Bitwig Studio 5.2 is here, and its new Compressor+ feature “excels” at adding colour and toneBitwig Studio’s 5.2 update has arrived in its beta testing phase, with an array of new features including an all-in-one compressor tool, Compressor+, for adding colour and tone, as well as mastering.
Additionally, the update brings three hardware-inspired EQs, a clipper device called Over, plus workflow enhancements including more precise editing and dynamic beat detection.

READ MORE: Bitwig Studio 5 continues to innovate with a new tranche of creative tools

Firstly, let’s dive into Compressor+. This new tool analyses incoming audio across four frequency bands. Users can tweak each band’s Intensity and Timing offsets to fine-tune which parts of the signal cause compression.
The device comes with three modes that determine the compressor’s behaviour (standard, beyond – for an extended compressor range – and Dual, for upwards compression), and the output hosts a range of different VCA Colours. These are:

Clear – applies no colouring
Prism – gives a clean blend of true multi­band com­pres­sion, with uni­fied sin­gle-band com­pres­sion
Tran­sis­tor – a con­sis­tent ana­logue feel, with a low bump and slight­ly re­duced highs
Sat­u­rate – a mov­ing analogue feel, with a mid-range bump and some frequency-dependent behaviour

Compressor+ also hosts six “Characters”, each to engage different styles of compression by changing various gain reduction and envelope behaviours:

Vanil­la – ap­plies pa­ra­me­ters lit­er­al­ly, in­clud­ing At­tack and Re­lease times go­ing all the way down to zero
Smooth – uses slow per-band re­sponse, of­fer­ing min­i­mal dis­tortion
Over – com­presses more quick­ly, but in a sta­ble way
Glue – slow to en­gage and quick to re­lease
Re­sist – has longer en­velopes and tries to quick­ly snap back after­wards to pre­serve bass and add even har­mon­ics when pushed
Smash – over-ac­cel­er­ates the at­tacks and re­leas­es and uses the Auto Tim­ing control to fur­ther in­crease ac­cel­er­a­tion

Moving on to the new EQ tools, the trio on offer are Sculpt, Focus and Tilt. Sculpt is inspired by the Pultec EQP-1, a vintage broadband EQ “good for bass sweet­en­ing”, while Focus recreates the components of the mid-range-oriented MEQ-5. Lastly, Tilt hosts a simple interface allowing users to re-balance any sound to be brighter or darker.
Beta testing of Bitwig Studio 5.2 starts now. If you have an active Upgrade Plan, you’ll find the installers in your user profile for free. A final release is expected this summer.
View the full changelog for further information, or check out Bitwig.
The post Bitwig Studio 5.2 is here, and its new Compressor+ feature “excels” at adding colour and tone appeared first on MusicTech.

UMG is returning to TikTok after settlement of months-long disputeMonths after Universal Music Group pulled its entire song catalogue from TikTok – effectively muting all user videos which included them – both companies have reached a new licensing agreement that will see UMG tracks re-added to the video-sharing platform.
In a fiery open letter penned by UMG back in January titled ‘Why we must call time out on TikTok’, the music giant accused TikTok of trying to “bully” it into “accepting a deal worth less than the previous deal, far less than fair market value and not reflective of [its] exponential growth”.

READ MORE: UMG and BandLab Technologies team up for “first of its kind” ethical AI collaboration

Now, both companies have resolved the high-profile dispute, striking a new “multi-dimensional” licensing agreement that will see music by artists under the UMG banner return to TikTok at last.
“This new chapter in our relationship with TikTok focuses on the value of music, the primacy of human artistry and the welfare of the creative community,” says Sir Lucian Grainge, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group.
“We look forward to collaborating with the team at TikTok to further the interests of our artists and songwriters and drive innovation in fan engagement while advancing social music monetisation.”
 Shou Chew, CEO of TikTok, adds: “Music is an integral part of the TikTok ecosystem and we are pleased to have found a path forward with Universal Music Group. We are committed to working together to drive value, discovery and promotion for all of UMG’s amazing artists and songwriters, and deepen their ability to grow, connect and engage with the TikTok community.”
The agreement, according to both UMG and TikTok, marks a “new era of strategic collaboration”, which in addition to the return of UMG music to the platform, aims to deliver “improved remuneration” for UMG’s artists, new promotional and engagement opportunities for their songs and “industry-leading protections with respect to generative AI”.
Both organisations also say they are working together to realise “new monetisation opportunities utilising TikTok’s growing e-commerce capabilities”.
Additionally, TikTok will continue to invest in building artist-centric tools, including “Add to Music App”, enhanced data and analytics, and integrated ticketing.
“We are delighted to welcome UMG and UMPG [Universal Music Publishing Group] back to TikTok,” says Ole Obermann, TikTok’s Global Head of Music Business Development. “We look forward to working together to forge a path that creates deeper connections between artists, creators, and fans. In particular, we will work together to make sure that AI tools are developed responsibly to enable a new era of musical creativity and fan engagement while protecting human creativity.”
Michael Nash, Chief Digital Officer and EVP of Universal Music Group, says: “Developing transformational partnerships with important innovators is critical to UMG’s commitment to promoting an environment in which artists and songwriters prosper. 
“We’re gratified to renew our relationship with TikTok predicated on significant advancements in commercial and marketing opportunities as well as protections provided to our industry-leading roster on their platform. With the constantly evolving ways that social interaction, fan engagement, music discovery and artistic ingenuity converge on TikTok, we see great potential in our collaboration going forward.”
Currently, there’s no hard date as to when UMG’s catalogue will return to TikTok in its entirety, but both organisations say they are working “expeditiously” to return music to the platform “in due course”.
The post UMG is returning to TikTok after settlement of months-long dispute appeared first on MusicTech.

Why Wolfgang Gartner used custom-trained AI vocals on ‘Automatic’One minute and 51 seconds into Automatic, a husky voice that evokes the rasp and gravitas of a 90s rap verse fills the sonic frame.
“Ya know, sometimes people ask me like, ‘How long did it take? How long do I have to work at it?’ And I’m not gonna lie, some people got it; some don’t.”

READ MORE: Fabiana Palladino is balancing perfectionism and knowing when to let go

The vocal texture is as gravelly as its delivery is authoritative. “To me, it sounds like Ol’ Dirty Bastard combined with The Notorious B.I.G,” Wolfgang Gartner muses.
Ol’ Dirty Bastard, The Notorious B.I.G, and the word “elderly.” At first blush, the outlier in this series is clear. Yet all three synergize in the context of Automatic — Gartner’s first drum ‘n’ bass production in more than 25 years, released via Dim Mak Records on February 9.
Adding to the single’s novelty is Gartner’s unusual approach to generating its rap verses. After writing and rapping them himself, Gartner morphed them into three custom-trained artificial intelligence (AI) voice models using two different speech-to-speech resynthesis applications designed for voiceover work and video game audio: Altered Studio and Respeecher.
That presence-commanding, spoken-word vocal that filters in just before the two-minute mark is a synthetic voice from Respeecher’s elderly category. It even has a name: Prospero. Each of the voices available in Respeecher’s portfolio, which currently spans 102 different options, is classified by name, age, pitch, and country of origin. Upon selecting a voice, users of the subscription service, purported by creators as a tool capable of producing “Hollywood-quality voices,” can adjust speech and pitch-shift to create the desired effect.
Wolfgang Gartner
To achieve the resonant vocal at the centre of Automatic, Gartner transposed Prospero’s voice down eight semitones. First, though, he had to record himself speaking the lyrics, pronouncing each exactly as intended while carefully considering cadence and inflection. This step, Gartner imagines, is not unlike professional voice actors’ preparation for the cartoons they voice.
“I had to practise saying things how I wanted to…I was walking around my house practising voices all the time for a while,” he says. “I would never want to actually [use these voices in front of] another person or let them hear the original audio recordings that I uploaded because it’s embarrassing and because it’s like a cartoon voice…I’ve done this for female vocals as well and had to practice talking [and] rapping like a girl for days before the results sounded even close to good.”
After getting in character to “learn the voice” of this interior rap verse, down to the pronunciation of each word, Gartner recorded the vocals for this section “at least 15 or 20 times in a row.” He then stacked them and slowly worked his way through the audio, one word at a time. He followed this formula to engineer the two main verses that bookend Prospero’s. This time, the Grammy-nominated producer used Altered Studio, a voice content creation platform offering speech-to-speech voice morphing and voice cloning, among other capabilities.
“Every time I [heard] a word where I was like ‘yes, that’s how I wanted that word to sound,’ then I chopped it,” he recalls. “This is how I did it just to get the vocal to submit to the AI, and then I did it on the other side of [the AI] too. Literally every single word that I submitted as audio was chopped from one take just to get everything perfectly.”

That Gartner has both an eye and an ear for minutiae is evident in how he details the individual steps that, together, yield the three rap verses.
As he speaks, he embodies the essence of a mad scientist working solitarily, meticulously, and with a singular focus on an experiment that challenges convention and at which others will marvel. The creative process behind Automatic does just that, albeit with rap verses and beats rather than test tubes and beakers.
Candidly, Altered AI and Respeecher weren’t designed for this use case, and of course, there are far faster and more straightforward ways to source vocals. But Gartner had time. He’d dedicated two years to making an album — his awaited answer to 2016’s 10 Ways to Steal Home Plate — so he wasn’t touring as much as usual.
From the availability of a commodity that seems always to be in short supply for DJ/producers, coupled with Gartner’s creative drive to do something different, something that ventured beyond a commission from a singer-songwriter or a vocal from a sample pack, Automatic was born. It’s one of several singles to come from the would-be follow-up to 10 Ways to Steal Home Plate.
“I did make an album, but we’ve since decided to just sign [the tracks] individually as singles,” he says. The first, Level Up featuring UK MC Scrufizzer, landed last December via Dim Mak Records.

Gartner doesn’t mince his words. He tells me unequivocally, and with his whole chest, that creating and training the voice models for Automatic “took forever.” And although he wagers that he could conceptualise and fashion the rap verses in just 10 days now (the vocals alone took at least a month, from start to finish), he claims he is one of the few electronic producers who would voluntarily do so.
“Part of the reason why I love it is because I know that most people, once they find out what it would take to get what they want or to get what I get out of it…” he pauses, then adds, “I don’t know anybody who would be willing to do it.”
The question is: why do it?
In the complete creative control that these speech-to-speech resynthesis applications afford, Gartner finds the conceptual freedom he’s sought his entire career.
Wolfgang Gartner
“This is the missing link, the thing that I had been looking for all my life. Because ever since I made my first song when I was 11 in 1993, my songs had lyrics. I always sang them, but the sound of my voice just isn’t cool,” Gartner recalls.
“There’s nothing you can do about that — you’re either born with great vocal chords or not. So, my whole career I’ve used vocalists to do verses for me. And then over the past five or six years, I started writing the entire vocal, singing a demo of it, and then having vocalists just re-sing it for me. That was what I always wanted to do, but most vocalists I think weren’t really into that.”
Still, he acknowledges that neither Altered Studio nor Respeecher is a seamless substitute. Because the applications, commonly used for voiceover work, were not developed to support the creation of vocals for a musical production, it’s understandably easier to generate a rap or spoken-word vocal than it is a more melodic, singing vocal. The latter would require significantly more editing than a rap vocal (akin to those on Automatic) already does.
These services were not built for this use case but in this unprecedented era of AI, generative and otherwise, Gartner is confident that in the not-so-distant future, one will be. Voice-Swap is already a promising solution for such a use case, albeit not yet perfect.
Wolfgang Gartner
The advent of such platforms can be expected to come with both added convenience and legal considerations, but that’s a story — or, in Gartner’s case, a song — for another time. For now, in the Wild West of AI in music, Gartner has “developed a system and learned all the little quirks” of this technology in its current form, enabling him to leverage it more quickly and efficiently on future productions. Some might even say it’s, well, automatic.
The post Why Wolfgang Gartner used custom-trained AI vocals on ‘Automatic’ appeared first on MusicTech.

From Connie Chan to Ethan Kurzweil venture capitalists continue to play musical chairsWhen Keith Rabois announced he was leaving Founders Fund to return to Khosla Ventures in January, it came as a shock to many in the venture capital ecosystem — and not just because Rabois is a big name in the industry. It was surprising because unlike in many other fields, venture capitalists don’t traditionally move […]
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States’ backlash against Binance.US continues with 6th license pulledOregon joins five other states that have delicensed Binance.US after former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to felony charges.

Tiny Prisms Let You See What Lies Beneath a BGA ChipCompared to through-hole construction, inspecting SMD construction is a whole other game. Things you thought were small before are almost invisible now, and making sure solder got where it’s supposed to go can be a real chore. Add some ball grid array (BGA) chips into the mix, where the solder joints are not visible by design, and inspection is more a leap of faith than objective proof of results.
How it works.
Unless, of course, you put the power of optics to work, as [Petteri Aimonen] does with this clever BGA inspection tool. It relies on a pair of tiny prisms to bounce light under one side of a BGA chip and back up the other. The prisms are made from thin sheets of acrylic; [Petteri] didn’t have any 1-mm acrylic sheet on hand, so he harvested material from a razor blade package. The edge of each piece was ground to a 45-degree angle and polished with successively finer grits until the surfaces were highly reflective. One prism was affixed to a small scrap of PCB with eleven SMD LEDs in a row, forming a light pipe that turns the light through 90 degrees. The light source is held along one edge of a BGA, shining light underneath to the other prism, bouncing light through the forest of solder balls and back toward the observer.
The results aren’t exactly crystal clear, which is understandable given the expedient nature of the materials and construction employed. But it’s certainly more than enough to see any gross problems lying below a BGA, like shorts or insufficiently melted solder. [Petteri] reports that flux can be a problem, too, as excess of the stuff can crystalize between pads under the BGA and obstruct the light. A little extra cleaning should help in such cases.
Haven’t tackled a BGA job yet? You might want to get up to speed on that.

Artists have earned $123m via Bandcamp Fridays since 2020 and fans have paid artists and their labels $1.3bn via the platform to dateThe direct to fan platform celebrates its 40th Bandcamp Friday on May 3
Source

5 hip hop sampling techniques that lasted for decades
Here are five timeless hip hop sampling techniques from the '90s and early '00s that you can use in your own productions.

The NMPA’s TikTok deal has officially ended. What does that mean for independent publishers in the US?“Music is essential to TikTok. As we have said, we are not engaging in an extension of our deal," said NMPA President & CEO David Israelite
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Manta: An Open On-FPGA Debug InterfaceWe always can use more tools for FPGA debugging, and the Manta project by [Fischer Moseley] delivers without a shadow of a doubt. Manta lets you add a debug and data transfer channel between your computer and your FPGA, that you can easily access with helpfully included Python libraries.
With just a short configuration file as input, it gives you cores you add into your FPGA design, tapping the signals of interest as an FPGA-embedded logic analyzer, interacting with registers, and even letting you quickly transfer tons of data if you so desire.
Manta is easy to install, is developer-friendly, has been designed in Amaranth, and is fully open source as you would expect. At the moment, Manta supports both UART and Ethernet interfaces for data transfer. As for embedding the Manta cores into your project, they can be exported to both Amaranth and Verilog. You should check out the documentation website — it contains everything you might want to know to get started quick.
The Manta project has started out as our hacker’s MIT thesis, and we’re happy that we can cover it for you all. FPGA-embedded logic analyzers are a fascinating and much-needed tool, and we’ve had our own [Al Williams] tell you about his on-FPGA logic analysis journey!

Sonic Temple to Return to Columbus Later This Month   

After a three year pause due to COVID, Sonic Temple Festival (formerly Rock on the Range) made a triumphant return to Columbus last spring. Not only did the festival pack MAPFRE stadium all weekend, but they did it for a ground-breaking 4 days, vs the standard 3, which is how the festival had run for years prior.

Once again, festival-goers are gearing up for an incredible weekend, highlighted by a combination of some of the biggest acts in rock and metal, as well as some of the most exciting up-and-coming bands. My personal highlights this year include The Original Misfits, Pantera, Evanescence and Limp Bizkit (none of whom I’ve personally seen at this festival, and I’ve been attending since 2014.

There are dozens of other really exciting bands to check out this year as well. Judas Priest are touring a juggernaut of a new album (‘Invincible Shield’). Sum 41 just released ‘Heaven :X: Hell,’ slated to be their last. Kerry King is back with an all-star band and the new tunes sound amazing so far! This year also sees Machine Head return to the festival circuit for the first time in ages.

As if this wasn’t enough, Sonic Temple has added a fourth stage this year! How’s that all going to flow? I’ll let you know in my review afterwards, but I’m confident the DWP team will continue to run the best festivals in the country, once again.

For anyone who attended last year, you were sure to notice the major changes in the layout of the festival. Rather than supporting the stadium with a stage on either side, one of the stages is now “in front of” the stadium, meaning that the festival grounds have now pushed into the parking lot. This looked a bit odd on the map, but once inside, it proved to be an excellent layout and a nice improvement over what was in place for years prior.

In prior years, I’ve always supplied the annual “survival guide,” which I’ve linked to HERE.

The most important take-a-ways from it are really the following:

Sunscreen and fluids are a must

Explore the grounds. Don’t just run up to the rail and camp all day.  You’ll burn and burn out, not to mention miss everything.

Pace yourself. Four days is a lot and I’m ten years older than I was when I started this. Sit down every once in a while. It does wonders for your feet in the morning. 

Enjoy the city of Columbus while you’re in town. There is so much to do in the city, but be sure to get in to the festival early every day. Those afternoon bands are future headliners and you’ll want to be able to say “I saw them when.”

It’s hard to imagine this festival (or any for that matter) getting much bigger than 4 days and 4 stages, but here we are. This is an adventure I look forward to every single year and this one looks like it just might be the best yet!
If you've had your tickets for months, then you've likely been counting down the days for some time. If you're still waiting though, head over HERE and grab your tickest today! 

ALGO from RYK Modular Described by RYK Modular as “all knobs and no menus”, ALGO is a stereo Eurorack module that offers a wealth of FM sounds and requires no menu navigation. 

G-Sonique Releases FREE BFX24 Analog Filter Plugin For Windows
G-Sonique released a new version of the Bi-Polar Analog Multifilter BFX24 Plugin, and the Windows-exclusive release is available for free download. However, it is only available for download via the Telegram app.  In an unusual move, the freebie is only available via accessing the G-Sonique Telegram channel, which requires downloading the Telegram app.  G-Sonique promises [...]
View post: G-Sonique Releases FREE BFX24 Analog Filter Plugin For Windows

American Music Tourism Act aims to help struggling venues and musiciansIf you get past the top 5%, dominated by Live Nation and AEG, live music tours and venues in the US are treading water and, in many cases, struggling to survive. The bi-partisan American Music Tourism Act hopes to harness music tourism to change that.....
The post American Music Tourism Act aims to help struggling venues and musicians appeared first on Hypebot.

Musicians: Don’t Panic, TikTok will NOT be banned tomorrow!Bruce Houghton of Hypebot and Bandsintown joins Michael Brandvold and Jay Gilbert on the Music Biz Weekly podcast to discuss some current events impacting musicians.....
The post Musicians: Don’t Panic, TikTok will NOT be banned tomorrow! appeared first on Hypebot.