netsvetaev

[netsvetaev]

Melodiya and its Plants in USSR

Although I am writing about music in the USSR, I am far from nostalgy and from loving that state. Most of the technically complex goods in the union were copied from the Europeans, Americans and Japanese. In rare cases it was licensed, like Zhiguli cars, but often it was simply disassembled and rebuilt on Soviet components, like Yamaha HP-1 headphones, which were called TDS-5 (I owned both, USSR is a cheap one).

In the case of records, and specifically Melodiya, it was much the same. But the deeper I dug, the more ridiculous the official story seemed.

What’s Wrong With Melodiya

If you look at wikipedia or other typical sources, you'll see the same thing everywhere: Melodiya was founded in 1964, the biggest company, a monopolist, wow! BTW, recently they released a book about their records and right in the announcement the unknown author again says that «"Melodiya" was the main and the only record label in the Soviet Union». They omits only a couple of details. First, how did the largest record production company emerge from nothing? Russian Wikipedia article cautiously specifies that it was “based on existing factories”. They built factories, I guess? No way. Further a little less carefully they write “nationalized”, but, of course, do not specify how exactly. In general, briefly about the factories that suddenly became “Melodiya”: - Aprelevsky (April), the biggest one: USSR took the factory from the German Moll after the revolution - Moscow plant: initially USSR took the machines from the French Pathe at the same time in 1910s - Leningrad plant: USSR took the machines from the Germans in '45 - Riga plant: USSR took the factory together with the whole Latvia in '40 - Tbilisi plant: USSR bought the machines from USA - Tallinn plant: USSR bought the machines from Germany. Then, at the time of the unification of plants in '64 and for some time after, there were a lot of small enterprises in the Union, producing their own records, which then simply closed down. Melodiya and that's it. By the way, Melodiya, which has been selling its archive of classics to the West for the last 20 years, was once again resold in 2020 for a fraction of its real value through a strange (as always in Russia) government tender. In addition to the book, the Melodiya website sells a T-shirt, a panama and a bag as a merchandise.

Original experimental records before vinyl

Was it something of its own in USSR, not copied and not taken away from someone? Before the WWII, yes. For example, amazing experimental factories that tried, obviously, to replace shellac with something (the invention of a suitable plastic/vinyl was yet to come). But there is very little information about them. All this disappeared; only rare surviving records made of something like rubber remain.

Experimental record from 1930s

The Aprelevsky factory now “produces socks and paper forms for the exams". Read the full article

[netsvetaev]

Started Writing a Book About Album Covers

Did you know there is no (or almost no?) “book about music album covers” format in Russia? I haven't come across any books about music design or by designers/photographers from the USSR or Russia. There are books about music, about music history, but not about russian design or designers. Moreover, designers are still rarely listed on the covers and aren't widely known. Not just only collectors know about them, but there is no information at all. Even the designer of the Melodiya logo is only listed as “alleged author”, not to mention the musical underground, which was much more curious than the official Soviet editions, but even worse documented and less often preserved. At the same time, I grew up on music designed by quite specific people and studios. As a person and as a designer (and amateur musician) I was always interested in who made them and how and why. And I easily found such books: for example, Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis shared tons of stories about the creation of their covers. With a huge amount of graphic material left behind. There is no such thing about Russian-language music, except for rare scraps of information from very old sources. After thinking about it for a while, in December I decided to write a book about different covers myself. I never planned to publish it in Russian, of course: there is no market, and there is a war, and people somehow don't care anyway. Gathering information, I was once again convinced that Russia has formed an extremely strange attitude to its past, even to its recent history. It is not customary to study culture, to preserve at least part of the cultural heritage, and many people don't even care about keeping the results of their own labor. There are no books, almost no interviews, many names and details of production, dates, names, context are unknown. There are fewer and fewer living participants in the events. Artists almost never kept the process of work, the sketches, the materials and techniques they used. Musicians easily threw away or forgot somewhere their recordings they had just finished. Journalists ask me why I need all this and who would even be interested in reading about it. Obviously, they don't need or care. That's a shame. Well, I just keep writing.

Read the full article

[netsvetaev]

InvokeAI prompt and library UI/UX concepts

As part of my work on InvokeAI in 2022-2023, I prepared a lot of ideas and mockups demonstrating how the interface should work.

Main concept:

- Tags instead of tokens. That means they would be more interactive, separate blocks, but we would keep compatibility with the text interface and ability to switch between them. - Keeping all the existing features and displaying them in the UI, including weights, blend, swap.Plan the ability to control them with a click rather than keyboard input. - Don't divide fields into positive and negative prompts, it's better to separate tags by colour or form. - Autocomplete tokens as you type. - Suggest tokens, depending on the context. Not sure exactly how to implement it yet. But at least we know what user has entered before, and could suggest frequently used tokens, for example. - Presets: saving and loading prompts. - Libraries: tokens and TI. Like on that screenshot, but without a separate field for them, because in my opinion it's part of the prompt. Search, display suggestions with pictures, add a few by click. Design sources https://www.dropbox.com/sh/hwetq9hcnftswk2/AACopwF3GBkCApUn3nS99iY4a?dl=0

Prompt UI ideas:

Different styles Make the positive tags rounded and the negative tags square.

Input Entering a word the usual way, a word or group of words turns into a tag after entering a comma or enter. Two clicks on the centre of the tag, on the word inside — edit.

When focus in the input field, a block appears at the right with a selection of concepts and a search. On a separate tab in the same block, token and string management — save, load, search, select. When you change the focus from the input field this block disappears. The context menu (right button click) contains tag types and operations with them like with any objects in any editors. Copy, paste, cut, delete, and so on. This is necessary for some cases and to duplicate features and make them more accessible.

When hovering over a tag, the tag block enlarges — so it's easier to hit it and we solve the problem of changing very short words and typos. At the same time, the text or token, the word inside the tag, remains in its place, it should not move. Only the size of the form around the tag changes. A great solution is the dock response in macos, it is magnetised to the cursor. Change token type (weight, blend, swap) By left-clicking on the tag, cyclically. This changes the tag visually, for example, I want to assign to each type of tag a different color, or rather a gradient, to distinguish them from other tags without additions. Change is also accessible through the context menu.

Change the weight By clicking on the right and left side of the tag. The side is highlighted and turns into a + or - button. When you change the weight, the tag has an indicator below — dots. I’m not sure there is a need for more than 3 (+++ or - - -). Also, if a user uses our text syntax, we can turn it into a tag of some type.

Swap tokens / objects Tag with two words, between which there is an icon like refresh. Each word is edited separately, mechanics as described above. You write one word, a tag is created, the focus goes to the part of the swap for the other word. Or write two words with unused character between them (like & or %). Swap with hover:

Blend Tag with two words, each of which has a weight indicator for blending. The mechanics are as described above. Selecting multiple tags Possible via shift or ctrl, then selecting a type via the context menu. For example, to change the weight of a group of tags or change them to negative tags.

Moving and merging tags: drag one tag on another and merge them to swap or blend. Drag to any part of the field and leave it there.

Option to automatically arrange the tags. This refers to grouping negative tags after positive ones. It would be convenient, but not necessary. Suggestions while typing Some tokens in the separate block below the cursor (can be disabled, optional).

Suggestions include tokens suggestions when the user doesn't know what to type in, but we know the context of the prompt. Also, if the user doesn't know how to start, has no ideas at all, we can set the “Random prompt” for example. Autocomplete tokens while typing Add the token’s part at the right side of a cursor, add it as a token with enter:

Concepts & tokens library

Tokens library consists of four types: - Single token — a keyword, tag - Style concept — several tokens for some style, which can be added to any prompt - Prompt — complete prompt to save it outside an image and to share - Embedding — TI trained

- There are local and remote (Hugging Face) embeddings. Local embeds can be marked as favourites (if HF remote embed is marked, it downloads to the local storage).

Prompts presets

“Save prompt” button is always there. If no token is selected, it saves a full prompt. If one token is selected, it saves the token. If multiple tokens are selected, it saves style.

Tokens organised into categories — folders or just virtual categories in some local file. Favourites — all frequently used tokens. Tokens are sorted A–Z. Main categories are: - Subject — landscape, portrait, still life, some objects, people, animals, etc. - Setting — location & context: cityscape, rural, interior, studio… - Style — art styles, such as surrealism, dada, installation, futurism and so - Artist — artists names - Medium — what and how the object is drawn or made of. Drawing, photo, ceramics, steel, oil painting, wood, etc. - Composition — arrangement of the elements, abstracts like symmetry, balance, emphasis (if they work at all). - Camera & Light — available camera models, films, focal lengths, lighting names and other photographic terms. - Emotion — happy, sad, horror, smart, beautiful…

Prompts

Prompts are organised in “folders” created by a user. “Previously used” prompts — those that the user has in the log file. Some of the prompts already have pictures (previously generated), maybe we can show them, too.

NOTE: All this work was done for InvokeAI project in 2023. Original document is here. You can use it for free and reach me if you want to develop something. Read the full article

[netsvetaev]

I trained a neural network on my drawings

Warning: this article is a bit outdated. Download the model here: https://huggingface.co/netsvetaev/netsvetaev-free. It’s great for seamless patterns, abstract drawings, and watercolor-styled images. How to use it and train a neural network on your own pictures?

How to use .ckpt model

You download the .ckpt file, put it in your models folder. Then it all depends on what fork you're using. In InvokeAI, which I use, the models are added by usual loading invoke.py and executing !import_model command in console.

How to train neural network on your images if you don't have nvidia 4090?

Google has a wonderful service called Colab: Google gives you free server for about an hour. That's enough to build a model from 15-30-50 images. First go here and get acquainted with colab (but don't touch anything): https://colab.research.google.com/github/ShivamShrirao/diffusers/blob/main/examples/dreambooth/DreamBooth_Stable_Diffusion.ipynb All that is required from you, except for clicking through each code window and uploading pictures, is a hugging face token.

Huggingface Token & Settings

Register at huggingface.co, and then create a token in the settings: https://huggingface.co/settings/tokens

Insert the token here:

Check the box to save the model to google drive and name a folder, if you want (it will be created automatically)

Next, specify how we will call your style or object

This is not so important, but you need to remember this token to invoke your object. Then upload the pictures:

Dataset

You need to use the size of 512x512 pixels, and it is better to prepare them in advance. It's up to you to decide what to cut, but I recommend to cut it so that the composition and significant objects were preserved. You can also make several separate zoomed in and cropped pictures.

Depending on the number of images, you can change the number of training steps. A reasonable number is 100 steps * number of pictures. For 8 images (at least 8 is enough, btw) — 800 steps is enough. Too many steps is also bad: the generation will become too contrast and you will get artifacts on images (overtrained model).

Next, simply start each block in the colab with the Play button in the top left corner and wait for the completion of each code. When you get to the section shown above and start it, you will see the learning process. It will take about 10 minutes to prepare + another 15-30 minutes, depending on the number of pictures and steps.

Test your ai model

After training you can test the model on test generation and convert it to .ckpt format:

Now you have the file on your Google disk: download it and add it to your favorite fork. Additionally you can delete unnecessary files and finish the process.

Other examples:

About me

My name is Artur Netsvetaev, I am a product manager, entrepreneur and UI/UX designer. I help with the development of the InvokeAI interface and have been using it myself since the beginning of this project. First published: https://habr.com/ru/articles/699002/ Read the full article

[netsvetaev]

Стихийно наимпровизировали 26 минут. Почти абстрактная смесь, напоминающая Жарре, Фриппа, Китаро, Flaming Lips времен Embryonic и, конечно же, PF.

26 minutes of seamless improvisation. Reminds of Flaming Lips, Pink Floyd, Fripp, Jarre, and Kitaro. Used tools: Strat, E-bow, AA Alkaline Battery, Korg Volca, free software synths. It's free for any kind of use. Please write me if you'll use this tracks or their parts in your works.

[netsvetaev]

https://soundcloud.com/netsvetaev/undeviginti-piceae-omorikae-16-12-17

[netsvetaev]

Много лет уверенно говорю, что у Сторма Торгерсона, оформлявшего обложки пластинок, очень много было образов, похожих на творчество Рене Магритта, а меня всегда слушают с некоторым удивлением, будто это не так очевидно, как мне кажется. А вот пятилетней давности доказательство этой связи: надпись "Ceci n'est pas une boite" (Это не коробка) на флойдовском боксе это, разумеется, прямая отсылка на магриттовское "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (Это не трубка). Могло ли быть иначе?

[netsvetaev]

«К столу внезапно подсел солдат в мохнатой шинели. — Я боец Особенных войск, — сказал он. — Давайте я расскажу вам про это.»

[netsvetaev]

Bar, Montenegro. Photo by Artur Netsvetaev.

[netsvetaev]

В зависимости от вашего бюджета выберите вариант Cold Ray с керамическим или стальным опорным шариком. Как известно, физические свойства стали позволяют ей успешно справляться с большинством резонансов, демонстрируя весьма впечатляющий результат. Керамика - это материал, который устраняет резонансы гораздо лучше, чем многие известные аналоги, и поэтому является бескомпромиссным выбором для антивибрационных и антирезонансных устройств. Одним из самых важных элементов конструкции Cold Ray является механическая стабильность. Обычно развязывающие приспособления становятся нестабильными при возрастании воздействующей на них массы. Cold Ray ведёт себя противоположным образом, демонстрируя большую стабильность при увеличении массы установленных на эти продукты компонентов. Вертикальная стабильность играет существенную роль в определении свойств данного устройства.

— http://www.cold-ray.ru/about/

[netsvetaev]

Доктор медленно поднялся и направился к стеклянному шкафу, заполненному пузырьками с лекарствами, — В вашем вопросе содержится внутреннее противоречие. Среду создают обитающие в ней люди. Следовательно, вы — один из тех, кто и создаёт эту ненормальную среду. Иначе выражаясь, если среда ненормальная — значит, вы тоже ненормальный. — Открыв коричневый пузырёк с ярлыком «Успокоительное», он высыпал в ладонь изрядную порцию белых пилюль и, не прекращая говорить, стал жадно набивать ими рот, — Поэтому если вы настаиваете на своей вменяемости, это, напротив, доказывает, что ваша среда на самом деле нормальна и только вы один ненормальны. Если вы считаете ненормальной среду, это, вне всякого сомнения, означает, что вы сходите с ума! Он схватил со стола пузырёк с чернилами и залпом всосал в себя сине-голубую жидкость до последней капли. Потом рухнул на стоявший рядом диван и уснул.

— Ясутака Цуцуи