Democrats added certain consumer protection rules to CLARITY: Coinbase execCoinbase vice chair Ryan VanGrack said that Democratic lawmakers had added provisions on customer protection to a digital asset market structure bill under consideration in the US Senate.

Google is working on a new AI chip designed to make Gemini more efficientAlphabet, Google's parent company, is reportedly working on a new chip designed to make its Gemini models run much more efficiently.

What is a patchbay (and how does it work)?
Let's explore what a patchbay is, its most common configurations, and why you might want to consider incorporating one into your workflow.

Echolocation for DronesBats are remarkable creatures, able to fly at night or inside the confines of caves without light to guide their way. A team of researchers at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) has determined how to use low power ultrasonic sensors to guide drones in obscured environments.
While radar, lidar, and GPS are all great for navigation and sensing, they can run into issues when light is obscured or can take too much power to be practical for the limited battery life of a drone. The researchers found that a dual sonar array could be used to implement a much lower power sensing system for a drone that performs well in environments that would stymie a computer vision system.
A shield placed behind the array cuts down on the sound of the propellers that would otherwise drown out the signal, and further signal analysis via a neural net separates the echoes of objects in front of the drone from the background. The prototype could navigate in various simulated environments like forests, smoke, and snow. It looks like it even got a chance to go for a flight in the actual woods. All the code and hardware designs are Open Source, so have at it!
We’ve covered mosquito-inspired drone sensors before, and if you want to get into echolocation yourself, apparently humans can learn to do it too.

via Entertainment Engineering.

Sony Music sues Udio again, asserting over 30,000 recordings a judge barred the major from adding to its original caseThe complaint was filed on July 20 in New York
Source

Slum Village Strikes a Blue NoteAlongside D12, Slum Village is inarguably the most influential hip-hop collective to have emerged from the Motor City. Now a duo composed of original member T3 plus Young RJ, the legendary J Dilla (RIP) was once in the ranks, as were Baatin (RIP), Elzhi, and Illa J (Dilla's younger brother). Rappers have come and gone, but Slum Village is very much alive in 2026. They released the F.U.N. album two years ago, and they still regularly play out.

In the middle of a July week, Slum performed at the Blue Note jazz club in Hollywood. In fact, they performed two sets on the same evening, as is the norm for that venue. Honestly, it was all a bit weird. The new L.A. Blue Note location is stunning, but the dining-and-entertainment vibe is far more suited to jazz and lounge music than the sort of vibrant rap that Slum Village has become known for. Both T3 and RJ attempted, on numerous occasions, to bring the crowd to its feet during the first of those two sets, with mixed results. But then, to be fair, it's difficult to stand and dance when you're trying to get through an arugula and butternut squash salad.

Still, the show was a ton of fun, and Young RJ (appropriately sporting a Detroit Red Wings hockey shirt) once again proved that he's worthy of his spot.

"The original Slum Village seemed like they had split personalities,” he told this writer in 2003 for a Detroit Metro Times interview. "Dilla was cool, a nice guy, He helped you with whatever you needed, but he also had a temper. A lot of people didn’t get the chance to see that temper. But it was like, if he didn’t show you that temper, it was because he didn’t really care. Baatin was a funny guy, hilarious, and that was a person you definitely didn’t want to crack jokes on. He’d hurt your feelings. T3 is a good guy but a lot of people don’t know that T3 produces. He wrote all of them hooks. All the Slum Village records you heard were written or produced by T3."

As for the set, it was as good as we could have hoped. Plenty of tunes from the classic Fan-Tas-Tic, volumes 1 and 2 ("Conant Gardens," "Raise it Up," etc). A blast through J Dilla's "Fuck the Police" is a highlight, and we get guest appearances from old friends Ras Kass and Kurupt.

Good food and great music, surrounded by fun people. Even without space to really dance, a good time was had by all.

The post Slum Village Strikes a Blue Note first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

AOFN Audio GrizzlyGrizzly is a free stereo modulator modelled on the 1979 Gristleizer circuit, as used by Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle. An internal LFO drives a modelled JFET stage in two modes: VCA, which controls the amplitude of the signal, and VCF, which sweeps a lowpass filter across it. Features: VCA mode: tremolo, rhythmic gating, choppy pulse effects, ringmod-adjacent tones above 20 Hz. VCF mode: autowah, dub filter pulses, slow cutoff sweeps. LFO waveforms: triangle, square, saw up, saw down. Speed: 0.01 Hz – 30 Hz free, or host-synced 1/1 to 1/32 note divisions. Shape control: slope asymmetry (triangle) / duty cycle (square). Offset: controls what fraction of each LFO cycle drives the effect. Bias: sets the resting position of the modulation (attenuation floor in VCA, base filter brightness in VCF). Drive: −12 to +24 dB pre-gain modelling the original op-amp stage. Spread: inter-channel LFO phase offset for stereo widening and auto-pan. Level: output trim. No presets, no menus. Get Grizzly here Read More

Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter admits that scoring Tron: Legacy was at times “depressing” and “limiting”If you’re a Daft Punk fan, you’ll surely have thoughts on their 2010 Tron: Legacy score. The soundtrack has split fans for years, with some adoring it while others brand it a “total disappointment” from the Parisian electronic duo. However, it turns out Thomas Bangalter has picked his own side – and he seems frustrated by the score, branding the recording process “depressing” and “limiting”.
In a new episode of the A24 Podcast, Bangalter appears in conversation with Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes to discuss all things film. Of course, it wasn’t long til Tron: Legacy cropped up. As Bangalter, Daft Punk accepted the job to experiment with symphonic textures. “Initially, [director Joseph Kosinski] was like, ‘I want you guys to do a full electronic score…’” Bangalter recalls. “[But] I’d done music like that for 15 years… [so I said] ‘No, we’re going to Hollywood, we’re going [to sound like] Fantasia, like it’s Disney with a full orchestra!’”

READ MORE: Watch Fred again.. perform with Thomas Bangalter during final night of Alexandra Palace residency

The vision was to rope in a full symphonic orchestra, and then mix electronics in the mid-range. However, that’s when the cracks began to show. “The problem was that anything in the medium range would conflict with dialogue,” he says. “[So] we ended up only using… this pulsing bass.”
Eventually, the group realised they could work in synth elements in the low range. But Bangalter admits that the process “was so limiting”, noting: “I had all these ideas… But the whole thing about a film score music is [you have to] take a step back [for the acting] performance, and not be in the way.”

The experience did teach him about the “magic chemistry between strings and dialogue” in film scores, however. Surprisingly, Bangalter believes that there’s more human soul in non-electronic instruments than their electronic counterparts. “Part of Daft Punk was working with electronic instruments, and it takes so much effort to bring soul to the sound of those synthesisers…” he admits.
“What I love about symphonic instruments is that you can have an orchestra and you can say, ‘okay, everybody play unison G,’ and then everybody plays that note, and you’ve got goosebumps…” he notes. “It’s [not] like that with electronic instruments.”

Despite Tron: Legacy opening his eyes to the importance of symphonic instruments, Bangalter does seem to mourn what the soundtrack could have been. “It’s always very depressing… when you you have these all these ideas… and then you end up having to go back to a more traditional way of doing it,” he says.
Thankfully, Bangalter didn’t hold back on his new score for French ballet group, Mirage, with album Mirage – Ballet For 16 Dancers. Following his more symphonic work on his previous ballet score, Mythologies, he’s taking a dip back into his electronic side. The score was greatly inspired by Greek composer Iannis Xenakis who specialised in avant-garde, microtonal compositions.

The post Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter admits that scoring Tron: Legacy was at times “depressing” and “limiting” appeared first on MusicTech.

Sonic Republic releases Pluginize! plugin manager for macOS
Sonic Republic has released Pluginize!, a native macOS plugin manager for producers with large and messy plugin folders. I’m pretty sure that most of us who have been collecting plugins for years know the problem. The DAW takes longer to scan, some plugins break, and eventually, you spend more time looking for the right tool [...]
View post: Sonic Republic releases Pluginize! plugin manager for macOS

Push and Groove releases FREE RMS LEVEL LIMITER plugin
Push and Groove has released RMS LEVEL LIMITER, a free stereo dynamics plugin for Windows and macOS. We have featured a couple of Takahiro Oishi’s previous releases on BPB, including the free Filtronix filter plugin and the more recent GROOVE60 MIDI timing processor. RMS LEVEL LIMITER is a different kind of tool. Instead of working [...]
View post: Push and Groove releases FREE RMS LEVEL LIMITER plugin

Audeze launch the Maxwell 2 ANC Audeze have announced the launch of the Maxwell 2 ANC, a new headset which adds active noise cancellation to the list of improvements introduced by the Maxwell 2.

Silverdaw is a FREE open-source Windows DAW for remixing and mashups
Silverdaw is a free and open-source Windows DAW built for remixing, mashups, and sample-based music production. The developer sent this to me via email, and I wasn’t expecting a lot (new free DAWs are popping up like mushrooms nowadays), but I ended up impressed. The key thing here is that Silverdaw is not trying to be [...]
View post: Silverdaw is a FREE open-source Windows DAW for remixing and mashups

EastWest DrumX could be the only drum machine plugin you’ll ever need$299 / $20 per month ComposerCloud+ subscription, soundsonline.com
DrumX sees EastWest Sounds team up with musician and producer Jimmy Jam, whose long list of credits include Janet Jackson, Boyz II Men, Mary J Blige, Mariah Carey, and The Human League, with 42 chart-topping hits. This drum machine instrument combines the sounds of 10 iconic machines with custom Jimmy Jam samples and grooves, giving you exclusive access to the sound of countless pop, R&B and electro funk hits. It’s a punchy, powerful and flexible collection, only let down by a sometimes cumbersome interface.

READ MORE: Reason 14, as reviewed by a Cubase user: “Bells and whistles aren’t always everything”

DrumX loads into EastWest’s Opus sample player instrument, which can run standalone or inside your DAW. It includes a massive 31GB of samples, covering TR-808, TR-909, TR-606, LinnDrum, LM-1, DR-55, DR-110, DMX, DrumTraks, and SP-12 drum machines. These have been deeply sampled with up to four-times round-robin, a real room ambience, and five levels of Studer tape saturation. These options bring life and variation to the sounds, avoiding the rigid machine-gun-like effect you get doing snare rolls with more static samples.
Each kit loads samples into a four-by-four pad grid, and you can edit the sounds individually with a fairly standard selection of controls alongside a few instrument-specific ones such as the 808 Kick Tone and Decay dials. There’s no deep editing or modulation, but it’s enough to shape each sound to fit your track. You can also affect the whole kit with transient shaping, drive, crush and compressor macros at the top of the interface, which is a fun and quick way to beef up the sound. In terms of sequencing, you can input 64 steps and accents along the bottom, or alternatively click the Grid button to switch the pads into a larger grid sequencer for the full kit. Everything is fairly immediate and available from a single screen, which makes programming basic beats fast.

As mentioned, you get 10 iconic drum machines saved as individual kits, plus a bunch of extra Jimmy Jam custom sounds. These add further original character to the mix and include reverse sounds, percussion, and powerful gated hits. You can mix and match drum machine elements using the All Kits patch, or mix up the Jimmy Jam samples using the All Kits Custom patch. Frustratingly though, you can’t blend these samples alongside the drum machines in the same interface.
Elsewhere, you get patches that load a single instrument onto a single pad for the purpose of layering within Opus. There’s also all the kicks, for example, spread across several pads, or a single sound pitched chromatically across the 16 pads. It’s a little confusing at first, and it would be more fluid if access to these options could somehow be incorporated into a single instance, but it’s possible to set up various different layouts as long as you’re willing to layer separate instances within Opus.
If you don’t already have a collection of solid, classic drum machine samples, then DrumX could be an excellent choice, as it covers all the main bases in great depth with several variations. I test the 808, 909 and several other kits alongside a few alternative sample instruments and although they lack a little top-end and sound subtly saturated, they make up for it with an incredible amount of punch.
DrumX sequencer. Image: Press
The obvious star of the show here is the selection of Jimmy Jam grooves, which include 214 beats paired with custom-curated kits. You can mix and match grooves with any kit using the Groove Browser, which also includes a pattern preview button and the ability to drag and drop the MIDI straight into your DAW. Stylistically, they range from big, 80s-style R&B power grooves with gated snares, reverse sounds and fills, to more modern-sounding and distorted electro beats. Not all of them are winners, as some rely a bit too much on gritty bitcrush effects, but there’s plenty here to showcase why Jimmy has so many platinum records under his belt. There’s an effective balance of simplicity, originality and varied sound selection. If you’re particularly looking to evoke that late 80s, early 90s sound, then this will get you there straight away. The only thing to look out for though is a massive variation in preset kit volumes, with some peaking at +15 dB.
In terms of more modern sounds, DrumX is slightly more limited on the surface as it’s drawing on old hardware. However, the Opus instrument has an incredibly comprehensive Mix tab where you can build individual processing chains for each sound, and choose from a large range of highly editable effects processors and convolution reverbs. These even include officially-licensed SSL Channel Strip, Bus Compressor and Transient Shaper effects. With a little tweaking, you can give these classic drum machines a unique and characterful flavour, and you can also route individual sounds to separate outputs if you want to process them using other plugins.
DrumX presets. Image: Press
Although it’s sonically strong, the lack of any modulation, or depth in the sequencer noticeably limits how detailed and alive you can make your beats sound. There’s not even a way to change the velocity of the hits outside of the simple accent buttons, although if you want to get more in-depth then you have the option of simply drum programming from within your DAW. Thankfully, there’s a flexible macro and automation system that offers some unique hands-on control.
These drawbacks aside, DrumX is a great sounding drum machine, with buckets of punch coming from the samples, and additional weight and power available through the extensive processing options.
At $299, it’s expensive. As an alternative, Wave Alchemy’s Revolution is £99 and also features an array of deeply sampled classic drum machines. However, it lacks Jimmy Jam’s excellent custom samples and broad selection of production-ready grooves. If these have value for the type of music that you’re making, then DrumX is well worth a look.
DrumX mix page. Image: Press
Key features

10 iconic drum machines: TR-808, TR-909, TR-606, LinnDrum, LM-1, DR-55, DR-110, DMX, DrumTraks, and SP-12
408 instruments (exclusive Jimmy Jam Kits, DX Kits, DX Layers, DX Stacks, DX Pitched and DX All Kits)
Up to 4x round-robin sampling
214 Jimmy Jam grooves (dance industrial, R&B, funk, pop, hip-hop and ballad genres)
64 step sequencer with global swing, per step accent & randomise function
16 pads/sounds per kit, with the ability to stack multiple kits
Tape Saturation knob with 6 options
Machine specific parameter controls for deeply sampled sounds
Full mixer with extensive per channel processing and effects options
Multi-out routing, drag and drop MIDI grooves & MIDI learn

The post EastWest DrumX could be the only drum machine plugin you’ll ever need appeared first on MusicTech.

“Those are my weapon”: Inside Audeze and Manny Marroquin’s MM-520 headphonesThreatening airport security is rarely wise, but Manny Marroquin had his reasons. “They pulled the headphones out, and were like, ‘What are these?’” says the celebrated mix engineer, stopped on his way back from Mexico. “Those are my fucking weapon. Don’t you mess with me.”
The weapon in question is the Audeze MM-520, the American brand’s new flagship planar magnetics, and the first pair of headphones to grace a MusicTech gear cover. More records than ever are mixed and mastered on headphones, and the MM-520 – the second product in Marroquin and Audeze’s collaborative MM-series – arrives engineered for the job’s toughest call: bass.
The Audeze MM-520 on the MusicTech Cover. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
The prolific Grammy Award-winner has run Larrabee Studios in Los Angeles since 2001, with production credits from Rihanna to Rosalía, and began tuning Sonos products in 2012. He first mixed on Solid State Logic consoles aged 17, and speaks to us from London before visiting SSL’s Oxford headquarters to test new equipment.
He used to think mixing on headphones was a joke. “If you had told me 10 years ago I would be mixing on headphones, I’d think you were crazy,” he admits. “I used to hate that. I would laugh at people.” So what changed?
The short answer is Marroquin badgered Audeze CEO Sankar Thiagasamudram to build the professional mixing headphones he actually wanted. He was repeatedly told there’s no money in pro audio (as compared to consumer audio), but one day, Thiagasamudram finally approached him at a trade show and said: “Manny, I think we’re ready to do this.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Marroquin worked through various prototypes with Audeze’s engineers, and the result was 2022’s MM-500. “My career is better because of them; it’s my set of speakers,” he says. It’s why he keeps coming back to work with the brand. “They took everything I told them and everything I wanted to do, and they were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll do that. Let’s go.’ They believed in me.”
The $1,700 MM-520 headphones come with a strange sales pitch: you might not need them. “I am not saying they’re better than the 500s, but it is an alternate version,” Marroquin insists. “If you own the 500s, it’s not like, ‘My gosh, I need to go get the 520s.’ Not about that at all. I want to make sure people know it’s not us trying to sell you a new pair of headphones.”
“If you had told me 10 years ago I would be mixing on headphones, I’d think you were crazy” – Manny Marroquin
A SLAM dunk
The star upgrade is SLAM, which is short for Symmetric Linear Acoustic Modulator and mercifully simpler than it sounds. Air passages running beneath the ear pad create extra space between the driver and your ear, forming a larger acoustic chamber and allowing Audeze to selectively boost the low-end frequencies.
“It’s kind of like increasing the body size of an acoustic instrument or a speaker,” explains Chris Berens, Audeze’s head of A&R. “It gives a little more resonance in the low end, and we tune that specifically for the headphone, so we have a nice, healthily reinforced low end.”
SLAM balances the air pressure on both sides of Audeze’s ultra-thin planar magnetic diaphragm, letting it move more freely and accurately. Measuring just 1.8 micrometres, the nanoscale polymer is around 40 times thinner than a human hair.
“It’s not like we’re just adding a subwoofer,” says Berens. “It really enhances everything that the driver does, which makes things [sound] a little bit wider, and gives you more accurate imaging in terms of location.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Peter James, Audeze’s director of marketing, says the tuning target was extension rather than flattery. “The bass of the MM-520 is pretty much flat to below 20Hz. We tuned this system to get a better bass extension rather than a bass shelf, the way the Harman curve has.”
For Marroquin, the low-end obsession is where records live now. “Whether you’re doing hip-hop, pop, country, or whatever, you want to make sure the low end is tight,” he says. “Low end is the most important thing in pop music, because if it’s too heavy, then it weighs down the track. If it’s too light, it sounds weak. Low end in today’s world has to really be accurate.”
The MM-500’s slightly forward upper mids, a common gripe, have been levelled off. The cost of all this is weight. Planars run heavy to begin with, but the 520s pile on more. SLAM adds material, while new snap on earpads require eight magnets per side.
Tipping the scales at 555g, they’re 60g up on the MM-500 and tower over non-planar rivals such as Sennheiser’s 330g HD 800 S, though Audeze says memory foam on the new earpads help disperse the extra load.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Turning the tables
For decades, engineers trusted monitors and used headphones for a second opinion, but increasingly, it’s the other way round. Low end is arguably the hardest thing to get right in any room, and Berens believes even serious money doesn’t fix it. “We have a lot of pro people in the space who are really primarily referring to our headphones for bass,” he claims.
“They can trust what they’re hearing, versus their room, [which] they can’t quite trust. Even people who have invested tens of thousands in great speakers, room treatment, all that stuff, there is always something that’s not quite right.”
Marroquin still mixes on Yamaha NS-10s; a mix that survives these famously brutal nearfield monitors is said to survive anywhere. He dreamed of taking that trusted reference on the road, and the MM series became his answer. “To me, that’s like [being] a kid in the candy store.” 99 per cent of the time, he says, he runs them straight out of his laptop, streaming his Larrabee sessions via a real-time remote streaming plugin by Audiomovers.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Audeze says it intentionally designed the 500s and the 520s to function perfectly fine from most devices without a dedicated headphone amp. That’s tricky, given most planar headphones are notoriously power-hungry. The efficiency comes from the company’s Fluxor magnet arrays, which pack a denser magnetic field across the driver, so the diaphragm needs less power to move.
Rival planar makers shed weight by using fewer, smaller magnets, James says, at the cost of needing an amp. Some of the 520’s heft, in other words, is precisely what frees you from carrying one.
The deeper reason Marroquin never travels without them has nothing to do with specs. “I’m pretty sure everyone is insecure, and it’s okay to admit to it,” he says. “Sometimes you’re having a bad day, or you didn’t sleep well, your mother’s sick. That’s going to reflect on your work. The successful [people] are the ones that can cut through the BS and just focus on this one thing.” His cure for mixer’s block lives in his headphone bag. “I’m feeling a little insecure, a little lost. Let me just put them on, and immediately, I’m back. I’m back within a split second.”
“I created these headphones for the masses. This is how I hear things” – Manny Marroquin
Sony and yet so far
Audeze was acquired in 2023 by Sony Interactive Entertainment, the PlayStation arm of the Japanese multimedia company, primarily for its patented technologies, planar magnetic drivers, and audio engineering expertise. So where does a pair of pro studio flagship headphones sit on PlayStation’s list of priorities? “Clearly, it’s still a priority for us because we put it out this year,” says James. “Nothing about the Sony PlayStation acquisition has changed that market orientation. We’re going to continue developing and deploying cutting-edge sound solutions.”
Is it odd that Audeze is now part of a bigger brand that makes the MDR-CD900ST and MDR-7506, some of the most ubiquitous studio headphones on the planet? James is unbothered, pointing out PlayStation sits a long way from Sony Electronics, and “Sony’s most expensive studio headphone is somewhere around the price of our least expensive.
“If PlayStation is the car brand, Audeze is the racing division,” he argues. “We’re out there at the edge of what’s possible, innovating and trying to see what we can do.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
The proof is SLAM, which debuted before the 520 and is now what James calls a foundational technology, deployed across the range as products refresh. That includes this year’s £339 Maxwell 2 gaming headset. And just last week, a Maxwell 2 ANC variant arrived, bringing active noise cancelling to a full-range planar magnetic driver – a world-first James claims the brand has spent over a decade developing. It also adds auto-calibrating head tracking and Dolby Atmos.
So who does Audeze want to see in the driver’s seat of its newest MM-520 racecar? “It’s a studio product for folks who are serious about learning their craft and perfecting it,” says James, pointing budget-conscious buyers to the MM-100, tuned for “the same kind of vibe”. For his part, Marroquin wants zero gatekeeping. “I created them for the masses,” he says. “This is how I hear things. And if you like it, if you give it a chance, do 10,000 hours on them.”
There’s plenty riding on his own pair. Marroquin is starting Post Malone’s next album, has just finished a Quavo record with Pharrell, and tonight will be back in his London hotel room, laptop open, controlling his console at Larrabee from another continent.
“It gives me a lot of confidence,” he says. And confidence, as he puts it, “is everything”. We sure hope airport security sees it that way.
The Audeze MM-520 is now available.
Words: James Day
Photography: Simon Vinall
The post “Those are my weapon”: Inside Audeze and Manny Marroquin’s MM-520 headphones appeared first on MusicTech.

Graph Tech Guitar Labs open UK Online Store Graph Tech Guitar Labs have just announced the launch of a new UK Online Store that makes it quicker and easier than ever for musicians, repair shops and guitar builders to get their hands on genuine Graph Tech products.