Chinese cybercrime operation that used AI to scam ‘hundreds of thousands of victims’ sued by GoogleThe tech giant said a group called "Outsider Enterprise" used AI to scam hundreds of thousands of victims, sending 2.5 million text messages over a span of two weeks.

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Building a 1:150 scale Toyota ProBox Micro Remote Control CarAlthough in our imagination those scale models of cars certainly can drive and steer just like their full-scale counterparts, there’s something incredibly satisfying about watching them truly come to life. Here [diorama111] is an absolute master at the craft, with the most recent conversion of a 1:150 Toyota Probox car model once again demonstrating these skills with casual ease.
We previously covered such conversions, with another recent one in 2024 involving another 1:150 scale model. That particular one demonstrated driving around on scale model roads, which shows a good practical use of this conversion if you want to have e.g. a scale model town with cars that actually drive around.
In the video you can see how first the base of the scale model has a tiny 25 mAh Li-polymer battery installed, along with two motors, one for steering and one for driving using a rod-linkage system and a lead screw.
The tiny gears used were salvaged from mechanical watches, with photoreflectors keeping track of the driving and steering positions. Remote control is done by infrared, with a tiny SMD IR receiver module in the car, while charging and programming of the MCU is done via terminals installed on the bottom.
In the final part of the video the car is demonstrated driving around, with working head- and rear lights, as well as blinkers and stop lights, including the top rear one. In the video description links are provided to the various schematics and software on Google Drive for those who are feeling like a fun Sunday afternoon project.

"Middle of Nowhere" by Kacey MusgravesLost Highway RecordsProducers: Kacey Musgraves, Daniel Tashian, Ian Fitchuk

Kacey Musgraves pays homage to her Texan roots with her seventh studio album Middle of Nowhere. The album does a good job at showcasing ​​Musgraves’ magnetic personality through her witty humor and tongue-in-cheek songwriting, especially on tracks like “Dry Spell” and “Mexico Honey.” The album also has its somber moments as it follows Musgraves’ experiences of solitude and the complexities of maturing as seen in “Loneliest Girl.” The album features Texan artists like Willie Nelson and Miranda Lambert with references to western swing, bluegrass, and traditional Mexican influences. Who knew country could be so fun!The post "Middle of Nowhere" by Kacey Musgraves first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Sonora Cinematic release Movimento Strings Inflections Movimento Strings Inflections builds on the capabilities of its predecessor by introducing extended techniques that promise to bring some “new textures and fresh colours” to users’ cinematic strings palettes.

Sam Bankman-Fried loses appeal to overturn 25-year prison sentenceA federal appeals court upheld the former FTX chief’s conviction, while his bid for clemency from President Donald Trump appears to face steep political odds.

From UMG’s €1B bond sale to Warner Music’s Sureel AI acquisition… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-upThe biggest headlines from the past few days...
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Darkpalace Studio PiranhaPIRANHA is our highly advanced multi-band waveshaper and clipper designed to unlock the full creative potential of modern music production. It comes with a big library of waveshaping functions including hard and soft clippers, transfer curves, bitcrushers, and time-dependent modules inside a modern, intuitive UI. PIRANHA allows you to distort, crush, saturate and clip your input signals without limits, opening up new ways to explore both precision mastering and bold sound design. Read More

Uryan Modular releases Vaelyra Stryn, a FREE resonant string/pluck synth
Uryan Modula, a company specialising in hand-built Eurorack cases and enclosures, has released Vaelyra Stryn, a free resonant string/pluck synth for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The Hungarian modular experts also offer free plugins, samples, and theory guides. At the time of writing, Uryan Modular has the following plugins on offer: Waeler Aether Drift Elysa Morph [...]
View post: Uryan Modular releases Vaelyra Stryn, a FREE resonant string/pluck synth

Anyma’s first-ever solo show was at Printworks – now he’s returning to the UK capital with his most spectacular show yet, ÆDENFrom a live visuals standpoint, Italian-American DJ and producer Anyma sets the bar. In the five short years since starting his solo project in 2021 – breaking away from Tale of Us, of which he remains a member alongside Carmine Conte (MRAK) – Matteo Milleri has brought his head-spinning visuals to some of the world’s biggest stages, recently including Coachella, and a massive sold-out residency at the Las Vegas Sphere.
Though born in New York City and raised in Milan, London remains Anyma’s spiritual home, after causing seismic waves in EDM with his landmark debut show at Printworks in 2022.
And this month he’s returning home, bringing his most spectacular show yet, ÆDEN, to Silverworks Island, right in the heart of the British capital.

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ÆDEN – debuted at this year’s Coachella festival and since brought to UNVRS Ibiza – is Matteo Milleri’s most ambitious live show to date, with cutting-edge visuals designed to emphasise the surrounding natural environment.
Silverworks Island is an open-air venue set against the backdrop of East London’s Royal Docks, so this means a cinematic experience and thoroughly immersive sound design as planes soar overhead while taking off and landing at London City Airport.

ÆDEN’s inaugural show at Coachella 2026 saw the debut of Anyma’s latest single Bad Angel with Blackpink’s LISA, alongside a stacked setlist of originals and remixes, including Voices in My Head (with Argy and Son of Son), and versions of Fred again and Swedish House Mafia’s Turn On The Lights Again, The Prodigy’s No Good (Start the Dance) and Cassian’s Run. The set even saw a guest appearance from Muse frontman Matt Bellamy.
Since then, Anyma and his label Afterlife have brought the ÆDEN World Tour to Shanghai, Brussels and Ibiza, and following his homecoming (so-to-speak) in London in June 27 and 28, the tour span the rest of the year, making stops in Gdańsk, Poland, Mexico City, Vancouver, Istanbul, Milan, Madrid, Sydney, Mumbai and Paris.

ÆDEN at Silverworks Island will see support from Kevin De Vries, Kölsch, Chris Avantgarde, Layla Benitez, KAS:ST and HANA on Saturday the 27th, and Mind Against, Ben Böhmer, Woo York, 8Kays, Kasia and Stylo on Sunday the 28th. 
With its industrial backdrop and the fact it’s Anyma’s first London show since 2022, ÆDEN at Silverworks Island could very well be one of the EDM spectacles of the summer.
Tickets for ÆDEN are available now via anyma.com and silverworksisland.com.

 
The post Anyma’s first-ever solo show was at Printworks – now he’s returning to the UK capital with his most spectacular show yet, ÆDEN appeared first on MusicTech.

Fraunhofer, the creator of the MP3 and MPEG-H, shows me the innovations coming to audioFraunhofer IIS occupies a central place in the history of digital audio. As the German-based institute behind the MP3 audio format and a major force in the evolution of AAC, it now combines that legacy with advanced research in immersive sound and technologies such as MPEG-H, designed to make listening more flexible, immersive, and adaptive.
MPEG-H pushes audio beyond the idea of a fixed stereo or surround mix. By working with audio objects and dynamic metadata, it allows content to adapt to different playback systems and listening situations, from immersive speaker arrays to soundbars, TVs and headphones.

READ MORE: Imagine Plugins is changing who gets to make plugins

During a visit to Fraunhofer IIS in Erlangen, that evolution came into focus in conversation with Bernhard Grill, the institute’s managing director and a member of the core group involved in the development of MP3. He describes his contribution as helping turn research that was still largely academic into something capable of operating in real-world conditions. That reflects one of Fraunhofer’s core principles: research is meant to be applied in the real world.
From that perspective, Grill can compare two very different technological eras. In the days of MP3, development could be handled by a small team and a relatively contained level of complexity. Today, the situation is very different. “MP3 could be done with a small team of maybe five people. At its peak, MPEG-H had close to 100 people working on it.” The remark is about more than scale. It points to a change in how innovation itself works: no longer the product of a small, tightly focused group, but of much larger, more specialised, and more distributed efforts. As Grill puts it, “It’s getting harder to make a difference for the next generation and just things get more complicated, but at the same time hardware gets more powerful.” Innovation has not stopped; its scale, pace, and conditions have changed.
Bernhard Grill, managing director of Fraunhofer. Image: Press
That growing complexity requires not only larger teams, but also an environment able to keep up with it. Europe, Grill argues, is beginning to lose ground against China and the US because bureaucracy is slowing progress: delayed purchasing processes, regulatory requirements, and, above all, restrictions on the use of AI that force researchers to spend time on forms instead of working on the technology itself.
Fraunhofer IIS still preserves the first MP3 player in history. Its storage capacity was limited, but the device remains operational, and it was even possible to hear it during the visit. It carries an obvious historical weight — a small artifact tied to a much larger transformation in the way music could be stored, carried and listened to.
The path to that transformation, however, was far from straightforward. In its early years, Fraunhofer was not the globally recognised institution it is today. In fact, as Grill recalls, they were seen as underdogs in a context where the industry distrusted their technology, considered it too complex, and doubted its viability in the mass market. The project’s survival depended in part on small jobs and contracts that kept the team together while they tried to push forward with a technology that almost no one fully took seriously.
The first MP3 player. Image: Press
MP3 was one of the decisive pieces of that transition, though not the only one. AAC is also part of Fraunhofer’s story and of the broader evolution of compression formats that shaped contemporary digital audio. From there emerged a new era that transformed the circulation of music altogether. Piracy became one of the most visible consequences of that shift, even though it was not something attributable to the team that developed the technology. Grill even recalled the industry’s early hostility: “They had a lot of lawyers trying to find something which we could be accused of in front of a court, but obviously nobody was able to find anything where they would actually be able to attack us with.” More than a fault of the team, it was one of the side effects of a much larger mutation: the transition to a world in which sound could be copied, shared, and moved with unprecedented ease.
The history of MP3 cannot be separated from the technical and cultural context of its time. Memory was expensive, connections were slow, and digital audio still had to solve concrete problems of transmission and storage. Fraunhofer understood early on that the internet was going to transform the circulation of sound, and that this would require efficient compression. The arrival of computers capable of playing MP3s without dedicated hardware, along with the spread of the internet and CD drives, ultimately brought together the conditions for the technology to expand in unstoppable fashion.
But if MP3 responded to the problems of an era marked by expensive storage and slow connections, the institute’s present points toward a different challenge. The issue is no longer simply how to compress audio efficiently, but how to redesign the listening experience more broadly.
Mozart room. Image: Press
Part of that work can be seen in the Mozart room, one of the institute’s most striking spaces. It is not simply an immersive listening room, but a validation and acoustic development environment built with an extreme level of detail. It is designed as a room-in-room construction, with a floating floor, double walls, double doors, and an air-conditioning system engineered to move air very slowly so that airflow itself does not generate unwanted noise. Inside, the room is equipped with around 40 loudspeakers positioned at different heights. The middle ring can be raised or lowered and is set at the listener’s ear level. Other speakers are placed above the listener’s head and others closer to the floor, so that spatiality is built not only horizontally but vertically as well.
Ulli Scuda, Head of Group Soundlab, guided part of the visit and explained aspects of the room’s physical structure. Even the large ring and the aluminum supports holding part of the system were specially designed to avoid vibrations that could interfere with reproduction. Because the truss is hollow, certain frequencies can make it resonate, so it was filled to prevent that.
The room’s central function is to serve as a space for listening tests: comparative sessions in which a person, positioned in the ideal listening spot, evaluates differences between signals, technologies, or sound treatments. Those comparisons, repeated and statistically processed, help determine whether a development truly improves the listening experience or whether the difference is inaudible.
Bach room. Image: Press
For a domestic environment, Scuda said that a 7.4 configuration offers a particularly convincing spatial image. In that setup, the four additional speakers are placed above the listener, reinforcing the sense of height and immersion. Beyond larger systems such as 22.2, used by NHK in Japan, 7.4 stands out as an especially interesting option for home use because it can reproduce spatiality powerfully without requiring extreme infrastructure. Scuda also explained that side positions are especially important for reproducing reverberation and spatial detail — for example, in recordings of churches or cathedrals, where the surrounding environment is an essential part of the experience.
This is where MPEG-H reveals one of its most concrete strengths. The system is not just about improving fidelity, but about transforming the listening experience through audio objects and dynamic metadata. It allows language switching without losing the ambient background, lets listeners adjust background and dialogue levels separately, and enables further customisation and track selection depending on the options defined by the provider.
That becomes even more significant when the technology is no longer confined to laboratories or demo rooms. In Brazil, MPEG-H has been gradually incorporated through trials, pilots, and concrete adoption by broadcasters and technology partners, until it became part of the new TV 3.0 framework formalized by decree on August 27, 2025. That matters because it shows the system has already found real paths into mass media environments.
This implementation does not depend only on a broadcaster adopting the format. It also requires integration into televisions, soundbars, set-top boxes, mobile devices, and streaming platforms. That is precisely why Brazil became such a relevant case. Fraunhofer worked with broadcasters such as TV Globo on tests and real productions, first with direct support and later more autonomously, as local teams absorbed the technology and learned to operate the system on their own.
Sound in MPEG-H also adapts to the playback medium. Even when it is heard through headphones, certain configurations can simulate rear spatiality through binaural processing. In other words, part of that three-dimensional complexity can be transferred to more accessible and everyday listening formats.
In that sense, one of the most interesting things about Fraunhofer IIS is that it does not maintain a strict divide between engineering and musical sensibility. Mandy Garcia, Head of Marketing and Communication, put it simply: “A lot of people that work here are also musicians. Passion for music is what connects a lot of people working here.” That is not a minor detail. It helps explain why audio in a place like this is not understood only through engineering, but also through lived experience as listening and musical practice. The institute even has a rehearsal room in the basement, along with bands formed by colleagues who play together at internal events.
That may be why the visit leaves a double impression. On the one hand, there is the historical weight of an institution that contributed to some of the most important changes in the recent history of recorded music. On the other, there is the evidence that its current work is no longer focused only on compression or efficient transmission, but on a broader question: how we want to listen in the future.
The post Fraunhofer, the creator of the MP3 and MPEG-H, shows me the innovations coming to audio appeared first on MusicTech.

Rekkerd Sounds preset packs for Massive, Serum, Spire, and Sylenth1 are now FREE
Rekkerd Sounds has made several sound packs available as pay-what-you-like downloads, which means you can grab them for free by entering zero as the price. The packs were originally released around ten years ago, but they are still worth checking out if you use any of the featured synths. There are four soundsets available, covering [...]
View post: Rekkerd Sounds preset packs for Massive, Serum, Spire, and Sylenth1 are now FREE

Wondering if your playlists contain AI-generated music? Deezer’s new free tool can tell youDeezer has launched a free online AI music detector that allows users to check whether their playlists contain AI-generated tracks, even if they use rival streaming services.
Available in 27 languages and compatible with 20 of the most popular music streaming platforms, the tool is powered by Deezer’s existing AI detection technology, and arrives amid growing calls for greater transparency around AI-generated music.
Recent research conducted by Deezer and Ipos across eight countries suggests listeners are increasingly concerned about knowing when AI is involved. According to the survey, 80% of respondents believe AI-generated music should be clearly labeled, while 73% said they would like streaming platforms to tag AI music-generated tracks.
The findings also suggest that synthetic music may already be more prevalent than many listeners realise. Deezer says 43% of users importing playlists from other streaming services already have AI music in their libraries – one of the reasons why the company has decided to make its detection technology available to the public.

READ MORE: “AI music is never going to take risks because it’s bad for business”: Tallinn Music Week panel plays down concerns around AI music

“By detecting and tagging AI generated music over the past year and a half, Deezer has been at the forefront of transparency in music streaming,” says Alexis Lanternier, CEO of Deezer. “No other company has followed our lead yet, so we decided to make it possible for everyone to check if their playlists include synthetic music, no matter which streaming platform they use.”
To use the tool, users simply need to visit Deezer’s AI music detector webpage, select their streaming service, connect their account, and allow Deezer to scan their playlists. The service then generates a report showing whether AI-generated tracks have been detected and allows users to share their results.
The launch builds on Deezer’s wider efforts to tackle the rapid growth of synthetic music on streaming platforms. The company says it is currently receiving nearly 75,000 AI generated tracks every day, accounting for more than 44% of all daily uploads.
Deezer’s AI detection tool has been active since the start of 2025, enabling the company to track a steady increase of fully AI-generated content. In June 2025, it became the first major music streaming platform to explicitly tag AI-generated music, and says it has now identified over 13.4 million AI-generated tracks.
In addition, tracks identified as AI-generated are also automatically excluded from algorithmic recommendations and editorial playlists.
“This is a first step in making sure that these tracks don’t dilute the royalty pool in any significant way,” says the company. “Potential future actions, including updating our supplier policy and removing/ demonetising content need to be based on careful consideration.”
Scan your playlists today at Deezer.
The post Wondering if your playlists contain AI-generated music? Deezer’s new free tool can tell you appeared first on MusicTech.

GearExpo UK: Home Studio Acoustics Talk At GearExpo UK, James Nugent and Mark Ashfield of Present Day Production will join Jesco Lohan of Acoustics Insider for a straight-talking look at why small rooms are so unforgiving.

Olivia Rodrigo's Deep Love Affair With 90s Alternative Rock and the Album She Calls Her "Perfect 10"From Hole and The Breeders to The Cure, Olivia Rodrigo's musical roots run deep into '90s alternative rock — including one 1995 album she calls "the most human record" ever made.