Why Lemmy? I like the memes :3

Who Lemmy? Me! And all of you!

How Lemmy? On my mobile phone ☝️🤓

Where Lemmy? See “How Lemmy” for more details

Thought it was, got to see my first rodeo there this year :)

Hey! That’s the Toronto Royal Winter Fair, isn’t it??

I’m back! I got a few pairs of universal plugs, Loop Switch 2, Westone TRU Music and Westone TRU Travel, and I also have a pair of Etymotic ER20XS I’ve had for a long while. The Loop can attenuate at various levels, including 20 dB, 23 dB, and 26 dB. The TRU Music attenuate at 10 dB and the TRU Travel attenuate at 7 dB. The Etymotic attenuate at 13 dB.

The Loop Switch 2 are pretty versatile, but also kinda strange. Unlike the other plugs, they are single-flange. This makes getting a good seal not as easy, and even when they do seal, they might not stay sealed as well. Single-flange does make them much more comfortable than other offerings, they wear exactly like standard in-ear monitors. They’re also much more “fashionable” depending on what you subjectively consider to be fashionable. When you wear the Loop, people know you’re wearing them because they announce their presence with a unique shape. The three switchable modes are great! The 23 dB “Experience” mode seems ideal for concerts, with the most balanced quality compared to the 20 dB “Engage” mode and the 26 dB “Quiet” mode. The Engage mode would be adequate for everyday use if you’re getting around a city and wanted enough spatial awareness whilst also making things more comfortably quiet. The Quiet mode dampens the upper end by a lot, and sound quality is terrible when using them. Quiet mode would be ideal for sleep or focus.

The Westone TRU plugs are triple-flange tips with slightly different acoustic filters. They are both pretty great, and they both come with two sizes of silicone plugs in the box, but only one pair of acoustic filters (you can remove the filter and put it in the size of your choice). Not as comfortable as the Loops, but I’m also more confident in their seal and they are also much more discreet. You could wear these plugs without people knowing you have ear plugs in. The 7 dB Travel are great as “everyday” plugs, with enough attenuation that you can hear everything around you well enough, but attenuated enough to make louder sounds more comfortable and take the edge off. I would not wear these at concerts though, unless you’re going to a small concert that won’t be very loud. The Travel plugs would be fantastic for use in a busy office though. As for the 10 dB Music plugs, they sound very natural and would be pretty good for use at concerts, but that’s assuming the concert isn’t going to be playing too loud for too long.

The Etymotic ER20XS… I hate these things. These are the ear plugs that made me think all universal ear plugs must suck. Before I had my custom-moulded plugs I had these, and even though I had these I would always opt for foam plugs. I won’t even try to talk about the sound quality, I cannot wear them long enough to enjoy music because I’m too distracted by the pain in my ears to enjoy a concert.

Here’s what I’ve learned: universal ear plugs can actually be pretty comfy! The ER20XS are just horribly stiff and my ears hate them.

Depending on where you go to have it done, it likely can increase the price you pay to have them done. If you’re crafty enough with an at-home mould you could likely pull it off, but I know very little about those, do they come with an acoustic filter? Depending on how the DIY customs turn out, they might not sound as good as a universal fit. Edit: looking online, Decibullz DIY custom ear plugs look the most promising. Their “High Fidelity” model appears on Amazon and comes with three different acoustic filters, attenuating at 14, 17, and 19 dB from lowest to highest. If I was gonna try an at-home custom, these are the ones I would go for.

I was fortunate enough to have gotten my customs when I was part of a live production group in college where we had it in our budget to get executive board members custom-made ear plugs. We had an audiology center right on campus with a doctor that could take the mould and send it to the company that would make the plugs, at no extra cost to the student.

I’m actually looking into some universal plugs right now because I might have written off universal plugs entirely due to the Etymotic’s triple-flange shape being such deep insertion. This weekend I’m expecting a few pairs of universal fits to come in the mail, I’ll follow up with how they work out soon! :)

Live audio guy here, and I can say that custom-moulded plugs truly are tremendously above anything you can get in a universal fit. I got mine done for about $100 USD and they are super comfortable. If you are able to save up for it, I cannot recommend enough that you get custom ear plugs.

I also own a pair of Etymotic ER20XS universal fit ear plugs and they really irritate my ears. It hurts to wear them for a long period of time, whilst the custom plugs I can wear for hours at a time. Your mileage may vary, depending on the size and shape of your ear canal, but for me, universal fit ear plugs are just really painful. Whenever I forget my customs, I just go with foam ear plugs because I just can’t stand the Etymotics.

None of that is to mention how much more balanced the sound is with custom ear plugs, I find that universal ones just don’t sound as good.

I mean the boxes for font and paragraph style are all dark when they should be light. I think it’s got to do with the system theme, I just wish I could selectively choose the theme for each application so dark mode doesn’t mess things up like this.

Awesome, I’m glad to help spread the good word! Fooyin is still in its infancy it seems, but I’m hoping we’ll get some more features in it soon- I’m hoping for spectrogram/waveform visualization as well as EQ.

I was really hoping you’d say it was Foobar2000! You can run Foobar2000 using something like Wine/Bottles, but the UI gets all screwy. Recently, somebody released a Foobar-alike called Fooyin and I love it! Here’s how I styled my layout:

Fooyin definitely has some growing to do, but I think it’s the best you can do on Linux if the goal is the ability to play bit-pefect music with a similar setup to Foobar2000.

Out of curiosity, what was that perfectly customized music player?

I don’t know if you happen to have any other machines available to you, but I do recommend you consider giving it a go on a machine you don’t share with another person, or at least dual-booting on that machine. It could be pretty jarring to be dumped onto another operating system so quickly, especially as one works out how to use the programs they had been running just fine before.

I recently made the swap to Linux myself, and a dedicated laptop for that transition has made my life a lot easier. I still have my old laptop on Windows, heavens forbid I absolutely need it, but I do find some issues with compatibility. As another person has mentioned, Roblox does not offer native Linux support, which means you have to run a program that more or less tricks Roblox into thinking you’re playing on a smartphone. You can do the same for Bedrock Minecraft if you want to play cross-platform.

For a lot of things there are alternatives that tend to work even better in some ways. For others, there are workarounds. And for others yet, you just can’t use some applications you might have been using before.

Hey, I only recently dipped my toes into Linux about a month ago and I went with Fedora, more specifically the KDE spin of Fedora. My experience has been fantastic- I’m not even dual booting and this laptop has become my daily driver! My computer seems pretty similar in terms of specs, it’s a ThinkPad X1 Carbon from 2017 that’s also rocking an i7 and 16gb RAM. I see a ton of folks recommending Mint or Ubuntu or Pop! as “Linux for noobs” but I feel like you don’t necessarily need to start there. I didn’t and I’ve been having a really great time!