Music, AI & the Metaverse ‘offer limitless possibilities’The potential for AI to disrupt music is the topic de jour, but add the Metaverse to the mix, and the possibilities become even more mind-boggling. Guest post by Eric. Continue reading
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Kitton 2 Is A FREE Drum Machine Plugin
Fanan Team releases Kitton 2, a freeware drum machine plugin. Drums are the backbone of so many popular genres. If you’re on the hunt for a lightweight drum machine, then Fanan’s Kitton 2 might fit the bill for you. Kitton 2 is a General MIDI compatible drum plugin that comes with 20 kits. The kits [...]
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AI can’t replace human writersIn the must-watch final season of “Succession,” Kendall Roy enters a conference room with his siblings. As the scene opens, he takes a seat and declares: “Who will be the successor? Me.”
Of course, that scene didn’t appear on HBO’s hit show, but it’s a good illustration of generative AI’s level of sophistication compared to the real thing. Yet as the Writers Guild of America goes on strike in pursuit of livable working conditions and better streaming residuals, the networks won’t budge on writers’ demands to regulate the use of AI in writers’ rooms.
“Our proposal is that we not be required to adapt something that’s output by AI, and that the output of an AI not be considered writers’ work,” comedy writer Adam Conover told TechCrunch. “That doesn’t entirely exclude that technology from the production process, but it does mean that our working conditions wouldn’t be undermined by AI.”
But the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) refused to engage with that proposal, instead offering a yearly meeting to discuss “advances in technology.”
“When we first put [the proposal] in, we thought we were covering our bases — you know, some of our members are worried about this, the area is moving quickly, we should get ahead of it,” Conover said. “We didn’t think it’d be a contentious issue because the fact of the matter is, the current state of the text-generation technology is completely incapable of writing any work that could be used in a production.”
The text-generating algorithms behind tools like ChatGPT are not built to entertain us. Instead, they analyze patterns in massive datasets to respond to requests by determining what is most likely the desired output. So, ChatGPT knows that “Succession” is about an aging media magnate’s children fighting for control of his company, but it is unlikely to come up with any dialogue more nuanced than, “Who will be the successor? Me.”
According to Ben Zhao, a University of Chicago professor and faculty lead of art anti-mimicry tool Glaze, AI advancements can be used as an excuse for corporations to devalue human labor.
“It’s to the advantage of the studios and bigger corporations to basically over-claim ChatGPT’s abilities, so they can, in negotiations at least, undermine and minimize the role of human creatives,” Zhao told TechCrunch. “I’m not sure how many people at these larger companies actually believe what they’re saying.”
Conover emphasized that some parts of a writer’s job are less obvious than literal scriptwriting but equally difficult to replicate with AI.
“It’s going and meeting with the set decoration department that says, ‘Hey, we can’t actually build this prop that you’re envisioning, could you do this instead?’ and then you talk to them and go back and rewrite,” he said. “This is a human enterprise that involves working with other people, and that simply cannot be done by an AI.”
Comedian Yedoye Travis sees how AI could be useful in a writers’ room.
“What we do in writers’ rooms is ultimately bouncing ideas around,” he told TechCrunch. “Even if it’s not good per se, an AI can throw together a script in however many minutes, compared to a week for human writers, and then it’s easier to edit than to write.”
But even if there may be some promise for how humans can leverage this technology, he worries that studios see it merely as a way to demand more from writers over a shorter period of time.
“It says to me that they’re only concerned with things being made,” Travis said. “They’re not concerned with people being paid for things being made.”
Writers are also advocating to regulate the use of AI in entertainment because it remains a legal grey area.
“It’s not clear that the work that it outputs is copyrightable, and a movie studio is not going to spend $50 to $100 million shooting a script that they don’t know that they own the copyright to,” Conover said. “So we figured this would be an easy give for [the AMPTP], but they completely stonewalled on it.”
As the Writers Guild of America strikes for the first time since its historic 100-day action in 2007, Conover said he thinks the debate over AI technology is a “red herring.” With generative AI in such a rudimentary stage, writers are more immediately concerned with dismal streaming residuals and understaffed writing teams. Yet studios’ pushback on the union’s AI-related requests only further reinforces the core issue: The people who power Hollywood aren’t being paid their fair share.
“I’m not worried about the technology,” Conover said. “I’m worried about the companies using technology, that is not in fact very good, to undermine our working conditions.”

Glaze protects art from prying AIs

Science fiction publishers are being flooded with AI-generated stories

AI can’t replace human writers by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Music Investing Goes Mainstream: Why opportunities for Artists and Investors are set to explodeFounder and CEO of Marination Music, Justin Longo, shines light on a new way to add stability to musician incomes as well as build a closer bond between artists and. Continue reading
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QUICK HITS: Duetti • Gibson • PIXELYNX • Blackbird StudioDuetti, the new music financing platform founded by ex-TIDAL and Apple Music execs Lior Tibon and Chris Nolte has launched with $32M in funding. The Fin-tech platform gives artists at. Continue reading
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Synchro Arts announce RePitch Elements The latest offering from Synchro Arts offers the same natural-sounding vocal tuning capabilities found in RePitch Standard, but with a reduced set of tools and a lower price point.

Wreak havoc on your favorite streamer’s game with Crowd ControlYou’re streaming the Sims to your loyal Twitch followers, when suddenly, a fire ignites in the middle of your virtual home. As you scramble to put out the fire before the Sim firefighters arrive, another flame appears out of nowhere. In the Twitch chat, your fans are giggling — they have caused quite the ruckus in your Sim neighborhood, but as a creator, you get the last laugh. You just got paid.
With support for more than 100 popular games, Crowd Control changes the way that streamers engage their fans, while also unlocking fun new ways to make money. Through reverse engineering these games, Crowd Control has created user-friendly apps and plug-ins that let fans pay to trigger an event on a creator’s livestream. So, as a fan, you can summon enemies in Minecraft, spawn a rare, shiny Pokémon in Pokémon Emerald, or make the creator’s avatar tiny in Resident Evil 4. You could use your micropayment to make a creator’s gameplay more difficult, or if you’re nice, you can give them a boost to help them out of a sticky situation.
Over 70,000 creators have already used Crowd Control, which started out as a Twitch-only app. Now, with the release of its 2.0 beta, the app is now available on YouTube, TikTok, Discord and Facebook Gaming.
“It’s been a long road of technical hurdles and experiments,” CEO Matthew “Jaku” Jakubowski told TechCrunch. “We have a really cool solution that just will work on just about any platform.”

Jaku founded Warp World, the parent to Crowd Control, after leaving his job as director of cybersecurity at Uptake. Warp World has developed other wide-reaching video game projects like Turnip.Exchange, which was all the rage when Animal Crossing: New Horizons was at its peak popularity, but Crowd Control is by far its largest technical undertaking. So far, Warp World has raised a round of seed funding.

An obvious risk for any startup that iterates on other platforms is getting rendered obsolete by those platforms themselves. Linktree, for example, was valued at $1.3 billion last year, but now, the company might be sweating: Instagram rolled out support for up to five links-in-bio. Even though Crowd Control doesn’t have any of its technology patented, Jaku doesn’t think other companies could catch up.
“For someone to build a similar sort of service at the speed that we have, and the library that we have… It will take some time,” he said. “I think we’re in a good spot where we’ve established ourselves in the field for over four years.”
If a game is not part of Crowd Control’s library, developers can now implement fan-controlled interactions in their games with Crowd Control’s developer plug-in, which is compatible with any game built on Unity, Unreal Engine, Game Maker Studio and other engines.
“With the developers building out this sort of stuff, it means reaching thousands of creators pretty much instantly,” Jaku said. “Increasing replayability is always huge for gamers or developers — they want that screen time.” He said that a typical Unity developer could probably make their game compatible with Crowd Control within a few weeks, but he’s also seen developers pull it off in a weekend.
As of now, Crowd Control keeps 20% of fans’ payments to creators, which is the standard split for Twitch plug-ins. But now, as a multi-platform app, Crowd Control seems to be getting around Twitch’s cut through a coin system. Other creator platforms like Fanhouse have taken similar steps to circumvent App Store fees and maximize creators’ profits.
“So, $100 is $100 of coins,” Jaku explained. “Instead of those coins only being available on one channel, that viewer will now have $100 worth of coins that they could spend on any channel.”
Crowd Control only has a team of ten, but most of them have been creators themselves at some point. Jaku himself started streaming Super Mario Maker on Twitch in 2015 and climbed the ranks to become a Twitch Partner. Then, he built the software that inspired Crowd Control to spice up his Borderlands 2 streams in 2018.
“We’re a passionate team,” Jaku said. “Everything we do is for the creators.”
Wreak havoc on your favorite streamer’s game with Crowd Control by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

APL (Applied Psychoacoustics Lab) APL VIRTUOSO Introducing VIRTUOSO A cutting-edge binaural technology powered by ASPEN, for virtualising stereo or immersive audio setups and listening rooms for headphone monitoring, with excellent... Read More

5 tips to get more engagement on social media for musiciansThe music might be great, but you need people to listen to it! Here are some sage tips on how you can get the word out (successfully) with social media.. Continue reading
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Zynaptiq Orange Vocoder IV ORANGE VOCODER IV: Vocoding, zynaptified. Combining the most comprehensive and best-sounding set of vocoding algorithms available today with laser-like pitch control effects, a powerful... Read More

Recent Classical Highlights for April 2023There are some interesting concertos among this month's new reviews. Conductor Marin Alsop is a champion of composer Kevin Puts, with a new recording featuring his latest concertos for marimba and for oboe, the latter featuring Katherine Needleman (pictured).

Soundly Place It Is A FREE Plugin That Emulates Different Speakers And Rooms
Soundly releases Place it, a freeware convolution plugin that simulates the audio characteristics of different playback devices and rooms. Creative effects are plentiful in the plugin space. There are shockingly few which try to emulate the particular characteristics of certain devices, like television, and how we might perceive them. Thankfully, the good folks at Soundly [...]
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6 Essentials for Playlist PitchingWith these six important steps, learn how to expand your fanbase and make your playlist pitch stand out. Randi Zimmerman of Symphonic Blog Playlist curators get tons of pitches from. Continue reading
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Neve launch USB/ADAT option for 1073OPX The latest expansion card for the 1073OPX adds ADAT connectivity along with extended USB interface functionality.