I’ll start by plugging Harvard’s free courses catalog as well as Udemy
Edit: Gonna add 2 more I remembered-
Blender - I wish I had more time to learn it, but I did start the infamous “Donut Tutorial” once!
Watch Cartoons Online - Lots of good older stuff!
Libraries. Most even rent video games, power tools, audio/video hardware, baking utensils…SO MUCH STUFF. All free.
On a whim I googled my city’s library and “tools” and I found a non-profit society that specializes in lending of hand and power tools! This is incredible and I wouldn’t have known about it without this prompt: thank you!
My local library loans dongles! Now if I can just manage to check one out without snickering …
In terms of fully free, obligatory mention:
Your library may offer more than books alone, depending on how well supported they are. Borrow music, movies, sometimes even video games. For music and movies they may also offer these to borrow digitally as well via online services they coordinate with.The library of things is also something many public libraries have now. Not just media, but tools, power tools, cooking pans and equipment, pod casting equipment. Definitely worth a look.
In the U.S. they may even offer things like State Park passes.
My library offers art! Like, original art pieces (paintings and sculptures) by local artists which you can borrow for up to three months.
That’s such a great idea!
Our library does audio books, 3d printer, sound recording (like a small studio), and passes to provincial parks. Some can offer a lot!
Making sure to keep it legal, right?
Let’s stick with Project Gutenberg - Public domain ebooks and other media, spanning centuries. They’re incredibly important for keeping our literary past alive.
I might have more later.
There’s also LibriVox for audiobooks of public domain books read by volunteers. They vary in quality but some of my favourite audiobooks are from there.
some of my favourite audiobooks are from there.
Go on…
Public domain audiobooks, read by members of the community. It’s a beautiful thing - which is why AI scrapers seem currently determined to tear it down.
What @Endymion_Mallorn@kbin.melroy.org said seems to be correct, they apparently have some problems right now, I can’t reach the website. It worked yesterday, when I posted the link. I’ll try again later to link some I like, I hope they are able to resolve the problems soon.
Having looked at the forum, they seem to be under attack by a swarm of AI scrapers. If anyone can help them defend against the attack, please do so.
Oh, that sucks. This is why we can’t have nice things.
I got a cooking book from the 1800s there, sadly the pricing is a bit off, I don’t think that recipe is 19 pence anymore.
I mean, I’m down for illegal mentions too, but Lemmy might not be?
Not on your instance, no. The Canadians don’t care.
Free Office Suite which is excellent for personal use. If you are on mobile Collabora Office if you want an Android/iOS version
I’ve been using it for over a decade. Prior to that I used open office but it quickly became clear Openoffice couldn’t match the development of LibreOffice. There is no concrete reason to buy microsoft’s bloated ever changing garbage.
OnlyOffice is even better in several ways.
I love how chill and helpful everyone is here.
Not being a dick is free too.
Yeah, I found some cool stuff for audio/music production
Pi hole
Pretty useful… when one site fails the other usually work.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet:
With just a cheap computer you can have your own Netflix and Spotify.
How is it different than Plex?
Does it find the movies for me, or do I still need to figure out the Usenet or BitTorrent?
Jellyfin Is completely open source, fully self-hosted, and free. With Plex the software still has to phone home to a central server for authentication and some features are locked behind a paywall.
No streaming software is going to find movies for you (without paying for content they’ve licensed) because that would be a sure fire way to get the project taken down for copyright violation.
It’s a FOSS plex alternative… yes you will need to stock your own library Then install SonArr, RadArr, some other Arr 🏴☠️just learn Linux nub. Jk but not really
Since no one really answered you, there are generally two routes.
If you use newsgroups you can run sabnzbd, which is a service that downloads from newsgroups. I’ve been out of the loop for a while but there used to be something like CouchPotato for movies or SickBeard for TV (which migrated to SickChill, though you shouldn’t use that anymore as it installed a crypto miner last I heard). Lastly you sign up with a news indexer (look up Nzb.su or nzbgeek.info). CouchPotato could be linked to your imdb watch list.
Plug all of those together with API keys, and now movies on your imdb watch list just show up in your plex library as they become available.
Now if you use Torrents instead of newsgroups, there are similar things that all exist, I’m just less familiar with them.
Ah, interesting. I’m actually only (barely) familiar with torrents, insofar as I have downloaded qBitTorrent and enabled its embedded search. I search for thing, sort by most seeds, and choose first relevant one. Usually it all goes well. Plex on my Mac watches the downloads folder, and the TV has Plex installed.
It works, but at least from my limited view of its search results, the seas seem to be drying up. I feel like there are better, non-default searches I could be adding. There was some kind of Jacket plugin that refused to load so it’s just disabled.
Am a very inept pirate 🏴☠️
In most eu countries the law requires businesses that give out food to also allow you to order free tap water. If youre in a city and dont want to spend money on a bottle of water, walk into mcdonalds and ask for free tap water. A lot of european countries also have strict laws about tap water so for example in france unless otherwise indicated with a warning, tap water is always potable.
Here in the US, this seems so normal that it didnt even occur to me that this may not be true everywhere else. And not need to be enforced by law.
A lot of places in the US will charge you for the cup or say they only offer bottled water for sale.
Ive definitely never, ever run into that. But I’m sure it happens.
Edit: I guess ive seen places that charged some nominal fee for the cup but it’s so rare
And even if they do give out free tap water … they might not mean lead-free.
Not true everywhere, actually never heard of it here (Germany and Austria).
But if you walk into a place and ask for a paper cup of tap water, a lot of workers are willing to give it to you, regardless of the laws.
Vienna has tap water straight from the mountains btw and it tastes amazing. Recommended.
Porn
Closing your eyes, slowly taking a deep breath, and calmly, breathing in, and breathing out, while focusing on the sensations in your body, and how much more relaxed you’re feeling right now
i.e. meditation
thanks now i feel more relaxed on my toilet
LMMS - free and open source garage band. It’s a little weird on how you do a song, but it’s pretty great.
Tips: Look at Beats and Baselines Editor and Piano Roll Editor first to probably get you where you want to be.
And if you need some free virtual instruments, Plugins4Free and Vital.
Wow, this thread came to me with perfect timing. I love LMMS and I’ll try out this plugins on Monday, thanks.
I’m currently going through this thread and found 3 other sites that are amazing and solved some project issues I was having.
Oh, glad to help! Any other music tools you’re looking for? I’m not good with any of them, but I like testing them out. I’m still just learning and experimenting.
I get a little sad when I don’t see anything new for me on threads like this, but then I’m a bit grateful since that means I’ve already spent a long time enjoying all these things!
I’ve been playing with it since my last comment. I just installed 8 plugins. There are 3 that are so freaking good.
My only wish is there was a way to make a song like in Garage band, where you can overlap the instruments and loops more easily. I think it’s there, but I’m just not good enough at it yet. When I play with the piano, I get a really good sounding melody, but then it’s gone.
Like in this video?
I haven’t used LMMS in a long time, but he’s manually editing the piano roll (where the notes are stored) but I see a record button here where it should record what you play on the keyboard.
Sort of, I found that portion. Here is my workflow in Garage Band.
- Pick loop and sound speed (has a ticker before it starts), and place on timeline
- Add instruments and play with melodies from a keyboard plugged in and record them.
- Use the melody.
- Record some vocals
- Add more layers of sounds or loops
- Create file
This takes about 4 hours to make an opening song that I usually love.
In LMMS
- I can find some loops, but they seem to really point towards making your own, or maybe there are some loop vaults somewhere I could use?
- I found some amazing instruments on the plugins4free site, but recording them with a keyboard seems hard somehow.
- I have the studio (paid) version of Davinci Resolve, I guess I could just switch over there once I’ve made my loops?
The rest seems easy and I like the set up.
If you want to do any loop and sample work FOSS style, then I’d highly highly recommend Bespoke Synth, easily the best FOSS modular DAW out there
It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you’re over it then it’s a pleasure to use and easily the best open source DAW I’ve used so far (and I’ve tried alot)
Biggest thing it has over LMMS: VST3 support, so you can actually use modern synth plugins like Surge XT, or dynamic EQ plugins like ZL Equalizer, or lo-fi plugins like CHOW Tape and MAIM
Although, there is a FOSS workout to get VST3 working in LMMS using KV Element, which you can load as a VST2 that itself can run VST3’s.
I use to use that before Bespoke but it was very much a workaround, and I had this infuriating annoyance where KV Element would just send pitch-wheel signals to everything and detune my synths without me knowing, and I could not find any reason or fix, so I just stopped using LMMS in favor of Bespoke
Hope this helped!!!
Gotcha, now I have a better idea of what you’re trying to do.
Watching this video about looping in LMMS shows it can sorta be done, sometimes with some help from Audacity.
If you’re adding in more stuff like VST plugins and vocals, you may want to try out Waveform Free, which I checked is for iOS also, so you get a full modern DAW. It’s the same product as their paid full version, just like 2 updates behind.
For more premade loops, check out Looperman if you haven’t already.
It’s not free, but I think I under $20 for the program and all the upgrades, if looping and sampling is something you want to focus on, check out Koala Sampler. I downloaded it the other week and have been sampling vinyl recordings from YouTube, it has an AI stem extractor to separate the instrument tracks, and then chopping and looping that.
It has a built in simple synth now as well, and you can use a midi controller with it. Lots of videos are out there if you want to see how that works. You might be able to incorporate that into your setup.
Wow, I was wanting to get into composing for fun and i saw this great comment :D never knew Mr. Superbowl would help me with this :-)
I do have some other hobbies! 😁
If you’re looking for instruments, effects, etc, the YouTube channel elektronickmusick demos a few each day and many are free or free trials and they run the same midday track through all of them to give you an indeed what they sound like.
I don’t think they’re the best demos because it’s a generic track through all of them, not necessarily something that fits perfect with each unique instrument’s strengths, but it gives you some ideas of the sound before you search for it, download it, and find out it’s not for you.
If you want some nifty and weird sounds with fun back stories, David Hilowitz searches out obscure old instruments, fixes them, and samples them in his Decent Sampler plugin and rotates giving away different ones for free.
I’m still really bad at making my own music, but I like experimenting while I’m learning to do better.
I do have some other hobbies! 😁
I don’t believe you… I fully believe you spend most of your day looking at owl pictures!
Thanks for the recommendations :D I’m not dedicated to it at all, but i think it would be fun to try. Bookmarking your comments for later :)
As hard as it may be to imagine, I feel I’ve been getting a bit behind from where I’d like to be with owl stuff. With so many owl babies right now, it’s been hard to get some of the variety I’d like, and between being sick and depressed, it’s hard for me to focus on owls or music the way I’d like.
But between all those links I’ve shared, you should have years worth of experimentation ahead of you. I hope you find lots of good stuff.
:C I’m sorry to hear about your irl affairs. Unfortunately going through some stuff too, but i hope you’re doing okay. I’d rather you be healthy than have superbowl :) anyways, thank you for the links <3
I’m sure a good deal of it is just that like being lazy and complaining. 😁
I got some good posts added to the queue today and planted some more stuff in my container garden and made some bread, so now to clean dishes and laundry and try to focus on some piano.
I think I’ve been lost since the gf has gone to a very fluctuating schedule, as it really throws off my routines. It’s like if the sun came out at a different time every day. There’s still the same amount of time and opportunity to do stuff, but you’d feel off after a while doing stuff at what feels like the wrong time of day. I dunno. I’m weird. 😝
VLC Media Player
Even better, MPV Media Player. Vlc has bad color reproduction
I use mpv, but VLC has GUI config stuff that is a lot more approachable.
lichess.org is a fantastic online chess platform for players of all skill levels. it’s free and—what’s more–it’s ad-free (unlike the parasitic organisation that’s squatting on the chess.com domain).
it has one-on-one on-demand match-ups, tournaments, puzzles, user-published training courses, multiple chess variants, and so much more.
it’s one of only two online resources to which i deem donating regularly worthwhile (the other being wikipedia).
do check it out. chess is one really healthy mental habit to inculcate.
Lichess may be the best board game software for any board game ever. It’s that good.
There’s also lishogi, if you want to learn that game.
I find the dynamics of lichess.org vs chess.com very interesting.
They are similar in terms of features. Both have decent interfaces, puzzles, matchmaking, live viewing boards and broadcasts for tournaments, training programs, etc. But chess.com has ads, and features locked behind subscription paywalls where lichess.org does not. (Everything is free on lichess, except for the little logo next to a user’s name to say they have supported the site with donations.)
But on the other hand, chess.com seems to have a higher number pro players; and probably a larger number of players overall.
I think its very interesting to think about why that is the case. Why would more people choose the version that is more expensive, but does not have more features?
I’ve thought of a few reasons, but I think probably the biggest effect is that chess.com has more money to splash around (because it sells ads, and asks for user subscriptions), and it uses big chunk of this money to advertise itself. eg. by sponsoring players and streamers, offering larger prizes for its own tournaments; etc.
And although I definitely think lichess is better, since it is generously supplying a high-quality product without trying to self-enrich, I do sometimes think maybe what chess.com is doing is ok too: in the sense that it is not only self-enriching, but also supporting the sport itself a bit by paying money to players, events, and commentators. Lichess does this too - but less of it, because they have less money.
(Note that chess.com also does some really crappy stuff, such as censoring any mention of lichess in the chat of their twitch broadcasts. That definitely does not help support the sport.)
Why would more people choose the version that is more expensive, but does not have more features?
It’s chess.com. We are the tech-savvy Lemmy weirdos who dig around for alternatives. I’d put my money on people just literally not knowing or thinking to check for an alt.
I didn’t know lichess existed until I found an extension that opens my chess.com match review into lichess, since the review is free there.
