Examining the Vulnerability of Large Language Models to Data-PoisoningLarge language models (LLMs) are wholly dependent on the quality of the input data with which these models are trained. While suggestions that people eat rocks are funny to you and me, in the case of LLMs intended to help out medical professionals, any false claims or statements dripping out of such an LLM can have dire consequences, ranging from incorrect diagnoses to much worse. In a recent study published in Nature Medicine by [Daniel Alexander Alber] et al. the ease with which this data poisoning can occur is demonstrated.
According to their findings, only 0.001% of training tokens have to be replaced with medical misinformation to order to create models that are likely to produce medically erroneous statement. Most concerning is that such a corrupted model isn’t readily discovered using standard medical LLM benchmarks. There are filters for erroneous content, but these tend to be limited in scope due to the overhead. Post-training adjustments can be made, as can the addition of RAG, but none of this helps with the confident bull excrement due to corruption.
The mitigation approach that the researchers developed cross-references LLM output against biomedical knowledge graphs, to reduce the LLM mostly for generating natural language. In this approach LLM outputs are matched against the graphs and if LLM ‘facts’ cannot be verified, it’s marked as potential misinformation. In a test with 1,000 random passages detected issues with a claimed effectiveness of 91.9%.
Naturally, this does not guarantee that misinformation does not make it past these knowledge graphs, and largely leaves the original problem with LLMs in place, namely that their outputs can never be fully trusted. This study also makes it abundantly clear how easy it is to corrupt an LLM via the input training data, as well as underlining the broader problem that AI is making mistakes that we don’t expect.

Flux Audio reveal MiRA audio analysis suite Designed for mixing, mastering, system calibration and loudness metering, MiRA offers multi-channel immersive audio support among a suite of cutting-edge features.

Morphoice MQP-1AA modern clone of the famous Pultec EQP-1A vintage equalizer. Read More

XRL Records KSNXRL REVERBLooking for a powerful and high-quality reverb VST plugin for your music production? KSNXRL REVERB is here to take your sound to the next level! Key Features: Studio-Grade... Read More

Official Spotify Fan Engagement Guide 2025 publishedTurn casual listeners into loyal fans with Campaign Kit, the official Spotify fan engagement guide.. From playlist pitching to Discovery Mode, learn how these powerful tools can grow an audience, reactivate past listeners, and deepen the fan relationship.
The post Official Spotify Fan Engagement Guide 2025 published appeared first on Hypebot.

Chappell Roan demands artist living wage in Grammy speechChappel Roan took home the 2025 Grammy for Best New Artist and delivered a powerful call for record labels to protect the artists their business is built on. Read the full text and watch a video of Roan's speech.
The post Chappell Roan demands artist living wage in Grammy speech appeared first on Hypebot.

Nathaniel Harder enlists Berklee Online peers for film soundtrackNathaniel Harder turned his Berklee Online education into a career-launching opportunity, scoring the dark comedy "Thank You, Places!" with the help of his former classmates. Despite a tight budget and post-pandemic challenges, their collaboration created a cohesive 31-song soundtrack that set the stage for Harder’s next big projects.
The post Nathaniel Harder enlists Berklee Online peers for film soundtrack appeared first on Hypebot.

TikTok rival Triller secures $50m in equity fundingFunding round was secured through a private placement with institutional investors
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SM Entertainment majority shareholder Kakao is building a superfan app to take on HYBE’s Weverse (report)Unlike HYBE's Weverse, Kakao’s BERRIZ will incorporate content from Korean movies, dramas, and webtoons
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Compact Stage stands from K&M K&M's latest announcement sees them expand the Compact Stage series, a catalogue of space-saving speaker and lighting stands that cater to everything from gigging to boardroom presentations. 

“When I heard Antenna, I was finally convinced of synthesizer music,” says Former Kraftwerk drummer Wolfgang FlürFormer Kraftwerk drummer Wolfgang Flür has recalled his time with the band in a new interview with Uncut, explaining how, even as a member of one of the world’s most iconic electronic music acts, he took his time to come around to the sound of the synthesizer, at first.
Flür joined the German electronic music pioneers in 1973, and played with them for 15 years until 1987. He appeared on several albums, including 1974’s Autobahn and 1975’s Radio-Activity.

READ MORE: Grammy’s 2025: Dan Nigro is awarded Producer Of The Year after working on Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan albums

“I had already contributed to the electrification of the group with my self-made electro-pads board, so Radio-Activity was the second album in which I was able to participate as an electronic percussionist,” he says.
“When Ralf [Hütter] and Florian [Schneider] first invited me to the rehearsal rooms on Mintrop Street in the hot summer of 1973, I saw and heard a so-called synthesizer for the first time in my life. The sound was overwhelmingly rich for me and their experimental style was not convincing me at once.
“But when I heard Antenna on one occasion on Berger Allee, where some of us lived, I was finally convinced of synthesizer music. The piece had powerful strength and crunchy, rich sounds. It still touches me more today than Autobahn.”

Elsewhere, Flür cites the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles and King Crimson as pivotal in his musical development.
“Jimi Hendrix played a special role for me,” he says. “Not only did I really like his recordings, I also thought he was a beautiful person. The craziest thing comes now: he had a German girlfriend, Monika Danneman, and in the Düsseldorf townhouse where I had my apartment on the ground floor, an elderly lady named Danneman lived on the third floor. I found out it was Monika’s mother.
“One evening, I heard loud English-speaking people in the stairwell, ran to my door and peeped through the peephole. It was Jimi Hendrix himself, with Monika. He had a little luggage and his guitar case with him. I didn’t dare run out and ask him for an autograph!”
The post “When I heard Antenna, I was finally convinced of synthesizer music,” says Former Kraftwerk drummer Wolfgang Flür appeared first on MusicTech.

Steinberg Backbone Drum Designer is FREE With Any Purchase on Plugin Boutique
Plugin Boutique offers Steinberg’s Backbone drum designer (normally €149) for free with any purchase in February 2025.  Backbone is a 64-bit-only release for macOS (VST3, AU, AAX) and Windows (VST3, AAX).  The plugin is free with any paid purchase on Plugin Boutique, but free products don’t count for the giveaway. The promo ends on March [...]
View post: Steinberg Backbone Drum Designer is FREE With Any Purchase on Plugin Boutique

Native Instruments Kontakt 8: A leap forward or a stumble sideways?£269 / $299 / € 299
Upgrade price £89 / $99 / €99
native-instruments.com
As one of music production’s most ubiquitous and long-running pieces of software, few were expecting surprises from the eighth iteration of Native Instruments’ Kontakt, but that’s just what they got.
In a series of firsts, the acclaimed sample player has introduced new ways of handling MIDI, performing with samples, and synthesising sounds. Together with a modernised user interface, it would seem that a new vision for Kontakt is emerging. No longer is this just a creative facilitator, it’s now also an idea generator.

READ MORE: Why Komplete 15 is Native Instruments’ most creative sound library ever

The first major addition to Kontakt is Tools. Billed as a rapid-fire solution to writer’s block, Tools is a set of creative MIDI effects, currently with two offerings – Chords and Phrases. Chords will trigger stacked harmonies from just a single root note, while Phrases will do the same but for melodic passages.
In essence, these are the same MIDI transformation functions you might already use in your DAW but baked into Komplete. By itself this is not that exciting, but what sets Tools apart is just how fast and straightforward it makes the process – not to mention the massive library of preset MIDI patterns it draws from. Phrases arrives with 181 melody presets, while Chords gets 130 harmonic progressions. For users trying to kick off an idea, or overcome a creative roadblock, this is a significant store of musical material to build upon.

Tools is instrument-agnostic and so can be used on any sample instrument loaded in Kontakt. Annoyingly, however, when auditioning Tools presets you’ll hear Kontakt’s new Piano Uno instrument, and not the sound of the sample instrument you currently have loaded. This can lead to a frustrating back-and-forth, as patterns and chords you thought were on point may actually sound naff when played with your instrument of choice.
With the ability to randomise parts, to invert the voicing and change the starting position of melodic passages, to add nuanced humanisation functions to chords, and to drag all of this out as MIDI regions for further editing, there’s enough depth here to make Chords and Phrases genuinely useful in the right context. Can Tools go toe-to-toe with the generative MIDI magic of something like Plugin Boutique’s Scalar 2? No, but there’s still plenty to like.
Chords Tool. Image: MusicTech
Leap is the next newcomer to Kontakt. A performance-focused sampler, it turns the white notes on your keyboard into triggers that fire off one-shot samples and tempo-synced loops. There are 12 Leap-specific expansion packs that ship with the full version of Kontakt, but you can also bring in samples from any Maschine expansion packs you own, or drag in audio files from your computer.
Leap lends itself to improvisational writing, with a highly intuitive interface that largely stays out of your way if you just want to jam through the 16 available sample slots without too much thought. The black notes of the keyboard are given over to performance effects. It’s simple to slap on pitch and time shifts, stutter, granulation, and other sonic modifications without breaking your stride.
For those who do want to dive deeper, Leap offers a surprisingly extensive set of sample editing tools and this adds real scope for building up custom kits that pull samples from multiple sources. Similarly, most performance effects come with additional parameters for fine-tuning how they’re executed – the exceptions are the pitch and tempo effects, which are locked to an octave, and halftime or double time, respectively.
Leap UI. Image: MusicTech
Unfortunately, all performance effects are applied to the entire track, and there is no ability to assign performance effects to individual samples. Leap is also limited to a stereo output, so if you want to record out multiple stems for further processing and mixing, then no dice. These are shortcomings that feel minor at first but grow the longer you live with them. As a performance-focused sampling platform it’s fun and genuinely useful for starting ideas. But as a serious creative workhorse, Leap stumbles.
That said, there is a strong foundation here, and, much the same as Tools, it significantly extends Kontakt’s creative capabilities and has the potential to grow into a real powerhouse.
Speaking of power and potential, Kontakt has supercharged its existing wavetable synthesis engine to now include FM, and phase and ring modulation. The first instrument to take advantage of all this is Conflux, an abundantly capable hybrid that pairs sampling with synthesis and throws in a welcome range of modulation options and audio effects. In use, it excels at evolving textures, big swamping bass swells, and cinematic sound design.
Leap Sample Edit Page. Image: MusicTech
Alongside these flashy additions, there are a number of bread-and-butter improvements across the board – including a new user interface, and expanded preset search, and audition functions. For those who’ve built an established workflow around Kontakt, an interface refresh can spell major disruptions or major benefits. Luckily, Kontakt 8’s new lick of paint mostly falls into the latter category.
The most notable improvement is the new Side Panel, which gives an overview of the instrument rack, quick access for loading and unloading libraries or Tools, and, best of all, the ability to search through and demo presets from any instrument in your library. In Kontakt 7 this required flicking into Library View, so being able to manage all this without leaving the Performance View is a small yet vastly-appreciated advancement.
On the other hand, we seem to have lost the ability to hide an instrument’s user interface. If you stack up multiple libraries into a combined instrument, you’re forced to scroll through all the pretty Performance View pictures in order to find the one setting you want to tweak. This is a frustrating, and time-consuming oversight, and hopefully one that Native Instruments will address in future updates.
New Side Panel. Image: MusicTech
You can still switch things back to Classic View, so, with a bit of leg work, it’s possible to get the best of both worlds.
All in all, this is the most significant update to Kontakt in quite some time. For users of the free Kontakt Player, the addition of Tools and Leap – albeit with only one expansion library – is the very definition of added value. However, the full version, at £269 for new users, hits a price point that’s hard to recommend as a standalone purchase. The obvious and intended upsell is Komplete 15 Standard. It comes with Kontakt 8 bundled in (as do higher Komplete tiers), plus 95-plus excellent sample instruments for £538, or less if you catch it on sale.
There was a time when Kontakt felt completely indispensable for anyone making music with sample instruments. This is no longer the case. EastWest’s OPUS player offers an excellent workflow for orchestral scoring, UVI’s Falcon 3 has serious synthesis capabilities alongside a streamlined sampling workflow, while the spectral oscillator in Steinberg’s HALion 7 turns samples into easy fodder for sound designers.
Hiding Performance UI in Classic View. Image: MusicTech
Ultimately, the biggest drawcard for Kontakt 8 is the same as always: access to the richest ecosystem for samples on the market. The ease with which it hosts third-party instruments remains industry-leading and, when paired with Komplete, it becomes a truly formidable musical force.
Tools, Leap, and the new wavetable engine are certainly all intriguing steps forward, showing a desire and potential to move Kontakt beyond its traditional supporting role In their current form though, these new creative features are simply ‘nice to have’ rather than being ‘must-haves’.

Key features

Standalone player and VST3 / AU / AAX plugin
Tools and Leap included in both free and full version
New hybrid wavetable instrument, Conflux, included in full version
12 Leap expansion libraries included in full version
Factory Library includes an expansive set of band, orchestral, and electronic instruments
Refreshed interface
Support for third-party developers
Rich ecosystem when integrated with Komplete

The post Native Instruments Kontakt 8: A leap forward or a stumble sideways? appeared first on MusicTech.

PSPaudioware launch PSP Wobbler PSP Wobbler faithfully recreates the Frequency Translator, a handmade experimental device built by Keith Adkins which created the unique modulation effect heard on ‘Time’ from Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’.

Grammy’s 2025: Dan Nigro is awarded Producer Of The Year after working on Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan albumsAmerican producer Daniel Nigro has been crowned Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical at the 67th Grammy Awards. The Grammy 2025 winner notably worked on recent records by Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo, which are also nominated for other categories in the ceremony.
READ MORE: CARRTOONS: “My most successful records were made using a Scarlett interface before I could afford anything else”
In the Producer Of The Year category, Nigro beats fellow producers Alissia, Mustard, Dernst “D’Mile” Emile II and Ian Fitchuk. His work on Chappel Roan’s 2023 album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and on Rodrigo’s 2024 Guts and Guts (Spilled) likely put him ahead of other nominees. The former artist is up for six Grammys in 2025, and the latter is up for one Grammy (but took home a cool three Grammys in 2022).
This isn’t the first win Nigro has picked up at the Grammys — he won in the 2022 Best Pop Vocal Album category for his work as producer and engineer on Rodrigo’s album Sour. 
In his acceptance speech at the 2025 Grammys, Nigro said: “I’d like to thank my wife, Emily; my daughter, Saoirse; my manager, Ian; Island Records; Interscope; Chappell Roan; Olivia Rodrigo; Dana Meyerson; Sony; Thomas Scout; Katie Nick; [and] lastly, my friend Justin Raisen. We grew up together and we started hanging out when we were five years old. I got him into [the] guitar. He got me into [music] production. We’re both here tonight, I think, because of each other.”
Watch his acceptance speech below.

Other producers taking home Grammy awards this evening include French dance duo Justice for Best Dance/Electronic Recording; Elaine Martone for Producer Of The Year, Classical; Peter Gabriel for Best Immersive Audio Album; Hans Zimmer for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media thanks to his work on Dune: Part Two. 
More Grammy-winning producers and engineers will be announced as the ceremony unfolds.
 Read more music production news. 
The post Grammy’s 2025: Dan Nigro is awarded Producer Of The Year after working on Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan albums appeared first on MusicTech.