The best apps to turn any iPad into a powerful audio editor

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Logic Pro on an iPad


Today’s iPads are capable enough to be used as full Digital Audio Workstations, but there’s also a range of audio editing apps for every need — and budget. Here are your best choices.

One thing that iPads are unexpectedly poor at is recording podcasts — they can’t readily be used to record a host and remote guest separately. There are workarounds but none that match the audio quality of being able to record directly.

Which is curious, because once a recording has been done, the iPad is nothing short of spectacularly capable at editing. There is simply a slew of audio editing apps available in the App StoreAppleInsider stopped counting at 60 of them.

Although at least one,Audacity, is really only on the iPad as a scaled-up iPhone app for people who like the Mac versions.

Alternatively, though, some of the apps claiming to edit audio are really meant for other media purposes and happen to include audio editing. A couple of those are worth looking at if you only rarely need to edit audio and you do already know these apps well.

That’s really how you decide between the apps. There is no limit now on what you can do with an iPad and the right app, but you always have to start with what your needs are — and what your budget is.

Apps that include audio editing

Even when audio isn’t their primary focus, there are very many apps that have to include at least some features for editing spoken word or music. The best examples of this are iPad video editors, of which there are now many.

DaVinci Resolve is a video editor, but it can also be used for just audio

Apple’s own iMovie is one, and it’s free for all iPad users. Equally, Apple’s other video editing app, Final Cut Pro for iPad 2 includes very many audio features for $49/year (or $4.99/month).

In this same line there is also DaVinci Resolve, which is free but includes optional in-app purchases. If it’s solely audio editing you want it for, you’ll never need its paid extras.

How, while all of these include at least basic and often quite powerful audio editing features, they are never the right choice unless you need their other functions. If you already edit video, for instance, then being able to quickly use tools to also do some audio editing in an app you’re familiar with is tremendous.

If you don’t already know, say, iMovie, then simply getting to its audio editing features will be a chore.

When you don’t know apps like that, and when you need to do more than one or two quick audio pieces, then you need an audio editor. In AppleInsider‘s experience, there are three audio apps that are worth considering.

Best easy and free iPad audio editor — GarageBand

Apple’s GarageBand is designed first for recording voice and musical instruments, and then for adding music loops. But once you’ve done all or any of that, you have to be able to edit the audio.

Consequently, GarageBand comes with a multi-track audio editor. That means you can, say, have two podcast guests recorded separately and then line them up together.

GarageBand. Note the one-size-fits-all "Fade Out" control

GarageBand also lets you split tracks, so you can cut out sections if you need. There are also features such as fading in or out, although overall, GarageBand tends to prefer ease of use over fine control.

So when you need more, or GarageBand’s settings don’t happen to suit what you want to do, it’s time to buy or subscribe to an audio app.

Best one-off purchase iPad audio editor — Ferrite

Ferrite is an example of where a list of features doesn’t convey all of what’s good about it. For instance, it has multi-track editing, but so does GarageBand.

Yet in Ferrite’s case, manipulating those multiple tracks just feels easier. And there are specific features such as the ability to tell it to automatically dip one track as another is playing.

Multiple audio tracks being edited in Ferrite for iPad

Ferrite is also an example of an app whose free version is excellent enough that you upgrade at least in part just to reward the developer. Nonetheless, if you do upgrade to the Pro version for $30, you do get extra features.

Such as the ability to play back at twice normal speed as you edit. Or the ability to tell Ferrite to strip out accidental silences, for instance when you’ve misaligned two vocal tracks and inadvertently left gaps.

The Ferrite Recording Studio requires iPadOS 16.4 or later.

Best subscription iPad audio editor — Logic Pro

As shown off by Apple at its "Let Loose" event as a highlight of the iPad’s capabilities, Logic Pro is surely the single most powerful and comprehensive audio editor available for the iPad. On the Mac, it has competition from Pro Tools and to a lesser extent Adobe Audition, but neither are available on the iPad.

It’s a true Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and as such is right for musicians, producers, and audio engineers. Logic Pro is really extreme overkill if you’re doing much less than making albums.

Yet even if all you want is to record a podcast with two hosts, having a full-on DAW at your fingertips is superb. It does come with the cost of a fairly steep learning curve, though, simply because it does so much.

It’s also arguably expensive, or at least it is not a casual purchase. Following a month-long free trial, Logic Pro for iPad costs $49/year, or $4.99/month.

Logic Pro for iPad 2 requires iPadOS 17.4. Apple has not yet specified any minimum hardware requirements for the forthcoming new version, but Logic Pro for iPad 1 needed an iPad with an A12 Bionic chip or later.

It also takes up quite a significant amount of storage space. The app itself is 1GB — compared to Ferrite’s 25MB — but then there are optional extras that can swell that to 15GB.

Editing an audio track in Logic Pro for iPad

The AppleInsider podcast used to be edited on Ferrite, but it’s now done on Logic Pro — albeit for the Mac. The Mac edition is a one-off $199 fee and it does not come as part of the iPad version’s subscription.

That’s the same as with the other app that Apple highlighted at its iPad event, Final Cut Pro. But unlike Apple’s video editor, Logic Pro has the tremendous benefit that projects can be moved between iPad, Mac, and back again, as you need.

Choosing the right audio editor for you

The one you want is Logic Pro for iPad — if you’re going to use it enough to warrant the subscription cost. And if you’re going to be using it for either complex enough projects, or just so many of them that it’s worth the time it takes to learn Logic Pro.

Then at the other end of the scale there is GarageBand, which you’ve already got. The fact that it’s designed for musicians means it has a lot of recording and loop features that you might not need, though, and its controls tend to be more basic.

So the sweet spot across all of the audio editor apps that AppleInsider has used, is the Ferrite Recording Studio. This, too, takes some time to learn but not as much as Logic Pro.

There may be situations where it becomes an issue that there isn’t a Mac version of Ferrite. But overall, it just means that the developer is truly focused on making it the best it can be for iPad users.

Whichever app you use, though, it’s got to be said that editing audio on an iPad is a pleasure. It’s much more of a pleasure to edit it than it is to record on, but pinching in and out of a track’s timeline, it feels like you’re touching your music and vocals.

AppleInsider News

Star Wars: Vintage Noir Edition

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Star Wars: Vintage Noir Edition

Link

George Lucas got his inspiration for Star Wars from a variety of sources, among them, vintage serials like Flash Gordon. Abandoned Films used generative AI to imagine what a Star Wars movie might have looked like had it been created 40 years earlier. The ship design and voiceover are spot-on, but the creepy AI-generated characters are nightmare fuel.

The Awesomer

Configuring and Utilizing Multiple Databases in Laravel

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Configuring and Utilizing Multiple Databases in Laravel

In Laravel, managing multiple databases is a common requirement for complex applications where data is distributed across different databases. Whether you need to interact with multiple databases for sharding, legacy systems, or simply for better organization, Laravel provides a convenient way to handle multiple database connections out of the box. n this guide, we’ll explore how to configure and utilize multiple database connections in Laravel, along with practical examples to demonstrate various scenarios.

Before diving into the usage, let’s set up multiple database connections in Laravel. Laravel’s database configuration is stored in the config/database.php file. Inside this file, you’ll find an array of database connections. To add a new connection, simply define a new array with the connection details.

'connections' => [
    'mysql' => [
        'driver' => 'mysql',
        'host' => env('DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1'),
        'port' => env('DB_PORT', '3306'),
        'database' => env('DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
        'username' => env('DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
        'password' => env('DB_PASSWORD', ''),
        'charset' => 'utf8mb4',
        'collation' => 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci',
        'prefix' => '',
        'strict' => true,
        'engine' => null,
    ],

    'second_db' => [
        'driver' => 'mysql',
        'host' => env('SECOND_DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1'),
        'port' => env('SECOND_DB_PORT', '3306'),
        'database' => env('SECOND_DB_DATABASE', 'forge'),
        'username' => env('SECOND_DB_USERNAME', 'forge'),
        'password' => env('SECOND_DB_PASSWORD', ''),
        'charset' => 'utf8mb4',
        'collation' => 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci',
        'prefix' => '',
        'strict' => true,
        'engine' => null,
    ],
],

We’ve added a new database connection named second_db here. Ensure you’ve updated the environment variables in your .env file accordingly.

Once you’ve set up the database connections, you can utilize them throughout your application. Laravel’s Eloquent ORM provides a convenient way to interact with databases.

1. Model Setup

When defining Eloquent models that use a different database connection, specify the $connection property.

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class SecondModel extends Model
{
    protected $connection = 'second_db';
}

2. Querying Data

When querying data from a specific database connection, you can use the on method on the Eloquent query builder.

$users = App\Models\SecondModel::on('second_db')->get();

3. Raw SQL Queries

You can execute raw SQL queries on a specific connection using the DB::connection() method.

$users = DB::connection('second_db')->select('select * from table_name');

Conclusion

Managing multiple databases in Laravel provides flexibility and scalability to your applications. By following the steps outlined in this guide, you can seamlessly configure and utilize multiple database connections in your Laravel projects. Whether it’s for distributed data storage, legacy integrations, or other requirements, Laravel’s robust database management capabilities make handling multiple databases a breeze.

Laravel News Links

The Fifth Element: 1950s AI Edition

https://theawesomer.com/photos/2024/05/the_fifth_element_1950s_ai_t.jpgAbandoned Films is back with another trippy, AI-generated movie trailer. This time, they took the 1997 sci-fi classic The Fifth Element and applied a 1950&#8217;s big-screen aesthetic to Leeloo, Corbin Dallas, Vito Cornelius, Ruby Rhod, Zorg, and their retro-futuristic world. Will our heroes find the stones and save us before the Ultimate Evil swallows the [&#8230;]The Awesomer

You’re Practically Guaranteed to Get Alzheimer’s If You Have This Genetic Variant

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A team of scientists seems to have discovered a previously hidden genetic cause of Alzheimer’s. In a new study Monday, the researchers found strong evidence that people carrying two copies of a genetic variation already tied to Alzheimer’s risk are practically destined to develop the neurodegenerative disorder as they get older. As much as 2% of the general population may have the same mutation, suggesting that the genetic risk of Alzheimer’s is larger than currently assumed.

Cop-Proof Your Phones Right Now

Alzheimer’s currently affects around 7 million Americans. It’s a complex condition that can have many different risk factors behind it, including age, cardiovascular disease, and genetics. There are known rare mutations that almost always cause someone to develop Alzheimer’s at a much younger age than usual, while other mutations appear to raise the risk of the classic form of Alzheimer’s, which typically starts occurring after age 65. One of these latter mutations affects the apolipoprotein E gene, or APOE, and is known as APOE4.

About a quarter of the population carries at least one copy of APOE4, and the variant is commonly studied as an important aspect of Alzheimer’s risk by scientists. Often, these studies don’t distinguish between people having one or both copies of the gene, but some research has suggested that these dual carriers, also known as APOE4 homozygotes, have a much higher risk of Alzheimer’s than others.

A large team of researchers from Spain and the U.S. sought to settle the question. To do so, they analyzed brain donor data from the National Alzheimer’s Coordinating Center (NACC) as well as data from five other large-scale studies that tracked people’s biomarkers related to Alzheimer’s, including their APOE4 status. All told, the analysis included over 13,000 people.

In the NACC data, the researchers found that nearly everyone with two APOE4 genes showed medium to high levels of brain changes associated with Alzheimer’s at the time of their death. For comparison, the same was only true for 50% of those with APOE3, the most common APOE variant, and which isn’t thought to affect Alzheimer’s risk. In the biomarker data, the team similarly found that almost everyone with two APOE4 copies had abnormal levels of amyloid beta in their spinal fluid (a potential early sign of the disease) by age 65, while 75% had positive amyloid scans. By age 80, almost 90% of these carriers had all of the biomarkers associated with amyloid and tau (another protein key to Alzheimer’s) that the researchers were able to track.

Not everyone with these changes will show clinical symptoms of Alzheimer’s before they die. But the findings, published Monday in the journal Nature Medicine, provide a clear illustration of almost-complete penetrance, the authors say—the odds of a genetic mutation causing a specific trait. In this case, those with two APOE4 genes appear near certain to develop at least the early signs of Alzheimer’s by the time they reach their mid-60s. Given that level of certainty, it’s more accurate to classify this mutation as representing a distinct, “genetic form” of Alzheimer’s, the researchers argue. They also note that 2% of the population is thought to have two APOE4 copies, which would make this form of Alzheimer’s one of the most common diseases tied to a single gene.

The findings, assuming they’re validated by other researchers, could lead to important changes in how we study Alzheimer’s. For starters, it should lead to a broader definition of genetic Alzheimer’s, with the APOE4 form recognized as usually causing Alzheimer’s at an older age than other genetic causes of it. Given the much higher danger associated with two APOE4 copies, the researchers say, future studies should also not bunch them together with single copy carriers. And simply knowing about this heightened risk should hopefully help scientists better understand how Alzheimer’s can happen, which might one day lead to more effective treatments for it.

“In conclusion, our study provides compelling evidence to propose that APOE4 homozygotes [i.e. two APOE4 alleles, or copies] represent a distinct, genetically determined form of [Alzheimer’s disease], which has important implications for public health, genetic counseling of carriers and future research directions,” they wrote.

Gizmodo

Build Your SaaS In Days With SaaSykit

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Build Your SaaS In Days With SaaSykit

SaaSykit is a feature-rich Laravel SaaS boilerplate that helps you build and launch your SaaS application in days instead of months.

SaaSykit is a robust framework that includes everything needed to run a modern SaaS. It help your launch fast, iterate on your SaaS ideas quickly, save time and effort, and focus on implementing your core SaaS features instead of reinventing the wheel by building every component from scratch to run your SaaS.

SaaSykit features in a nutshell:

  • 💰 Payment provider integration (Stripe, Paddle & Lemon Squeezy)
  • 💻 Easy product, plan, discount and pricing management
  • 👩 Stunning admin panel and user dashboard (powered by FilamentPHP)
  • 🚪 Beautiful checkout process
  • 🗓️ Ready-to-use components (hero sections, features, testimonials, and more)
  • 🥑 Built-in user authentication and social login (Google, Facebook, X, and more)
  • 📈 SaaS metric tracking in a beautiful dashboard
  • 🎨 Customizable landing page styling for your branding
  • 💌 Email templates and transactional emails
  • 📝 Built-in Blog
  • 🚧 Integrated Roadmap
  • 🧒 User / role management
  • 🌍 Fully translatable and SEO-optimized
  • 🚀 One-line deployment
  • and much more

Building a SaaS has never been easier. Check out SaaSykit to know more.


The post Build Your SaaS In Days With SaaSykit appeared first on Laravel News.

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Laravel News

The Ultimate Laravel Admin Panels Overview in 2024

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The Ultimate Laravel Admin Panels Overview in 2024

Laravel is popular PHP framework, that allows rapid web app development. Many apps are built around CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete) on database entities. These operations typically involve a listing table, form for creating a record, data validation and other repetitive tasks and components. Admin panel packages have gained popularity in recent years, because they automate many of these repetitive tasks, saving programmers hours of work.

In this article, we will take a look at different approaches of admin panels and compare the most popular solutions, so you can choose the best admin panel for your project in 2024.

To generate or to configure — admin CRUD generators vs configurators

Admin panel packages can generally be classified into two groups: CRUD generators or CRUD configurators. Apart from their different approaches, they also differ in terms of the use case they are best suited for.

Generators, as their name implies, generate source files that can be directly manipulated. In the context of Laravel, this means that the package will generate routes, controllers, views, form requests, and more. This generated code is regular Laravel code that you would otherwise have to write manually. As a result, any developer familiar with Laravel (and potentially frontend technology like Vue.js) will be able to understand and customize the code without much effort.

Configurators offer a different approach to creating CRUD admin panels. Instead of directly generating files, they provide predefined concepts and an API for customizing the admin panel. This means, that you will write specific code (mostly PHP) to define resources, forms, tables and the tool will behind the scenes take care of routes, views and others. While this may be more challenging to get started, due to learning and understanding additional concepts and syntax, they tend to be faster in terms of simple customizations once you know what to do. However, this may not be true if your requirements exceed the capabilities of the tool.

Craftable PRO

Craftable PRO is the successor to the established Laravel CRUD generator, Craftable. It falls into the category of admin panel generators as it generates customizable Laravel source code and files. It utilizes the popular VILT stack (Vue, Inertia, Laravel, Tailwind) for development. Although it is a paid package, it offers many essential features out of the box, including user management, roles and permissions, media management, and translations.

The main and most powerful feature of Craftable PRO is probably the CRUD Generator. It is a command line tool that can generate a complete CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionality for your predefined application model with just one command. This tool can be used to add an admin panel to an existing database or to quickly start a newly created project. After running the command, you will have the following generated:

  • routes
  • controllers
  • form requests
  • Vue files for pages (since it uses Inertia)

Since these files are regular Laravel files, you can directly edit them without the need of learning any new concepts or syntax. This automation will save you hours of repeating work for scaffholding the CRUDs so you can focus on the more important advanced tasks.

Customizability may be the biggest strength of the Craftable PRO, but for some people, it may be the exact opposite. After running the generator, you will have all the files for the CRUD generated and ready for direct editing, which means that you cannot run the generator for the specific module again without loosing your changes. This can be “fixed“ by using GIT history, but it is not as convenient.

Backpack

Backpack from the point of generator/configurator approach would fall somewhere in between. It generates some of the source files like you would normally do in Laravel, but you still use some of the tool specific API to create CRUD for your resource. It uses a different approach than typical configuration-based admin panels like Filament or Nova, which share some of the common principles. Another difference from the other admin panels is the tech stack. Backpack uses Bootstrap and jQuery. While you may entirely omit working with Tailwind or Bootstrap in some admin panels, it may be an important point if you plan to extend the panel with custom functionality.

Backpack provides all the core features you need to create a CRUD admin panel, as well as the official and community addons. You have also ability to create your custom addon, but the process feels a little bit more complicated then in Filament. The UI feels a little bit older, but that is more of a subjective opinion.

While Backpack core is open-source and free, it has its PRO version which is paid, and it will provide you with additional tools, like new fields, columns, charts and many more.

Filament

Filament is an open-source “collection of beautiful full-stack components” which are mainly used to create admin panels, but can be also used outside of admin panels for crafting standalone forms, tables and more. Filament is build on top of TALL stack (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Laravel, Livewire). It provides a simple API for managing resources, creating flexible tables, forms via classes that acts as configuration.

Like all configuration based admin panels, it requires an initial understanding of concepts and learning the syntax, but it is pretty simple to get up and running in a short time. If you can fit the needs of your administration within the provided features of Filament, all you have to touch are resources files and you do not have to deal with Livewire at all. Anyway, Filament provides a great developer experience when it comes to extending and creating plugins, which may be the reason behind community creating dozens of them.

On the other hand of simplicity, we found a few caveats after working with Filament for a while. Filament can sometimes feel a little bit “slow” or “laggy”, mainly if you do not optimize your queries and actions. This is mainly caused by Livewire doing AJAX requests behind the scenes. Since the Livewire v3 introduced some optimalizations, it may not happen as much, but some may still find Filament a little bit slower than competitors. Another problem is heavy customization, which may require advanced Livewire and Alpine skills together with some creative workarounds.

Laravel Nova

Another super popular package for creating admin panels in Laravel is Nova, which is a premium package from creators of Laravel. Based on VILT stack (Vue, Inertia, Laravel, Tailwind), Nova is configuration based admin panel solution, which provides a wide variety of tools to manage resources, menus, search, filters and many more. This way, you don’t directly create routes and views, but rather write classes that follow Nova conventions and syntax.

After the initial learning curve (which is in my opinion a little more steep than in Filament), one can pretty easily create and customize a lot of things. Everything can be found in extensive documentation.

A general problem of admin panel configurators is customization that is behind the predefined features. With Nova, this seems to be the most problematic part as it is harder to extend functionality and create custom components than it is for the competitors. There are, however, a plenty of open source packages available from the community.

Laravel News Links

Missing Satellite Found After 25 Years of Being Lost in Space

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An experimental satellite that launched in 1974 disappeared from ground-based sensors in the 1990s, only to be found again this week. Some defunct satellites or debris can often go missing for years, presenting hazards within an increasingly crowded Earth orbit. But, how exactly do objects disappear in space?

Astronomers Could Soon Get Warnings When SpaceX Satellites Threaten Their View

The Infra-Red Calibration Balloon (S73-7) satellite was part of the United States Air Force’s Space Test Program. After launching on April 10, 1974, a large reconnaissance satellite, called KH-9 Hexagon, ejected the 26-inch-wide (66-centimeter-wide) satellite, boosting it to a 500 mile (800 kilometers) circular orbit.

The Air Force’s KH-9 Hexagon satellite, pictured above, deployed the tiny IRCB (S73-7) satellite in 1974.
Illustration: U.S. Air Force

The tiny satellite was supposed to inflate in orbit and serve as a calibration target for remote sensing equipment. Its deployment, however, failed, and it became another piece of space junk. When looking over the satellite’s archival data, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, found that it had gone missing once before, with radars tracking it in the 1970s before it disappeared, and then again in the 1990s before it disappeared once more.

The satellite was rediscovered earlier this week after being untracked for the past 25 years, according to tracking data from the Space Force’s 18th Space Defense Squadron. “The problem is that it possibly has a very low radar cross section,” McDowell told Gizmodo over the phone. “And maybe the thing that they’re tracking is a dispenser or a piece of the balloon that didn’t deploy right, so it’s not metal and doesn’t show up well on radar.”

Ground-based radar and optical sensors are keeping track of more than 20,000 objects in orbit, and that can get quite tricky. There is a global network of sensors that feeds information to an up-to-date catalogue of satellites, but the majority of objects don’t transmit their identities. Instead, the sensors depend on identifying the orbit of a moving object and matching it with the designated orbit of a satellite.

“It’s basically like air traffic control,” McDowell said. “All this stuff is whizzing around and if you’re going to try flying through that, you want to know where the hazards are.”

After a satellite is launched, engineers on the ground know roughly where it’s going to be and at what altitude it’s going to be drifting. If an object is found in that designated area, then they can rewind that orbit and see if it meets with the orbit of when the satellite was last seen.

“If you’ve got a recent orbital data set, and there’s not too many things that are similar orbit, it’s probably an easy match,” McDowell said. “But if it’s a very crowded bit of parameter space, and you haven’t seen it for a while, then it’s not so easy to match up.”

Tracking satellites in geostationary orbit—a circular orbit directly above the equator—can be challenging because there are no radars positioned to monitor objects precisely on the equator. “There’s actually a hole in the tracking,” McDowell said. “If you hug the equator, you can hide from the tracking.”

If a satellite also carries out an unexpected maneuver, then engineers are forced to hunt for it in Earth orbit. “If you don’t know exactly where the maneuver was, you may have trouble locating it,” McDowell said. “If I rewind the orbit of an object and fast forward for the missing object, do they meet and is the point where they meet where the maneuver happened?”

Most things that end up go missing in space are either defunct satellites or broken up fragments of debris. The Department of Defense’s global Space Surveillance Network is currently tracking more than 27,000 objects in orbit, the majority of which are spent rocket boosters, and operational and dead satellites.

As Earth orbit gets more crowded with a growing number of satellite constellations and rocket launches, it’s become more crucial to keep track of all these objects.

“If you’re missing one or two objects, that’s not a huge risk,” McDowell said. “But you want to do as good a job as you can.”

For more spaceflight in your life, follow us on X and bookmark Gizmodo’s dedicated Spaceflight page.

Gizmodo