Barry Diller trusts Sam Altman. But ‘trust is irrelevant’ as AGI nears, he says.Barry Diller defended OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, while warning that AGI remains an unpredictable force needing guardrails.

As crypto cools, a16z crypto raises a $2.2B fundAs some of the biggest VCs in crypto start to consider funding AI startups, a16z crypto's new fund will stay the course.

US Senator says crypto market structure vote could happen by AugustKirsten Gillibrand said that the US Senate had to address lawmakers potentially getting “rich off of these industries because of their insider status“ before any vote on the CLARITY Act.

Direct FDM Printing with GranulesThe idea of FDM 3D printing using granules rather than filament is an appealing one: rather than having to wrangle spools of filament that need to adhere to strict dimensions and cannot be too flexible, you can instead just keep topping up a big hopper with fresh granules. This is what [HomoFaciens] has been tinkering with for a while now, with their Direct Granules Extruder V7.0 showing significant improvements.
There’s also an accompanying article, with details of previous granule extruder attempts detailed on the same site. Many of the improvements here focus on making sure the granules melt properly before they reach the end of the extruder, with the auger screw helping to push things along. While this seems straightforward, there are many details to get right, with the previous v6.2 version having issues like the hot plastic backing up into the cold section and clogging things up.
For the test bench a Prusa Mk4 FDM printer is used, with the standard extruder swapped for the experimental extruder. On the extruder the cold, top part is water cooled to ensure it stays cold, with each turn of the wood-screw-turned-auger providing the right extrusion speed. As can be seen with the print tests, the results look pretty good despite the extruder not having been tuned yet.
If you want to give it a shot yourself, the article page provides files for download.

Shed Valley Labs Chief LP-2Chief LP-2 is a free, 2-channel audio looper for Windows, built for live performance. It pairs a precise audio engine with a fast recording workflow - tap a tempo, record a loop, and it locks to the bar automatically. Core features: - 2 independent loop channels with per-channel gain, mute, and input mute - MIDI learn on all controls - Direct Host VST-instruments (VSTI) and record the output as audio - Metronome-locked recording: loops snap to bar boundaries automatically - Count-in and fixed-length recording modes - Overdub with configurable decay - 1 mute group for instant channel muting - 1 programmable macro button (trigger multiple channel actions in one keystroke or MIDI message) - Per-channel VST3 plugin insert - Per-channel routing: choose any hardware input/output, with mono output option - MIDI clock master and slave (beta) - Chromatic tuner - Song settings save/load - Song templates (save/apply a default rig setup). Coming soon: Upgrade to the Chief LP-6, featuring 6 channels, 4 mute groups, 5 macros, A/B/C sections, and a built-in lyrics/chords screen. Read More

How to make ambient music: Tools and techniques
Learn how to make ambient music that's immersive, expressive, and ever-evolving via our in-depth guide.

Sony in advanced talks to buy Blackstone’s Recognition Music for up to $4B, reports BloombergThe acquisition would be made through Sony's music rights-buying JV with Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC, the news outlet reported
Source

Ninajirachi still doesn’t have any “professional” music gearEver since Ninajirachi landed the cover of MusicTech, the Australian-born DJ and producer has been on a whirlwind run. She recently completed her debut tours of the UK and Europe, she closed out the intimate Sonora stage at Coachella 2026, and her debut album, I Love My Computer (2025), has earned millions of streams.
And yet, despite this rapid, vigorous ascension, the title of her album is quite literal when it comes to her production. To clarify, the artist, real name is Nina Wilson, still only uses her computer to produce.

READ MORE: Ableton Live 12.4 has arrived – here’s everything you need to know

“All of my muscle memory is here now with the trackpad,” she tells Mixmag in a recent interview. “I’ve never learned to use gear like synthesisers or MIDI machines, it was just always laptop music.” She goes on to refer to in-the-box production as her “first language”, and that so far it hasn’t been necessary for her to expand beyond it.
Her current DAW is Ableton Live, and before that, it was FL Studio, but she got her start on the entry-level laptop-friendly DAW: GarageBand.
On her episode of MusicTech’s My Forever Studio podcast, she went into detail on how she fumbled through those early days to her immense success:
“I would just loop the stock loops and record over the top through the MacBook microphone. A lot of the first recordings, I didn’t know how to turn the metronome off, so it would be just completely out of time with everything I was recording over the top. I still have a bunch of those old recordings.
“I eventually started using different software when I got into electronic music when I was in early high school, like maybe about 12 years old. And I realised I kind of needed something more powerful if I wanted to make sounds like the ones I was hearing in my favourite songs.”
While she continues to use software to make those sounds, she is also expanding her musical toolkit. Namely, she has started doing a lot of singing on her tracks.
“I can now use my voice like an instrument for songwriting and not feel embarrassed about it,” Wilson says. “I remember when I first started collaborating with people, I wouldn’t sing even if I had the ideas because I figured that I just couldn’t sing. But I manipulate my voice so much because of that insecurity – it’s something I want to get past.”
Wilson has confirmed she is working on new music, including a song with her hero, Porter Robinson. Those songs may not feature any fancy outboard gear, but they will represent her persisting growth as an artist.
The post Ninajirachi still doesn’t have any “professional” music gear appeared first on MusicTech.

Focusrite: Designing The ISA C8X Audio Interface Learn about the history of the Focusrite ISA preamp circuit, explain what makes it special, and lay bare the intensive development process behind the first ISA audio interface.

SCALER on remixing their music for stage, the Novation Peak, and 200 channels of basement re-ampingAd feature with Novation
Hailing proudly from Bristol, England, four-piece experimental band SCALER have spent the past decade fusing metal, techno and trip-hop, both onstage and in the studio. Their latest album, 2025’s Endlessly, is an intricate collage of metallic synths, thumping percussion and, crucially, rich vocal parts from five different local collaborators. The band’s shared and intimate studio space in the city is where these ideas begin and transform.
The quartet of lads in their 30s stress that the live show is where SCALER REALLY comes to life. “The concept behind the band was always to create the best live show that we possibly can,” says SCALER’s guitarist and self-confessed tech-head, Nick Berthoud. “We’re writing songs to facilitate the live show; the reason we’re writing music is to play it live in some capacity, basically.” Beyond laptops, they rely on several choice instruments and essentials — Novation’s Summit and Focusrite’s Clarett chief among them — to bring their vision to the stage.
A SCALER show is an organised chaos of an audiovisual experience. Having supported Squarepusher and performed with Daniel Avery in recent years, the band attract a distinct type of fan with their collision of acid basslines, crunching guitar riffs, and permutating drums.
We sit down with bandmates Berthoud and James Rushforth to learn more about their live-first approach to music production, the reverb-rich environment they used to re-amp the elements of Endlessly, and the gear that’s crucial to SCALER’s sound.

Endlessly is now eight months old. How is it evolving SCALER as a band, both in the live shows and in your approach to making new music?
Nick: “We took quite a long time to make Endlessly as a record. And from a songwriting standpoint, it’s quite different from our live shows; we placed a bigger focus on vocal features, and we just wanted to explore a different side to the band. We almost always remix the songs to play live.
“Some tracks from the record have been completely reworked, because what works within our live show versus what they are on the album are two different things, so we do have to work that out. I think that’s a process we quite enjoy, though, and it keeps things quite interesting [for fans]. If we just played all of the songs exactly as they are on the record, then…I don’t know, it’s just a bit naff.”
James: “Endlessly has been really difficult — the conversion into the live show. When we perform it, it definitely feels like we’re doing an album show. It’s much cleaner, which is fine, but we’re kind of in the process of enacting a response to that chaos.”

Why do you place such a strong focus on the live show?
James: “In the age of playback, I think there should be a bit more responsibility to try harder with the arrangement. People just don’t do that enough, and it’s very lazy.”
Nick: “Our back catalogue has never streamed well. It’s just not that type of music. But it’s not a worry for us that we’re not getting millions of streams because the reason we make a record is to come and get people down to the live show to experience the full thing.
“We don’t want to just play exactly what we’ve heard for a year whilst making an album. It’s much more interesting for us to take elements from that and make it exciting again. We’ll even sometimes rewrite a song for specific shows. Like, if we’re playing a techno event or playing a more metal event, we’ll think, ‘Okay, how can we like dance-ify that song even more for this show?’, and it keeps evolving.”
Image: Press
SCALER tracks are complex and layered, almost like tapestries. How do you actually start a song together?
James: “Conventionally, a song will start from a simple but strong idea, which then gets pitched to the group. However, when working across an album, we end up being responsive as we’re writing. It’s a lot easier, with this band, to conceptualise the track first [and] be like, ‘What actually are the limitations of it? What are the things that it’s borrowing from?’ Being able to put the building blocks of an album [together] is much more satisfying to me, because you have this longer form to play with, so you can be reactive as you’re making it.”
“The much bigger picture, about us making music…Like, when we were making a lot of these songs [on Endlessly], I was saying, ‘Let’s just make something that when we get older, we’re going to look back and be happy with those decisions.’”
You’re speaking to us from the studio right now — can you tell us more about the gear there that inspires you?
Nick: “We’ve got most things piped into a Focusrite Clarett audio interface, so everything is good to go. There’s a wall of synths that changes — because we all have some synths at home as well, and we bring them back and forth. That’s all parked into a Soundcraft mixer that then goes into the Clarett.
“We also use the Novation SL MIDI controller, which controls the wall of synths. It’s really nice how you can set up each individual synth and have the MIDI CCs control [each synth].
“But the biggest thing for us was the Novation Peak synth. [It] was used at various points on the record — probably not as much as the Arturia MiniFreak or the Roland JP-8080 — but for live, we’ve taken a lot of the synth lines onto the Peak. So Alex [Hill], who performs the electronic instruments, can control it live. It’s this idea of consistency… Being able to take a lot of those sounds and put them all into the Peak for live means that we have that consistency across the live show, where a single, versatile synth can play all the sounds that — some of which it created, some of which it doesn’t create in the studio. That’s been a game-changer for the live show.”
Image: Press
What do you think it is about the Peak that makes it such a valuable centrepiece for you?
James: “It’s got analogue oscillators with digital control. That’s the whole setup, really. And then, within that, the effects sound great; multiple different filter modes. You’ve got these Animate buttons that you can assign stuff to, which seems kind of gimmicky, but you can actually use them really well. It’s also got a wavetable thing going on as well, so you’re kind of somewhere in between analogue and wavetables. So you can have a nice low end and then a really bright high end.”
Nick: “For a professional or semi-professional, it’s one of, if not the best synth you could use, because it’s built like a tank and it can just kind of do everything you would want it to do.”
Beyond synths and straight-up gear, you also used some interesting recording techniques for Endlessly, right?
James: “Yeah, the whole record was basically an exercise in feedback and resonances. Conceptually, that’s across the album, in the loops and you can kind of see it in the artwork. But at the end of the album process, we went to a manor house, and we took the stems from the record and re-amped them in the basement of this empty manor. So across the whole record, there are lines and lines of re-amps mixed in with absolutely everything: different mic positions, two Fender Twins and a bass amp, and then a shit amp in the other room, multiple mic positions on the stairs…There’s like, 200 channels on one of the songs [laughs].”
“I basically made this spreadsheet, going through section by section — ‘We need this one, we need this one…’ Then, yeah, we just spent three days in this cold basement and spent two and a half grand to do it.”
“You go back and listen to Cold Storage, in the middle eight it goes right down into this bleepy arp, and then you can hear you’re fully in the underground basement…It’s crazy. But once you do that stuff, you never look back.”
Image: Press
There are a few collaborators on the album, too, who are all local to Bristol. As a quartet, what’s the collaboration process like for you, and how did you end up working with these artists — Art School Girlfriend, Akiko Haruna, Tyla X An…
James: “Well, when we were making this album, we were unsigned, so we funded the creation of the album ourselves — it’s not like we were going in with a budget. I was basically going cap in hand to some people I didn’t even know, and cold-calling people. So my olive branch was always, ‘We’ve made you a track. We want you to do this. Here it is.’”
“This project specifically was about collaboration, and to also be a real illustration of the landscape and the people that we’re surrounded by. We want it to be an authentic representation of a moment in time in Bristol, really. We love to do it. We’re always going to be doing it. It’s always gonna be part of what we do.”
With Endlessly now out there, what’s your focus from here on out?
Nick: “We’ve got some festivals over the summer — we’re going to Sonar in Barcelona for the first time. But we’re also focusing on writing some new music at the moment as well, which should keep things rolling.”
James: “Also, just within our lives, we’re trying to make the band financially stable, and make sure we’re consistently putting out stuff in a way that is comfortable and actually enjoyable. We want to make sure that, A) we can sustain all our fixed costs in a reasonable way, and B) consistently put out music that we all enjoy and not kill ourselves doing it. That’s crucial, because Endlessly killed us — not in a bad way, but that’s what it takes to make a record like that.”
The post SCALER on remixing their music for stage, the Novation Peak, and 200 channels of basement re-amping appeared first on MusicTech.

Analog Obsession releases MuChild, a FREE Fairchild 660 emulation plugin
uchDeveloper Analog Obsession has released MuChild, a free Fairchild 660 emulation for macOS and Windows. It’s a good day for Analog Obsession fans; we’ve already had LAEA and RazorClip from the developer this year, and here we are getting ready to discuss another new release. This latest release is MuChild, Analog Obsession’s take on the [...]
View post: Analog Obsession releases MuChild, a FREE Fairchild 660 emulation plugin

RME TotalMix FX 2 now available TotalMix FX 2.0 delivers some major updates to the popular mixing and routing tool, introducing a new graphics engine along with a scaleable user interface and a whole host of enhancements.

Pulsar Audio Smasher is FREE for a limited time again
Pulsar Audio is giving away Smasher, its €49 FET compressor plugin, as a free perpetual license. If the name sounds familiar, it should. We’ve covered Smasher being free four times before, going back to 2020. If you’ve somehow missed it every single time, here’s another chance. And I’m having a hard time coming up with [...]
View post: Pulsar Audio Smasher is FREE for a limited time again

Mastering The Mix releases STEREOVAULT, a new stereo width plugin (LAUNCH OFFER)
Mastering The Mix has released STEREOVAULT, a stereo width plugin for macOS and Windows. The plugin addresses a common problem where stereo widening can make audio sound bigger immediately, but it often weakens the low end, blurs the center of the mix, and introduces phase issues that hurt translation outside the studio. STEREOVAULT fixes this [...]
View post: Mastering The Mix releases STEREOVAULT, a new stereo width plugin (LAUNCH OFFER)

New Global Booking Agency from ATC and Arrival Artists Now Reps 800 ArtistsThis week on the New Music Business podcast, Ari sits down with Ethan Berlin and Skully Kaplan of Roam Artists to break down the modern landscape of booking and live touring.