Purafied Audio Everything Bundle is FREE for a limited time
Purafied Audio is once again offering its Everything Bundle for free with the coupon code MYSHITWASFUCKED at checkout. The Everything Bundle includes every plugin Purafied Audio has released so far: LED Compressor, VU Compressor, Micro Limiter, SLP 538 EQ, The Panda Rooms, DEATHWESTERN Amp, and Liquid Death Snare. The regular price is $238 (down from [...]
View post: Purafied Audio Everything Bundle is FREE for a limited time

Notion just turned its workspace into a hub for AI agentsNotion’s new developer platform lets teams connect AI agents, external data sources, and custom code directly into their workspace as the company pushes deeper into agentic productivity software.

Dynamix Audio Sampling MasterSampling Master is an autosampling and sample library creation tool for recording and building multisampled instruments from hardware and software sources. It supports automatic key mapping using pitch detection, metadata, or file names, and provides tools for looping, normalization, leveling, and sample organization. The software is designed to streamline the process of capturing audio, mapping samples across the keyboard range, and exporting structured sample libraries for use in samplers and production workflows. Read More

The Return of Cabaret Voltaire at the Bellwether, L.A.There was something in the water in the county of Yorkshire, England in the early-to-mid '70s. In 1975, proto-industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle formed in Hull. But two years prior, 68 miles south in Sheffield, Cabaret Voltaire was born.

So the story goes that founding member Chris Watson, inspired by Brian Eno, was experimenting with making "music without musical instruments." He was a telephone engineer, and that work informed his creativity too. Watson soon joined forces with Richard H. Kirk, and the pair were joined by Stephen Mallinder.

The rest is history. The Mix-Up album dropped in '79; the last Cabaret Voltaire album, BN9Drone, was released in April 2021, though by that point Kirk was the sole remaining member out of the original three. Five months later, in September 2021, Kirk passed away.

So here we are in 2026. Cabaret Voltaire is Mallinder and Watson, through the latter struggles to travel so the touring lineup is Mallinder and friends. One of those friends is Tara Busch, aka opening act I Speak Machine, who performs Watson's parts with aplomb.

There were no songs performed from the first three albums at Cabaret Voltaire's Bellwether show (their return to Los Angeles after years away)--the set was weighted heavily towards 1983's The Crackdown and 1984's Micro-Phonies. CV kicked off with "24/24," "Animation," and 'Why Kill Time (When You Can Kill Yourself)" from the former, before diving further into the past with "The Set-Up" from 1978's Extended Play EP, and "Landslide" from 1981's Red Mecca.

"Crackdown" and then "Yashar" (the latter from 2X45) were set highlights, "Sex Money Freaks" betrays their early Berlin nightclub inspirations, and set closer "Do Right" was a crowd pleaser. Encores "Nag Nag Nag" and "Sensoria" proved to be the perfect way to end the night.

The Bellwether was packed for this one. CV seemed to bring out all of Los Angeles' beautiful freaks, from the goths to the cyberpunks and everyone in-between. They all will have left happy.

The post The Return of Cabaret Voltaire at the Bellwether, L.A. first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Custom Mainboard for PS2 PortableAs time marches on, the retro gaming community gets more and more access to older systems. This is partially a product of modern computing having much more power to emulate more demanding systems, but also because many in the community have spent more time with their favorite systems. Such is the case for [tschicki] who has spent considerable time and effort reverse engineering the Playstation 2 to come up with this custom mainboard for a handheld version that still uses some of the original chips from the console.
This Playstation 2 handheld console is designed almost completely from the ground up, not just including the impressive main board but also its modernized features, including USB power delivery handled by an RP2040, digital video output, support for modern storage media like SD cards, a customized boot ROM, and upgraded audio. The DualShock 2 controller is also implemented within the handheld, and the case itself is designed to be 3D printed. It’s an impressive effort which preserves the original feel of the console without relying too much on ancient hardware for everything.
Before jumping in to building one yourself, though, [tschicki] cautions that this project is not for the faint of heart, as it requires some specilized tools and a high degree of skill, but for those still wishing to attempt this build all of the instructions are available on the project site. For such a popular console it’s no surprise we’ve seen plenty of other handheld PS2s before, from this one which uses an original PS2 mainboard to this one we featured way back in 2010.
Thanks to [raz] for the tip!

Whale shorts $70M in crypto and tech: Should Bitcoin traders worry?Despite short-term bearish bets from a successful Hyperliquid whale, a growing US Fed balance sheet and rising inflation support Bitcoin in the long term.

Sony Music Publishing wins Pop Publisher of the Year at 2026 BMI Awards… as Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Luther’ takes Song of the YearSMP landed the title for representing 24 of the previous year's most-performed songs.
Source

Hyperfocus DSP releases Niner, a FREE open-source 909-style kick drum synth
Hyperfocus DSP has released Niner, a free open-source kick drum synth with a parallel 909-style clap voice for Linux, macOS, and Windows. It’s been a while since I last covered a free drum synth specifically focused on kicks. I recently wrote about Sender Spike’s DR.89, which goes for the full 909 kit experience. Niner is [...]
View post: Hyperfocus DSP releases Niner, a FREE open-source 909-style kick drum synth

Nugen Audio update DialogCheck Set to debut at the 2026 Media Production & Technology Show, DialogCheck 1.1 adds a selection of new features and functions that make it quicker and easier to use, as well as extending its immersive audio support. 

Pür Recording & Residence Pür Recording & Residence have announced their official opening, introducing a new world-class residential recording complex on Cunda Island along Türkiye’s North Aegean coast.

Generative AI’s threat to music sample libraries is existential — Splice thinks it has a solutionRecently, a music tech company asked Ms Mavy, a notable Afrohouse DJ/producer, if she would appear in an ad for their new AI product. There was a problem, though: the product was an Amapiano music plugin that would directly compete with Mavy’s own sample library business, Afroplug.
“It was crazy,” says Mavy. “It was like I was a child – you want my face, and you’re taking my business.”

READ MORE: Study shows “78% of musicians are now using AI” – but is everything really as it seems?

Mavy is calling from Belgium, where she lives; she has just dropped one of her sons off at school and is sitting in her car in a parking lot with her other son, who’s snacking in the back seat. Born in France and with roots in Cameroon and Guadeloupe, Mavy (born Maëva Nkouwap) built Afroplug after seeing that sample marketplaces weren’t keeping up with the exploding interest in genres like Afrobeats, Amapiano and Afrohouse. She now has a six-figure business selling samples on her own site, as well as on other sample marketplaces such as Splice.
As a businessperson, Mavy sees opportunities in building AI tools — Afroplug has released an AI music agreements generator, and has plans for other AI products. But it’s also an existential threat. Mavy’s entire business is based on her deep knowledge and contacts with music makers from across Africa and the Caribbean.
For now, that knowledge is her business’ “moat” against AI tools. “I know I have a treasure with my niche,” she says. The attempts she’s heard from AI full-song generators to create Amapiano and other music from the African diaspora “don’t sound authentic,” she says. “It’s harder for AI to replicate” the dozens and dozens of genres and subgenres (she estimates around 100).
But when they do get better at it, it could be all over for Afroplug. It’s for that reason that Mavy doesn’t listen to tools like Suno; she says she needs to protect her mental health, and doesn’t want to spend too much time obsessing over them. “I cannot lie, I’m very shocked [with them]…. It’s easy to fall into a toxic mindset.”
Ms Mavy. Image: Adèle Boterf
Trust issues
“We have a trust and a tooling problem,” says BT, the electronic artist and film composer, about full-song AI tools. He’s no AI sceptic; he’s been experimenting with music and technology for decades and runs an AI music start-up called Sound Labs. But he sees a lot of “righteous anger” from fellow artists and producers about the copyright and attribution questions with full-song AI tools. In this case, he says, the classic Silicon Valley saying “‘move fast and break things’ has become ‘move fast and break musicians’.”
Generative tools now do something that many producers usually want to do themselves – build an entire song — with ingredients they might not have chosen. Writing a prompt to generate a song is “a really unnatural interface for a musician,” says BT. “We’re not conditioned on language.”
And while some full-song tools now offer advanced features such as stem separation, they still don’t provide the granular control that experienced producers demand. A single sound can “show me what’s missing” when BT’s making a song, he says. “Some little Rhodes piano loop — I hear it and I go, ‘Oh, shit, I know what that’s supposed to be carved into.’” If those ingredients are off, Mavy can tell right away: the song doesn’t “sound like my husband,” she says; “the guy making reggae music on my island.”
BT. Image: Lacy Transeau
With AI song generators, “the output is more important than the input,” says Ale Koretzky, Splice’s head of AI. Despite their limitations, AI song generators pose a deep challenge to companies like Splice, which are built on a catalogue of fixed sounds.
“Static catalogues are now under existential threat,” says Koretzky. “When you can create what you want on the fly, and it’s unique to you, that is a very compelling value proposition.”
Variations, which Splice launched in April after two years of internal development, is the company’s wager on a way through. Rather than building a full-song generator, Koretzky and team built a tool that can take any sample in Splice’s catalogue and generate new versions of it. Most important, it preserves what Koretzky calls the sound’s “DNA” — its timbre and close-to-undefinable character — while giving producers the ability to change the melody and structure. A producer who loves a flute sample’s tone but needs a different melody can now generate alternatives that match its tone, with each licensed variation triggering a payout to the original creator.
Trying to compete with full-song generators directly, Koretzy says, is “a lost battle starting from the data.” Splice isn’t scraping terabytes of data from YouTube and other sources for its model. The bet is that producers will value something different. BT says he does: “If I can play one guitar part and repurpose that guitar part as a marimba part — these are tools that would be so useful for me personally.”
“What we are proposing,” says Koretzky, “is that input is just as important as output.”
Ale Koretzky. Image: Press
Liquid sampling
A musician and electrical engineer from Argentina, Koretzky was part of the University of Southern California team that pioneered techniques for stem separation, the technology that lets you pull individual instruments out of a finished mix; he’s been at Splice for eight years.
A couple of years ago, Koretzky proposed what he describes as a moonshot: make the Splice catalogue “liquid.” Instead of a fixed library you browse, he wanted to build a system where any sound could be reshaped, extended and made your own.
The core technical challenge was one that researchers have wrestled with for decades: how do you capture the essence of a sound? The qualities that make one flute recording distinguishable from another — the room it was played in, the timbre, the player’s breath and articulation, the microphone and signal chain — have resisted measurement for decades. “This is literally an impossible problem in the field of psychoacoustics and signal processing,” Koretzky says. “I’m crazy enough to think that we can solve these problems, and we sort of did.”
The breakthrough came when his team trained a model to learn a sound’s identity (its DNA) by telling the model to analyse everything except measurable aspects, such as the melody and structure. The result is a system that can extract the indefinable parts of a recording — the attack of a musician’s playing, room acoustics — and then inject that fingerprint into a generative model to create new variations.
Koretzky describes it as “the world’s first universal synthesizer, able to reproduce any sound in the universe.” A cello variation can capture the air of the bow, along with reverberation and compression, which are elements that would take a sound designer hours to approximate manually, if they could approximate them at all. The same model can blend two samples into a new hybrid; Koretzky calls this “semantic sound design.” A producer can specify a ratio (30% of one sound, 70% of another), and the model synthesizes something new that carries the DNA of both. Crucially, both original creators are credited and paid.
Andy Thompson. Image: Press
The philosophical risk
Many Splice staffers are musicians, so internal debates around AI and music during the development of Variations reflected the outside world. Andy Thompson, Splice’s product lead for the project, describes spending hours one weekend playing with a full song generator and an AI vocal persona he’d built, generating roughly 40 versions of a track with “Maggie Rogers energy.” When he finally tried to pick up his bass to play, for the first time in two months, he couldn’t. “I just was stuck in that moment,” he says.
“After hearing the final output so many times, I didn’t know how to put myself back into it.” That experience, he says, crystallised what Splice was up against. Thompson calls it a “philosophical risk” alongside the obvious competitive one: that “the value of making music would be eroded, and the struggle that people go through to become really good at their craft would be diminished.”
The same anxiety surfaced inside Splice’s own testing process. Thompson runs an internal program called Soundcheck, in which over 80 producers, vocalists and artists give unfiltered feedback during the development process. On consecutive days during one round of testing, two creators — one from Splice’s content team, one of them an external producer — heard outputs from an early version of the model and gave Thompson nearly identical reactions: “This is really cool,” followed by, in his paraphrase, “What’s my role? What happens to me in the future?”
Mavy, who played with Variations before the public launch, had a different reaction. “I love that you can play with it but it doesn’t distort the original samples or loops,” she says. She also sees a practical advantage for creators who’ve heard the complaint that too many producers use the same Splice packs — something that Julian Bunetta, producer for Sabrina Carpenter’s Espresso, heard when other Splice customers noticed he was using samples from Power Tools: Sample Pack III, made by veteran producer Vaughn Oliver. “Now you don’t have that excuse anymore,” says Mavy. “You can take the loops and make another variation.”
Mavy is optimistic about where AI music tools eventually land. “I think the real artists and real creators will have more value,” she says. “People want authenticity.”
BT, for his part, ends with the same diagnosis he started with. The industry, he says, is in “an awkward moment” that it will eventually move through — but only by working across two conversations at once. “You really can’t have one without the other,” he says. “The trust problem is still there. The tooling problem is still there. This is one of the most exciting times to be alive as a musician. We just need to fix the ethics piece of it.”
The post Generative AI’s threat to music sample libraries is existential — Splice thinks it has a solution appeared first on MusicTech.

He Went from 40K Listeners to 11 Million and a Coachella Slot in Under a Year as an Indie ArtistThis week on the New Music Business podcast, Ari sits down with Oskar Med K, a breakout Norwegian EDM producer.

What the next wave of music creators is learning at Tennessee State University
The Splice team traveled to Nashville to spend the day with students from Tennessee State University (TSU) as part of the Music Business Accelerator program.

Sonic Republic Pluginize!Pluginize! is a native macOS application that scans, catalogs, and organizes installed audio plugins across AU, VST, VST3, AAX, CLAP, Universal Audio (UAD DSP and UAD Spark), and Waves. Pluginize! is the first plugin manager that handles individual Waves bundles and individual UAD plug-ins as separate items, rather than only operating at the vendor-folder level. Producers can. enable or disable a single Waves bundle (e.g., a specific compressor) or a specific UAD plug-in without going through Waves Central or UAD Connect, and without uninstalling anything. A whitelist. and auto-restore system protect user organization across vendor updates, which historically reset everything to "all enabled". Other features: - Cross-format grouping — AU, VST, VST3 and AAX versions of the same plugin are treated as one entity, switchable together with a single click. - Plugin Sets — saved active-library configurations (e.g., "Mixing", "Mastering", "Sound Design") switchable in one click. - 40+ auto-detected subcategories (Synth, Drum Machine, Reverb, Saturator, Vocal Tuner, etc.). - Storage breakdown with charts, broken down by vendor, format, and processing type. - Plugin Catalog Pro — visual catalog with editable icons and previews. - Setup Assistant — first-run guided configuration with vendor folder detection. - Menu bar integration. - Email-based activation, no serial keys. - Non-destructive by design — plugin files are moved between Active and Unused folders, never deleted. Platform: macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Universal Binary (Apple Silicon + Intel). Apple Developer ID signed and notarized, Hardened Runtime. Pluginize! is a standalone application — not a plugin. Read More

RIP Jack DouglasMC was saddened to learn of the passing of celebrated producer Jack Douglas. A note on social media from his family reads, "He passed away peacefully on Monday night. As many of you who follow him know, he produced great music, and lived a colorful life. We know that he touched many of your lives; we would love to hear more about that in the comments. He will be missed."

We look back on our 2017 interview, courtesy of writer Rob Putnam as part of his "Producers Sound Off" feature...

Jack DouglasClientele: John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Aerosmith

In the ‘60s, Jack Douglas was a musician with a label deal in hand and stars in his eyes. Encouraged by the Isley Brothers, he was inspired to engineer and ultimately to mix and produce. The now legendary producer’s first taste of studio work came as a janitor at New York’s then-new Record Plant studios. As his repertoire expanded, he was tapped to engineer John Lennon’s Imagine and later to produce the former Beatle’s final album, the Grammy-winning Double Fantasy. Originally from New York, Douglas has worked in London and currently splits his time between L.A. and NYC.

What are some of the biggest challenges facing producers today?Convincing major labels that, after mixing dozens of singles and albums, I can mix a record. When I’m hired to produce, I include a mix in the price. I’ve been told many times “But you’re not a mixer.” I find that challenging and hard to understand. It’s caused a lot of homogenization in pop music. But finding work isn’t difficult. There’s tons of it, as long as you keep all of the avenues open and are willing to diversify. But that’s only speaking for myself. I bet a big problem for a lot of producers is finding work.

What’s an ideal client for you?There’s no such thing. They’re all different. I may work with a brilliant artist who’s a fall-down drunk. I may work with the nicest guy in the world, but he needs so much help with his music. Maybe John Lennon was the ideal client. He had more talent than he could ever imagine. He delineated between who was the artist and who was the producer. My job was to direct him and bring an objective opinion of his work. His job was to write and perform. It made working with him simple.

When does a producer become a co-writer?For years I co-wrote with Aerosmith and didn’t take the credit. I thought that it was the producer’s job to facilitate the song in any way: writing bits and bobs and pieces along the way. I did that for a few albums and then caught on that I was missing a big chunk of dough. You start to see my name as a writer around [1977’s] Draw the Line. But I don’t jump in to write unless I’m invited or I feel the need. Otherwise it’s an intrusion. I have to write a big chunk [of a song] before I ask for a percentage. Not words here, chords there. That’s a producer’s job.

What’s your strategy for putting an artist at ease?During pre-production, I like to discover what makes an artist tick long before we get into the studio so that I can facilitate his or her dream. When we do go in, we feel like we came together in the same car. I do pre-production with all of my artists. With a band like Aerosmith, it may last a month. Other artists come to me with a demo that’s worthy of release. I feel it out as I go.

What have been your favorite technical developments over the past few years?Good copies of older equipment. Companies are making great stuff—reproductions of Fairchilds that sound better than [the original] Fairchilds. And these don’t have to be rack-mounted. They can be virtual. They’ve taken the [original] idea and improved on it.

How do you establish a strong relationship with a mastering engineer?I have a 35-year relationship with everyone at Sterling [Sound], starting with George Marino and Greg Calbi. Aside from things done by Doug Sax or Bob Ludwig, Sterling’s done 80 percent of my mastering.

What are the best ways for artists to save money in the studio?Own your own studio. No matter how big or small. Otherwise, be prepared when you go in. But allow for improvisation. Don’t be so stiff that nothing’s going to change.

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve ever faced in the studio?I put a lot of pressure on myself. I’m a nervous wreck before I start a project—it doesn’t matter who it is. I’m challenged every time I go into the studio. I try not to show it, but internally there’s a bit of stage fright. Once it gets going and I see that it’s on course, everything’s fine.

What does the future hold for major labels?To buy records cheaply that are already made and distribute them. This means whatever the record-buying public is into. They’re not going to take any chances. Major labels have lost their way. They’re only interested in pop, urban music, a little country and not much else. Fortunately, there are avenues for every kind of music. We don’t need the majors except to compete with artists in the mainstream genres.

Who are some of your dream clients?The Rolling Stones. My buddy Don Was produces for them and he does it well. My other dream client was Bob Dylan and I’ve worked with him [on Allen Ginsberg’s 1983 record, First Blues].

What’s the key to identifying talent?Originality. I don’t like chasing trends. Hearing something I’ve never heard before is what turns me on. It keeps me interested.

Photo, by Joanne.nathan, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

The post RIP Jack Douglas first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.