same mails that I constantly mark as "not spam" go into spam again and again. Their spam filter needs a lot of work. Otherwise I got a solid workflow (inspired by Hey) set ujp that I haven't modified in years that works for me
> Does it automatically filter my email into tabs for primary, promotions, social, and updates? Cause that is the single most useful feature offered by Gmail that I have yet to find elsewhere.
Surprising. I turned that off cause I found that to be yet another google nonsense. It did not filtered well and I simply hit unsubsribe for stuff I dont want.
What's clever about the "promotions" tab being automatic is that it actually makes me want to read them on my own time. Before Gmail my old pattern was classify with read/delete/save. Commercial emails were usually deleted.
This is the one great feature about Gmail I think.
But I haven’t touched Gmail in years, been on fastmail for about 6 years now.
I’ve solved this by using the fastmail-mcp plugin and have a skill that organises all my mails for me and highlights high priority ones. Works great - I run it every few days, takes about 5-10 minutes.
I guess everyone is different? That's one thing I hate about Gmail. I use Fastmail and funnel emails to different folders. I treat spam as a fact of life.
I unsubscribe aggressively. I keep my inbox well maintained, but that's still not the feature I'm talking about.
My work sends me several shipping notifications a day, but they are not priorities. They are emails to be reviewed later in the day. I don't want push notifications for them. I don't want them in my primary inbox. Gmail (without me telling it to) puts them in the "updates" tab.
Same for the promotional emails that come in. They go in "promotions".
If I get a 2FA email or an update on a social website they are sorted in the "social" tab without my having to set anything up.
This is extraordinarily helpful for managing my email, and it is absent in every client I have tried.
Exactly. I do unsubscribe--perhaps not as aggressively as I should--but there's a ton of stuff I may want to be aware of that I don't want polluting my primary mailbox. Sometimes I even shift them to my primary tab but, in general, I'm happy with keeping my primary to stuff that I generally do mostly care about and have a few other categories I care about to varying degrees.
This has been my strategy. I've had location history turned off since they introduced the tabbed inbox because for some reason the only way to turn off the tabs was to never save my location history. Not sure how those features got co-mingled but...One inbox feels much nicer. I don't get a ton of email though.
I don't want to unsubscribe from everything that I might not be interested in at the moment but may want to skim now and then to various degrees. I find gmail is very effective for that sort of thing. I find gmail's tabs pretty useful.
fwiw, you can easily see the contents of these tabs from your inbox. Each tab shows a preview of their two most recent emails, so you can easily monitor the activity. I check them directly 1-2 times a day with a single click. Things rarely get overlooked.
It's a pretty elegant design, which is why I'm so frustrated that Gmail has been the only service where I have found comparable functionality. I'd like to move away from reliance on Google.
Setting up your own filtering rules seems like a relatively tiny time investment compared to the productivity gains if you have a busy mail account. Other features that Gmail lack are IMO more important than magic filtering, like a proper threaded view, or not being pestered by their AI bullshit.
If I configure my rules today and then tomorrow I sign up for a new site do I have to amend my rules to also filter the new site? Because that's too much manual management. It's not a lot for a single site, yes, but x10 new sites a month it is too much. It's death by 1,000 cuts.
I don't ever have to do it with Gmail, and that is a tremendous amount of time saved. It is a lifesaver.
And then my banking updates go into promotions. Along with notifications I set up on streaming sites, and newsletters, and patreon posts. It's not that simple.
Someone creating a more intuitive, graph-based UI for rules would be good, otherwise it’s easy to get lost in the overlapping mess, like you have to run the ‘bank email’ rule run before the ‘promotion’ rule, but after the ‘important’ rule.
Gmail’s auto-sorting is extremely simple to look at, but is out of the user’s control, it’s like a secretary handling your letters instead of a predictable system
You can create one thematic alias and give it as your email to 1000 sites that belong to that category, they all will send millions messages to that alias.
I'm fortunate to have an attentive property manager and a landlord who is interested in doing the preventative maintenance to keep the units from degrading.
I inherited a mold and moisture problem under the kitchen sink when I moved in, one that I neglected for a while. As soon as I told my landlord they sent a crew out to tear down the wall, fix the plumbing, and rebuild it in a more robust manner.
I don't even have a particularly nice apartment. My apartment just turned 100 years old, but it's maintained well enough. I've been here seven years now. I keep my house clean, don't leave food out, and still see the occasional cockroach in the kitchen. Probably once every 1-2 months. Fine.
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