A couple of cases where A.I. doesn't suck

[dean.winter]

Hey, thought I'd share an interesting AI use with FSP. While I generally believe the production of art should be left to humans, AI does offer some interesting uses for manual organizational work. Here's a couple use cases.

I ran a session the other day for a jazz quartet. It was 7 songs, and involved 18 channels (2 upright bass, 2 guitar, 1 sax, 11 drums, and 2 rooms). Each song was 7-10 minutes long (cause, you know, jazz), and I did a new FSP session for each song. Normally, this would mean that when I mix I'd set a static mix for one song, and then copy that mix manually to each of the other songs. This works fine, but is tedious. So I thought I'd try an experiment - since Claude can read most of the files that FSP uses, I pointed it at the directory with the songs and said (paraphrasing) - "Can you apply all the mix settings from song A to songs B, C, D, and so on? Make a copy of each of the target songs so you don't overwrite the originals". And holy crap, it worked like a charm. Took about 30 seconds and copied all the mix settings (levels, pan, fx, etc) to each of the target songs. Probably saved me an hour or so of work.

Since then I've used it for a couple other purposes. One more that was very helpful - Claude can read I/O maps. In my studio I run by default at 48khz, but I sometimes have clients who want higher sample rates. Since I heavily use ADAT, MADI, and Dante, changing sample rates also changes the number and mapping of my available channels. In my case that means I drop from 128 channels of A/D and D/A to 64 when going from 48khz to 96khz. It also re-indexes the numbering, so (e.g.) channels 65/66 become 33/34 and so on. As you might expect this makes my 48khz FSP I/O maps completely useless. Normally re-mapping requires hours of setup, but Claude can read the files (including RME TotalMix workspaces) and just do it for you.

Just a couple of thoughts I thought I'd share with the folks here. I know that AI use is potentially controversial, and god knows I share the dislike in a whole bunch of cases, but for these kinds of organizational uses it really is a pretty significant time saver.

Dean

 

[Gerran]

I'm not that fluent with the feature, but isn't "Import Session Data" designed to do exactly these kind of tasks?

 

[dean.winter]

I'm not that fluent with the feature, but isn't "Import Session Data" designed to do exactly these kind of tasks?

Yes!
But also, only sort of

Import session data will allow you to, one by one, import track data from one session into another. BUT - it's manual, and it won't overwrite track data on to existing tracks (at least not that I'm aware of). So that workflow would be:
1 - set static mix on source song
2 - Open dest song 1
3 - Import session data from source song
4 - move existing wave forms onto new tracks created by the import
5 - delete old tracks
6 - repeat for the other 6 songs

The (IMHO) easier manual method is to:
1 - set static mix on source song
2 - Select all tracks and busses
3 - Copy track settings
4 - Open song 2
5 - Select all tracks and busses
6 - paste track settings
7 - repeat copy/paste for the master bus (cuz you can't do it with the tracks/busses)
8 - repeat for the other 6 songs

That works fine, but is time consuming and tedious. Claude can do all that with a single command for any number of dest songs.

Dean

 

[Gerran]

I guess I really need to stop turning away from AI... Somehow it feels daunting for me, although I do see it's uses (as you pointed out above). I'm not ready to get my toes wet, but maybe I'll loosen my shoe laces for now...

 

[Vocalpoint]

Claude can do all that with a single command for any number of dest songs.

Fair enough to see you used AI for some heavy lifting - but how exactly - is Claude residing right ON your DAW machine?

While I too am all for relegating some AI slopster as a nameless grunt worker - I have yet to make any decision about allowing it on my network.

VP

 

[tulamide]

The only problem I see is in the user. Aside from the usual issues, like not paying the sources it was trained on, many don't understand, that despite its name, no intelligence is involved. It is still a propability app - a sophisitcated one using neural networks to find statistical correlations, but still a propability based pattern matching model. That's why there's always this little sentence somewhere in the GUI ("AI can make errors", or similar). Any propability is below 100% - the word "coffee" often stands next to "hot", that's what its neural network figured out. But a VST called coffee is a lot less propable and will not be the answer. And what a hot coffee makes us feel, or how it tastes is something only intelligence could understand.

Always be careful when using AI as a tool. It can and will make errors.

 

[SwitchBack]

With AI even a woolly question produces an eloquent answer, which can easily be taken for the answer because computers are convincing that way. With an AI tool with access to everything on the internet it's very likely that every question will find at least one answer, from sources that just happened to use the phrasing you used in the question. Much better to have an (offline) 'Assistant' with access to good/approved information alone, giving you a "Come again?" if the question isn't finding an answer (or, with a sense of humor: "The answer is 42").

 

[dean.winter]

Fair enough to see you used AI for some heavy lifting - but how exactly - is Claude residing right ON your DAW machine?

While I too am all for relegating some AI slopster as a nameless grunt worker - I have yet to make any decision about allowing it on my network.

VP

Hey VP
I'm using Claude in what used to be called "Cowork" mode. So it's just an app that runs locally on my computer. You can permit it to access any folders you'd like on the local host. For my case I don't allow any access unless it asks me first, and then I grant one time access, but I'm a bit cautious about such things (my day job title is "Security Architect" and sometimes those practices bleed into my regular life a bit. You write enough corporate security policies and you end up starting to follow them without even thinking about it. It's dreadful ).

In any case, it's more-or-less an app like any other, and just like FSP can read, edit, and save files, Claude can do the same thing if you allow it.

Dean