Being a DJ ranks as the #1 most desired job in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, per new studyA new study has apparently revealed that being a DJ ranks as the #1 most sought after job in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
A massive study conducted by Remitly – which specialises in international money transfers – looked at online searches for “how to be a…”, and found that being DJ was the most desired job among participants from these countries [via Mixmag]. Searches for “how to be a DJ” ranked higher than searches for becoming a vet, actor, writer or CEO.

READ MORE: Producer John Dahlbäck was “scared of AI”, now he’s a “firm believer” in some tools – here’s why

Searches from 145 countries were included in the study, with DJ being the 10th most desirable job in the world overall. Becoming an actor was right at the top with over 222,000 searches, followed by pilot, firefighter, lawyer and then YouTuber, the latter likely reflecting the aspirations of the younger portion of the sample size.
Interestingly, searches for “how to be a DJ” rose 14 places since 2024, now with nearly 100,000 queries.
Another key finding of the study was that being a YouTuber is now the top dream job in more countries than any other, coming in first in 28 countries, predominantly across Latin America and the Caribbean.
“In 2022, we set out to uncover the world’s most coveted dream jobs,” Remitly says. “We revisited the data in 2024, and now, two years on, we’re back for a third look at the most popular jobs people across 145 countries are searching for when they imagine their next career chapter. What those popular careers are has shifted dramatically since we first started this research.”
You can read the results of the full study at Remitly.
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Producer John Dahlbäck was “scared of AI”, now he’s a “firm believer” in some tools – here’s whyDJ and producer John Dahlbäck has explained why he’s adopted AI into his work, favouring AI vocal tools in particular.
Dahlbäck has worked with artists such as Kaskade, Benny Benassi, and also collaborated with Avicii during his early career on track Don’t Hold Back under the name of Jovicii. In a new interview, he’s shared how he looks to use AI like “an instrument”, and why he feels excited by it, rather than scared.

READ MORE: Credits.fm is a free, open music credits database to help artists get paid in the AI era

Dahlbäck tells MusicRadar, “I tend to turn to AI for inspiration mainly. I use it more of an instrument – just as I would Splice or a synthesiser. Just as you’re tweaking things on a synth that eventually leads to something, I do the same with AI. I can feed [it] that beat that I’m doing, and it gives me ideas of where to develop it.
“[When I was younger] I was heavily into sampling. The way I would use samples is that I would try to re-create it rather than just include it in the final product. The same goes for AI in my case. I’m also a firm believer in voice-changing tools with AI. I sing something in the microphone with my horrible singing voice, and I change that into a beautiful singing voice.”

He goes on to explain, “I’m very excited by AI if the person using it is also creative and not just lazy. My brother is a very old-school music producer, he records a lot of bands traditionally.
“I used to be scared of AI in music, and he told me it was fantastic, he’d tell me that he had a singer who came in to do a full vocal, but then she left the studio, and he realised he didn’t have backing vocals. So, he just loads in her acapella, and he gets great stems and just backing vocals by using AI. It made the vocals more full. I just thought that was a brilliant use of it.”
Dahlbäck also says he recently spoke to the producer of “quite a famous Swedish singer” who he can’t name, and says that she had discovered tapes from when she was singing at five years of age. Plans are now in motion to train AI on her singing voice at that age, “so that she can duet herself”.
“It’s kind of incredible,” he says. “I’m all for that, and like I said, I don’t like when it’s just anyone sloppy using AI to just [generate] a pop song, then export and then upload Spotify. That doesn’t make any sense.”
The post Producer John Dahlbäck was “scared of AI”, now he’s a “firm believer” in some tools – here’s why appeared first on MusicTech.

Rust Romance releases Drive in my head, a FREE saturation plugin
Developer Rust Romance has released Drive in my head, a free saturation plugin for Windows and macOS. Drive in my head is a physically modeled op-amp line-driver plugin. The developer says it is not designed as an obvious distortion or fuzz effect. Instead, the idea here is to give clean sources the feel of passing [...]
View post: Rust Romance releases Drive in my head, a FREE saturation plugin

Synth Anthology 5 From UVI From the pioneering polysynths of the 1970s to the flagship and boutique hardware of today, Synth Anthology 5 promises to provide users with “an entire history of electronic sound” at their fingertips.

50​ Y‌ea⁠rs Ago: 12 Al⁠bum‍s That Defined 1976‍With‍ the Unit‌ed States marking 250 years since the adoption o‍f‍ the Declaration of Indep‌endence‌ this July 4, now is the‍ perfe⁠ct moment to revi⁠sit 1976—the nation's bice‍ntennial year‌—and the cl‌assic alb⁠ums it produced.

Uber’s European expansion plans may have hit a speed bumpBack in February, Uber announced ambitious plans to launch in seven new European markets in 2026 — but now five of those launches are reportedly on hold.

Seeing Bacteria, Nanoprisms, and More with an Atomic Force Microscope
Unlike almost every other kind of microscope, atomic-force microscopes (AFMs) don’t use any kind of optical beam to image their subjects. Instead, they physically detect the subject’s surface with a tiny probe, repeating this thousands of times to build up a height map of the subject, sometimes with a resolution below a single nanometer. [Ben Krasnow] got to use an AFM in an investigation of one of his projects, and shared some unusual uses of it in his latest video.

For his first demonstration, [Ben] took a video of the probe head in action. Since the probe oscillates at nine kilohertz, this was less straightforward than it sounds, but a stroboscopic welding camera filming near that frequency could visualize its motion. The next project was to image some biological samples, particularly bacteria. First, [Ben] let the bacteria from nattō (fermented soybeans) multiply in a sterile growth medium, then centrifuged and washed them.
He spin-coated a thin layer of gelatine onto part of a silicon wafer, which provided a very flat substrate. The gelatine is electrostatically attracted to the bacteria, adhering them to the slide and letting [Ben] wash away other contaminants. This let the AFM image the bacteria clearly, even revealing how a spin-coating step had oriented them all in the same direction.
[Ben] also imaged a few other samples, including silver nanoprisms and track-etched membranes. Track-etched membranes use high-energy radiation and an etchant to cut very consistent, fine holes into a plastic filtration membrane. Finally, [Ben] used it to image his laser-etched diffraction gratings; to find out how the laser had created these diffraction patterns, he tried to selectively etch away the laser-exposed metal, using the AFM to verify that this metal had been stripped away. Neither an acidic nor a basic etch worked, but electrochemical etching seemed promising.
If after seeing this you want your own atomic force microscope, we’ve seen a few DIY AFMs, including one which can resolve individual atoms.

Thanks to [H Hack] for the tip!

34Audiovisuals RevenantDieA revenant never truly dies. It lingers, feeds on its own echo, and returns. RevenantDie is a spectral instrument built on that idea: at its heart lives a feedback delay network — four coupled delay lines stirred by time-varying rotation matrices, detuned by a random-walk warble, diffused through allpass filters and closed by a saturating, self-limiting feedback path. Left to itself the network refuses to fall silent; your job is to raise it, shape it, and decide how it decays. The same engine is coaxed into four spirits — an endless Drone that self-feeds forever, a struck Resonator that rings from MIDI notes, a spectral Haunt that captures and freezes incoming audio, and a raw Oscillator fed straight into the network. Feedback delay network engine — four coupled delay lines with time-varying rotation, random-walk warble, allpass diffusion and a saturating feedback path. Four voices from one engine: Drone (self-sustaining), Resonator (struck / MIDI-tuned), Haunt (reverberate & freeze audio) and Oscillator (sine-to-saw). Network macros — Drive, Damping, Motion and Warble — shape every voice. Amplitude ADSR envelope, global Width and Output, plus a license-interlocked soft-clipper that keeps the output under 0 dBFS. Two assignable LFO modulators — drag-to-assign onto any knob. Ships as two builds sharing the same engine: an Instrument version (MIDI / sidechain Haunt) and an FX version (processes its own track). 50 factory presets organised by voice, plus a user preset manager (.rvnt patches). Resizable UI (50%–200%) with per-voice accent colours; all parameters host-automatable. Time-limited fully functional demo — no feature restrictions. Activate on up to 2 machines with a single license. Read More

Bitcoin nears $63.5K into weekly close as trader warns of 'terrible' MondayBitcoin reached its highest levels in nearly a fortnight over the weekend, but BTC price action faced an "absolutely terrible" Monday track record.

Free Behringer Synth Editor Digital Sunset Studios have been busy working on an interesting project: a free software tool that provides computer-based editing for a range of Behringer’s synths.

GetYourGrooveOn GYGODynamicsGYGO Dynamics is a two-sided leveler. Instead of one compressor threshold, it works both directions at once: it tames loud peaks down and lifts quiet passages up, toward a target window you can see and drag directly on a live map of your signal. We built it around one idea: loud and quiet problems aren't the same problem, so they shouldn't share one knob. Peaks get pulled down quickly and released smoothly; quiet passages get lifted more gently, using a slower, perceptual sense of level so the lift feels natural instead of pumping. Both sides are visible at once on the Dynamic Map — the loud ceiling as a red line, the quiet floor as a blue line — and you can drag either line right on the waveform to reshape the window in real time, or use the Tame Loud and Lift Quiet knobs to do the same thing numerically. Use it on a vocal that swings from a whisper to a shout and needs both ends brought into a controllable window without three plugins stacked to do it. Use it on a bus or a full mix as a gentle, program-dependent leveler that keeps quiet sections present and loud sections in check without obvious compression pumping. Use it on podcast or dialogue tracks where consistent perceived loudness matters more than a specific compression curve. And use the live map itself as a diagnostic — watching the white input trace against the red output trace shows exactly where and how much gain is being applied, moment to moment. Feature list: A live Dynamic Map showing input (white) against processed output (red), with two draggable threshold lines — the loud ceiling and the quiet floor — that you can grab directly on the waveform or control with the Tame Loud and Lift Quiet knobs (the two are the same parameter, so either always reflects the other); Speed and Stability controls that shape how quickly and how smoothly the leveler follows changing material; an overall Mix knob to dial the total strength of both upward and downward leveling; an Output trim applied after leveling; and real-time input/output level meters plus a live gain readout and transport clock on the map itself. Formats: AU for Logic Pro. Platform: macOS. Trial: 14-day full-function trial via GYGO Portal. Read More

New Google commercial imagines a Declaration of Independence written with help from AITwo hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a new commercial asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace?

Disk Polishing Goes Open SourceOptical media is great — it’s pretty high density, relatively durable, and decently long-lasting if
“That’ll buff out” is very often true when it comes to disks.
well cared for. If not well cared for, well, it’s only relatively durable, and we’ve probably all picked up a second-hand disk that’s too scratched to use. The X-Box 360 is notorious for causing circular damage, and while decent disk cleaners were easy to get in the 90s, we’re not sure how far we trust what’s on offer at retailers today. Hence [Dennis], aka [RetroGameRevival]’s RGR ezBuff polishing machine, which does exactly what it says on the tin: buffs disks to a polish, easily.
We’d say the whole thing is 3D printed, but of course you still need a motor and controller — if you had to turn a crank, that would just be a Buff polishing machine, no ez — and we’ve yet to see a printer poop out polishing compound. If you build it, keep in mind that you’re taking the top layer of material off the disk to polish scratches away, so don’t overdo it. It’s entirely possible to ruin a disk beyond repair with too-aggressive buffing; it’s also possible for disks to be scratched too deeply to save. Polishing can’t save genuine disk rot, though in our experience you’re more likely to find scratched disks than rotten ones. Still, [Dennis]’s birthday gift to the community — it was apparently released on his birthday — should keep more than a few disks out of the trash.
With Sony getting out of the disk game, physical media is becoming more precious than ever, so it’s good to see what looks like a quality polishing option for those of us who either never had a polisher or didn’t save theirs. If you really want your disks to last, maybe we should bring back CD caddies.
Thanks to [Dean] for the tip, via timeExtension.com.

Kraken lets traders use tokenized stocks as collateral for leveraged tradesEligible users can now use select tokenized stocks and ETFs as collateral for futures and margin trading without selling their holdings.

Rhodes to launch the MK8/80AE Limited to a run of just 80 instruments, the Rhodes MK8/80AE will feature a gloss-varnished black oak case, chrome detailing and a transparent hood, with each unit handcrafted in the UK by Rhodes Master Builders.