Dezert Audio releases PolyFreq, a free analog modeled synth plugin
Dezert Audio has released PolyFreq, a free analog modeled synthesizer plugin for macOS and Windows. You may recognize Dezert Audio from Freq-2, the premium Kontakt instrument we covered previously, built from recordings taken from Dez Wright’s personal collection of over 20 analog synths. PolyFreq is a different kind of release. It’s a synthesis engine rather [...]
View post: Dezert Audio releases PolyFreq, a free analog modeled synth plugin

Get Plugin Alliance Black Box Analog Design HG-2 for $30 (76% OFF until May 31)
Brainworx and Black Box Analog Design’s HG-2 tube saturation plugin is currently 76% off at Plugin Boutique. The regular price is $125, and the deal brings it down to $30 until May 31. HG-2 is the official emulation of Black Box Analog Design’s hardware tube processor. It’s a unit that retails for around $3,000 (yikes!) [...]
View post: Get Plugin Alliance Black Box Analog Design HG-2 for $30 (76% OFF until May 31)

AI-generated actors and scripts are now ineligible for OscarsBad news for Tilly Norwood.

MousePlugins Mastino 60Mastino 60 is a hard-knee VCA-style compressor designed for fast, punchy dynamic control on drums, bass, buses, and mix sources that benefit from firm gain reduction. The plugin focuses on direct compression behavior, clear metering, and a practical modern workflow. It includes threshold and compression controls, output gain, stereo linking, a sidechain filter, parallel mix control, and fixed low-latency processing. Mastino 60 was developed with measurement-guided tuning and listening tests, with the goal of capturing the feel of classic fast VCA compression while keeping the interface simple, responsive, and suitable for everyday mixing. It is available for Linux and Windows in CLAP and VST3 formats. Read More

Pushing as Many Pixels as Possible to a CRT: Interlaced 4KSome people love CRTs to a degree that the uninitiated may find obsessive. We all have our thing, and for [Found Tech], it’s absolutely pointing particle accelerators at his face to play video games. He likes modern games, with modern resolutions– none of this 1080p nonsense. Today’s gamers demand 4K! Can a CRT keep up? The answer is a resounding “No, but actually, yes!”
[Found Tech] has an IBM P275 monitor, which is one of the last generation of CRTs.  Officially, the resolution maxes out at 1920 dots by 1440 lines. While one might (inaccurately) call that UHD output “2K”, you certainly cannot claim it is 4K. So, what’s the secret? Interlacing. Yes, interlacing, like old analog TV signals.
Apparently, in spite of what the manual says, getting the screen to absorb the 2880×2160 interlaced signal wasn’t the hard part, but generating it was. NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards are absolutely unable to create an interlaced signal, but Intel integrated GPUs are– if you get the right combo of chip and old driver. Sadly, the video doesn’t list exactly what he used. Of course an iGPU isn’t going to give you a very good gaming experience at this high resolution, so [Found Tech] has his games do their rendering on the discrete card before piping that over to the iGPU for display on the CRT.
Technically, you still can’t call the 2880×2160 picture “4K”, as that trademark refers to 2160p at 16:9, and this is both interlaced and 4:3. Still, close enough. In spite of the artifacting that turned us all against interlaced signals back in the day, this apparently has [Found Tech]’s eyes fooled– he says it’s as good as 2160p on his OLED, plus the extra magic that comes with glowing phosphors.
It certainly looks great in a recording, but the monitor in the recording isn’t displayed at a high enough resolution to say for sure if it’s 4K. Still, if you’re into CRT gaming, maybe give this high-res interlacing a try. If you still don’t get what’s so great about CRTs, check here, and remember it could be worse– at least we’re not going on about Plasma TVs.

Warm Audio launch the Reamper Aiming to bridge the gap between guitar rigs and studio setups, the Reamper delivers a multi-purpose tool that’s capable of carrying out re‑amping, placing guitar pedals into a DAW signal chain and capturing a signal from pushed valve amps at studio-friendly volumes.

Ewan Bristow’s UZU spectral phaser is FREE for 7 days (regularly $17)
Ewan Bristow has officially hit 10k followers on Twitter/X, and as promised, his UZU frequency domain phaser is now free. The plugin normally sells for $17, and you can grab it from the developer’s website for free. We covered the initiative back in October 2025, when Ewan announced that UZU would be made free for [...]
View post: Ewan Bristow’s UZU spectral phaser is FREE for 7 days (regularly $17)

CPU Productions Groove DetectiveGroove Detective: The only search engine for drum loops based on patterns and 'sounds like'. As producers' and musicians' collections of audio loops used in music productions of all stripes grow steadily year by year, so does the accompanying problem of finding exactly what you need, when you need it. Even though individual collections may be sensibly organized into styles, tempo and so on, there is no agreed-upon system for doing this and rarely does a user take the time and effort to consolidate all these disparate libraries. The result is that the collection is spread over a large number of folders, making it exceedingly difficult and time consuming to audition potential candidates when it matters the most: at the moment of inspiration and creation. Groove Detective solves this problem in a musical way. By analyzing all the loops the user has and consolidating all the data in a single searchable database, it no longer matters where the loop is stored. The information in the database allows the user to search for loops based on the pattern of drum hits in the loop itself, not on how it is named or in which folder it resides. The search pattern can be made as narrowly specific or as widely fuzzy as one wishes, depending on the need of the moment. There is also an option of including a "sounds like" dimension to a search. For example, if one is looking for loops that have a particular snare drum sound, one needs only provide that sound to the search engine and the degree to which the sound should match. In the result browser one can further refine the search by filtering on tempo, 'pitched-ness', file type, sample rate and so on. Once a choice has been made, the loop can simply be dragged into a track in the DAW production software (if it is so enabled), without ever having to enter any file open or import dialog. This technology is based on decades of research in audio analysis and Music Information Retrieval (MIR) systems and utilizes an advanced expert system. Read More

Three Bitcoin data points suggest a rally to $80K is imminentBitcoin chases $80,000 as rising spot volumes and futures open interest suggest the market has shifted back in the bulls’ favor.

DPA MICROPHONES CAPTURE NUANCE AND DETAIL ON YANN TIERSEN’S TOURDPA Microphones released a statement this week, stating that, "Reproducing the full emotional and dynamic range of a solo piano on a large-scale sound system presents a unique set of challenges, especially when that performance is as nuanced as Yann Tiersen’s. Known for his emotive, minimalist compositions and genre-blending artistry, his latest tour, titled “Rathlin from a Distance | The Liquid Hour,” unfolds in two distinct chapters: an opening set of a solo piano followed by a second half steeped in modular synthesis and electronics. For Veteran Live Sound Engineer Jamie Harley, whose four‑decade career spans electronic, indie and acoustic music, the challenge was finding a way to blend these two very different sound worlds into a seamless live experience each night. The DPA Microphones’ DPK2015 Piano Stereo Kit became an essential part of that equation."

“Working with DPA Microphones on Yann Tiersen’s tour has been about capturing nuance without compromise,” says Veteran Live Sound Engineer Jamie Harley to MC. “Yann’s performance moves between fragile, highly textural piano passages and expansive electronic moments, so the microphones must stay honest to the source while giving me control in very dynamic environments. The DPK2015 Piano Stereo Kit, in particular, lets me focus the microphone exactly where it needs to sit—preserving detail, avoiding midrange build-up and keeping everything natural, even at high gain on large systems. When the technology disappears and the piano simply sounds like itself night after night, that’s when you know you’ve got it right.”

The statement continues: "For the piano-driven portion of the performance, Harley deployed the stereo pair of DPA 2015 Wide Cardioid Microphones, which are included in the miking kit. Known for their natural sound reproduction and controlled off-axis response, the 2015s proved to be a powerful tool in managing the delicate tonal characteristics of Tiersen’s playing style. “Yann plays in a very textural way,” Harley explains. “He’ll hold notes and build layers of tone. If you’re not careful, things can get mid-range-heavy quite quickly. I was really interested to see how the piano kit would handle that, and it worked extremely well.”

"The 2015 microphones were positioned inside the piano to capture both clarity and depth, with a focus on maintaining tonal balance across the instrument’s full range. The wide cardioid pickup pattern of the mics allowed Harley to capture the natural resonance of the piano while minimizing unwanted bleed."

“Having that directional control is a godsend,” he says. “Especially when you’re working with a very quiet, delicate instrument on a large system. You need microphones that keep everything tight and focused exactly where they need to be.” 

The post DPA MICROPHONES CAPTURE NUANCE AND DETAIL ON YANN TIERSEN’S TOUR first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Adapting a 100-Year-Old Lens To A Modern CameraYou can get all kinds of fancy lenses for modern cameras, with all sorts of mechanical and electronic wizardly to make them shoot better images. But what if you paired a vintage lens with a modern camera? It would take some work, as [Mathieu] found out, but you’d also get some interesting results.
The optic in question is a 100-year old lens—a Foth 50 mm f2.5 to be precise, originally used with a folding film camera. It was sourced from a market for just 3 euros. Notably, the lens was not designed for modern cameras, and so lacks an aperture and focusing mechanism. [Mathieu] thus had to fabricate something to fit the lens to a Sony FX3. A first attempt used an aperture adapter from Amazon and an elcoid adapter, but there were vignetting problems due to the lens placement in this case. Ultimately, [Mathieu] went with a special macro adapter that allowed him to control focus and tuck in an ND filter behind the lens, which made up for the lack of an aperture.
The vintage glass isn’t the sharpest lens out there, but that’s kind of what’s fantastic about it. The center of the frame is certainly focused, but it fades out softly towards the edges of the image, giving a cinematic, dreamlike effect. The bokeh in the background are particularly charming, too. As far as 3 euro lenses go, this one was a hit.
You can slap just about any lens on anything if you get creative with how you do it. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Stephen Walters for the tip!]

Coatue has a plan to buy up land for data centers, possibly for AnthropicCoatue, one of the biggest names in venture capital, has a new venture that is reportedly buying land near large power sources.

From The Orchard acquiring Brazil’s OniMusic to the BMG-Concord merger… it’s MBW’s weekly round-upThe biggest headlines from the past few days...
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Universal Audio release UAD Enigmatic ’82 Overdrive Special Amp Already available as a hardware pedal, Enigmatic ’82 Overdrive Special Amp has now made its way into the UAD line-up, bringing the same iconic tones to DAW users. 

Heritage Audio announce the Baby RAM Black Edition Created in celebration of the company’s 15th anniversary, the Baby RAM Black Edition offers the same performance and functionality as the original, but in an alternative finish.