Martinic AX73 Sample Library released The Martinic AX73 Sample Library brings the sound of the softsynth and more to Kontakt.

Touch The Universe Productions Ethereal Dreams Library for Synthmaster 2 Ethereal Dreams for Synthmaster 2 contains 248 high quality presets suitable for any contemporary electronic or ambient music genres spread out in a variety of categories. It includes over... Read More

Coinbase screws up, Florida bans CBDCs, and Ordinals face controversy: Hodler’s Digest, May 7-13Calls for a boycott of Coinbase over memecoin controversy, Florida’s ban on CBDCs, and the effects of Bitcoin Ordinals on the BTC network.

Google bets the farm on AI, Twitter gets a new CEO, and Meta contractors protestHey, friends — you’ve made it to the end of the week. Congrats! That’s an achievement worth celebrating, I’d say. And what better way to ring in the weekend than by recapping the week in tech? This is Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s weekly news roundup, where we highlight the most important, impactful and otherwise eye-popping stories over the past days. We get it — you’re busy. Hence, a digest that highlights all the key happenings.
Before we get on to the good stuff, a reminder that on May 17, TechCrunch Live, TC’s virtual speaker series, will feature Intel Capital’s Mark Rostick and Garima Kapoor — the founder of MinIO, a startup building an enterprise-grade, but open source, object storage solution. On the further horizon, there’s TC City Spotlight: Atlanta on June 7, which will host a pitch competition, a panel discussion on investing in the Atlanta ecosystem and more. Last but not least is Disrupt in San Francisco (from September 19–21), a conference jam-packed with expert-led sessions and interviews with movers and shakers in the tech space. Mark the dates!
Now, with that out of the way, here’s the top headlines.
most read
Google I/O, recapped: On Google I/O keynote day, the search and internet advertising giant put forth a rapid-fire stream of announcements during its developer conference — including many unveilings of recent AI-related things it’s been working on. If you didn’t have time to watch a two-hour presentation, the TechCrunch team took that on and delivered story after story on new products and features — plus quick hits of the biggest news in an easy-to-digest, easy-to-skim list.
The purge continues: Twitter is purging inactive accounts on its platform, which may free up a number of long-coveted usernames, according to recent tweets by owner Elon Musk. Though Twitter for years has promised to put more usernames back into rotation, it hadn’t yet made any large-scale effort to do so, despite having an inactive account policy in place that suggests Twitter’s users should log in at least every 30 days to keep accounts from being permanently removed.
New Twitter CEO: In other Twitter news, Elon Musk says that he’s found a new CEO for Twitter. Musk didn’t initially specify who’s going to take on the role, though The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that NBCUniversal head of advertising Linda Yaccarino is actively “in talks” for the position. In a tweet, Musk announced that he’ll transition from his role as CEO of the company to serving as its executive chair and chief technology officer. The new CEO is expected to start in six weeks, according to Musk.
Health records leaked: NextGen Healthcare, a U.S.-based provider of electronic health record software, admitted that hackers breached its systems and stole the personal data of more than 1 million patients. In a data breach notification filed with the Maine attorney general’s office, NextGen Healthcare confirmed that hackers accessed the personal data of 1.05 million patients, including approximately 4,000 Maine residents.
Rapid lays off workers: Rapid, previously known as RapidAPI, a startup that built out an API marketplace valued at $1 billion last year, has laid off another 70 employees less than two weeks after letting go of 50% of its staff, TechCrunch has learned. An affected employee who wished to remain anonymous told TC that just 42 people remain at the company — down from 230 in April — reflecting an 82% drop in headcount.
Meta contractors protest: Content moderators under Sama, Meta’s content review subcontractor in Africa, earlier this week picketed at the company’s headquarters in Kenya demanding their April salary. The 184 moderators have sued Sama for allegedly laying them off unlawfully, after Meta wound down its content review arm in March, and Majorel, the social media giant’s new partner based in Africa, for blacklisting on instruction by Meta.
From Pokémon to Peridot: From the makers of Pokémon Go comes another mobile game that brings cute little creatures to our fingertips: Peridot. Like a ’90s Tamagotchi toy, Peridot is a pet simulator, but it takes place completely within augmented reality. You can feed, play with, walk, breed and socialize with your Peridots, but don’t worry — if you take a break from the game, your creatures won’t poop all over your screen and/or die.
Texting, but different: “The medium is the message” is the common phrase, but entrepreneur Alexis Traina believes that messages themselves — text messages, to be exact — deserve attention, too. Traina is the CEO and co-founder of HiNOTE, an app that helps people create messages, set over personalized backdrops of anything from a tipped-over wineglass to a branded letterhead notebook page. The idea, she said in an interview with TechCrunch, is that she wouldn’t get up every day and dress in green, blue and gray — so why do our text messages stick to those colors?

audio

Need listening material for your weekday commute — or shower, for that matter? TechCrunch has you covered. On Equity, the crew dove into a brace of new Mayfield funds, as well as how Wellthy is helping caregivers feel less overwhelmed and the slowing growth of tech companies. Over at Found, the team talked with the co-founders of Juliet, who are reimagining boxed wine. The Chain Reaction team released a bonus episode from a fireside chat with Nadya Tolokonnikova, the creator of the protest art collective Pussy Riot, at NFT NYC in April 2023. The TechCrunch Podcast covered Google I/O, including the tech, attend talks and demos. To round things out, TechCrunch Live talked about developing therapeutics for anti-aging with James Peyer, the co-founder of Cambrian BioPharma, and Maryanna Saenko, co-founder and partner at Future Ventures.
TechCrunch+
TC+ subscribers get access to in-depth commentary, analysis and surveys — which you know if you’re already a subscriber. If you’re not, consider signing up. Here are a few highlights from this week:
Visions of a colorful future: How far has the psychedelics medicine industry come over the past 12 months? Well, it depends on where you look. A recent survey indicates that instead of simply looking for attractive opportunities, investors and founders are increasingly putting their minds to building the foundations for an industry that can employ the power of psychedelics to change lives.
AI’s eating search: News from Google’s AI-soaked developer event this week makes it plain that we’re on the cusp of a new era of search. Following Microsoft’s molding of OpenAI’s tech into Bing, Google is experimenting with its own AI tech and opening up new ways to use search. It’s clear we’re about to see the first major overhauls in the market for finding information on the internet in a really long time.
Salesforce embraces generative AI: Salesforce is increasingly investing in generative AI as it becomes apparent that the technology has the potential to transform how we interact with software — allowing us to describe what we want instead of clicking or tapping.

Get your TechCrunch fix IRL. Join us at Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco this September to immerse yourself in all things startup. From headline interviews to intimate roundtables to a jam-packed startup expo floor, there’s something for everyone at Disrupt. Save up to $800 when you buy your pass now through May 15, and save 15% on top of that with promo code WIR. Learn more.
Disrupt 2023
Google bets the farm on AI, Twitter gets a new CEO, and Meta contractors protest by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Sound Radix SurferEQ Boogie SurferEQ2 is a ground-breaking pitch-tracking equalizer plug-in that tracks a monophonic instrument or vocal and moves the filter with the music. Sound Radix teamed up with... Read More

Wolf Shaper Is A Free Waveshaper Plugin
Patrick Desaulniers of Wolf Plugins released Wolf Shaper, a freeware waveshaper effect for Windows and macOS. I’m so sorry, everyone, but I’m back again with another distortion plugin. 🤘 I can’t help it. I see another distortion/saturation effect and think, “Nice, I bet this one might be better than what I have 900 other copies [...]
View post: Wolf Shaper Is A Free Waveshaper Plugin

Getting It Done: Last Week in D.I.Y. & Indie MusicLast week, our tips and advice for the independent do-it-yourselfers out there covered how to get music videos on VEVO, five fun giveaway ideas, and more… With ‘Fans,’ SoundCloud creators. Continue reading
The post Getting It Done: Last Week in D.I.Y. & Indie Music appeared first on Hypebot.

REWIND: The new music industry’s Week In ReviewA busy week by any definition, the music industry was no exception, with new noteworthy artists to check out, Google releasing a text-to-AI music creation tool, Ed Sheeran winning a. Continue reading
The post REWIND: The new music industry’s Week In Review appeared first on Hypebot.

Bastl launch Basil Bastl announce the launch of the Basil stereo digital delay module, based on their Bastl Pizza HW platform.

Kubernik: Hall of Famer Link WrayLink Wray was made a posthumous inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2023, in the "Musical Influence" category.  

Perhaps it's now time to re-visit Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked the World. The 2017 dazzling feature documentary from Montreal, Canada-based Rezolution pictures about the role of Native Americans in popular music history.

    The film’s title comes from the 1958 hit instrumental single “Rumble” by Link Ray & His Ray Men issued on Archie Blyer’s Cadence label.  

       Wray, born to Shawnee parents in North Carolina, was a major guitar influence on Jeff Beck, Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, and many others.

    In the documentary It Might Get Loud, Page describes hearing “Rumble” as a turning point in his own love of the guitar.         

    “‘Rumble’ had the power to push me over the edge, and it did help me say: 'Fuck it, I'm gonna be a musician,” stressed Iggy Pop. “That was the rawest form of the kind of guitar that all of the guys that I listened to, that’s where it started,” confessed Slash of Guns ‘N Roses, while Steven Van Zandt of Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band recollected, “Here comes Link Wray with the theme song of juvenile delinquency…. I’m not surprised it was banned.”

  Further testimony is supplied by the MC5’s Wayne Kramer, “He was one of the first that really had a tone that pointed the way to the future.”

   “There might not be a Who, were there no Link Wray; there might not be a Jeff Beck Group, were there no Link Wray; there might not be a Led Zeppelin, if there were no Link Wray,” summarized Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters.

   In Rumble, director and Rezolution co-founder Catherine Bainbridge and co-director and director of photography Alfonso Maiorama examine the journey of Native Americans on record and stage. They expose a critical and profound missing chapter, revealing how indigenous musicians helped influence audio culture.

   The on-screen participating contributors in Rumble are a list of music artists, historians, family members, and experts who acknowledge Native musicians that helped shape the soundtracks of their lives: Buffy Sainte-Marie, Robbie Robertson, Martin Scorsese, Tony Bennett, Steven Tyler, Iggy Pop, Buddy Guy, Taj Mahal, Cyril Neville, Ivan Neville, John Trudell, Steven Van Zandt, Corey Harris, Jesse Ed Davis, Alvin Youngblood Hart, David Fricke, Guy Davis, Monk Boudreaux,  Quincy Jones, Jackson Browne, Martha Redbone, James “Hutch” Hutchinson, Joy Harjo, as well as Pat Vegas (Redbone), Wayne Kramer (MC5), Slash (Guns ‘N’ Roses), Dan Auerbach (The Black Keys), Marky Ramone (The Ramones), Taylor Hawkins (Foo Fighters), Pura Fe Crescioni (Ulali), Rhiannon Giddens (Carolina Chocolate Drops), Mike Inez (Alice in Chains), George Clinton, Robert Trujillo (Metallica), and Taboo (Black Eyed Peas).

   Christina Fon, Stevie Salas and Catherine Bainbridge served as producers. Bainbridge and Neil Diamond previously helmed Reel Injun about the representations of Native Americans in Hollywood movies. 

     Rumble earned a Sundance special jury award for “masterful storytelling,” and the film also received best music documentary at the Boulder International Film Festival. The movie just had its U.S. theatrical premiere in late July at Film Forum in New York.

  “Rumble” has since been heard in Quentin Tarentino’s Pulp Fiction and in the surf documentary Riding Giants, directed by Stacy Peralta. It’s also been used in the HBO television show The Sopranos and additional movies, including Independence Day and Blow.

    “In Rumble, for the first time a film reveals a fascinating, and until now unknown, influence on the formation of rock and roll,” explained Bainbridge and Maiorama in their Director’s statement press notes. 

   “The music that has become a part of who we are. We are so honoured to be able to tell this story about the influence of iconic Native American musicians speak about how these icons were an influence, you listen! Native American music – born of this land – was violently suppressed for many years as both American and Canadian governments outlawed Native ceremonies and rituals in a deliberate attempt to break the people.

     “As a result, the music was forced underground and found its expression in alternative ways. It is important to note that the primary drivers in the creation of blues and jazz and therefore rock were African Americans, but Native Americans, like Europeans , also played a part.

    “We feel that it is important for everyone, and especially Native youth who have so few pop culture role models, to have proof, through the icons we feature and the famous people that give our story credibility, that Indigenous cultures were an integral part of the evolution of popular music. The truth that we want to expose in Rumble is that the attempted erasure of Native American people, their culture, and their music, didn’t work. As Robbie Robertson said in one of our interviews with him ‘you wouldn't let me talk about it before, well now I'm going to talk real loud.’” 

   “One can’t help but notice the rhythms of—or the pulse that was here, that is here; been here. The feel of Native American is in a lot of rock 'n' roll,” suggested George Clinton.  “It’s interesting how much the Native American element just filters through,” offered Martin Scorsese, while Joy Harjo, a Muscogee-Creek musician and poet added, “Our peoples were part of the origin story of blues and jazz and rock of American music but we’re left out of the story consistently from the beginning.”

      During Rumble, half-Jewish, half-Mohawk, Robbie Robertson, co-founder of the Band, reflected in an interview, “My real guitar lessons were at the Six Nations Indian Reserve in Ontario. All my cousins, uncles – everybody -- seemed like they could play an instrument. If you considered yourself a real rock ’n’ roll guitar player, you had to learn ‘Rumble.’ It was raw and dirty, and had that rebellious spirit to it.”

    The influence of the Native American has never been lost on musician/actor/producer, Steven Van Zandt, whose production company is named Renegade Nation.

    Van Zandt further cited the impact of Robertson and the Band, whose commercially successful roots-music groundbreaking sound emerged in 1968 after a 1966 world tour backing Bob Dylan and 1967 Basement Tapes recording sessions with Dylan.  

    “The entire industry got right back to song writing, and Robbie Robertson, one of the great song writers of all time, had effectuated that change by his own sensibility, and the Band's sensibility.”

   Portions of this text were published in my 2020 book, Docs That Rock, Music That Matters. 

(Harvey Kubernik is the author of 20 books, including 2009’s Canyon Of Dreams: The Magic And The Music Of Laurel Canyon and 2014’s Turn Up The Radio! Rock, Pop and Roll In Los Angeles 1956-1972.   Sterling/Barnes and Noble in 2018 published Harvey and Kenneth Kubernik’s The Story Of The Band: From Big Pink To The Last Waltz. In2021 they wrote Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child for Sterling/Barnes and Noble. Otherworld Cottage Industries in 2020 published Harvey’s Docs That Rock, Music That Matters.

Kubernik’s writings are in several book anthologies. Most notably, The Rolling Stone Book Of The Beats and Drinking With Bukowski. Harvey wrote the liner notes to the CD re-releases of Carole King’s Tapestry, The Essential Carole King, Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish, Elvis Presley The ’68 Comeback Special, The Ramones’ End of the Century and Big Brother & the Holding Company Captured Live at The Monterey International Pop Festival.  

    During 2006 Harvey spoke at the special hearings initiated by The Library of Congress held in Hollywood, California, discussing archiving practices and audiotape preservation.

   In 2017 Harvey Kubernik appeared at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, as part of their Distinguished Speakers Series.

ALBUM REVIEWS: Billy Valentine (10/10)The Universal Truth 

Downtown Music / Direct Music Services(North America) Ace Music (elsewhere)

Producer: Bob Thiele, Jr.

Sharing classics made famous by Curtis Mayfield, Stevie Wonder, Gilbert Scott-Heron, Prince, and more, Valentine gathers heavyweights, including Pino Palladino, Jeff Parker, Larry Goldings, and Abe Rounds, for soulful jazz with a timely message. Elegantly recorded, mixed and mastered by Dave Way and Chris Allen, Valentine’s incredible vocals render the listener entranced and breathless, and leave the powerful, emotive lyrics to pull at their soul. Pure exquisite magic. The vocal masterclass. – Andrea Beenham

US lawmakers target perceived risks of crypto adoption in El Salvador with reintroduced billThe legislation appeared to be another attempt at the Accountability for Cryptocurrency in El Salvador Act, originally introduced after the country's Bitcoin Law was enacted.

Elon Musk appoints new Twitter CEO, NBCU’s Linda YaccarinoThe rumors are true: Elon Musk has chosen NBCU leader Linda Yaccarino as the next CEO of Twitter.
Musk confirmed Yaccarino’s new role in a tweet this morning, a day after he announced that he had completed his search for a new CEO.
“Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app,” wrote Musk.

I am excited to welcome Linda Yaccarino as the new CEO of Twitter!@LindaYacc will focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design & new technology.
Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app. https://t.co/TiSJtTWuky
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 12, 2023

Yaccarino announced on Friday morning that she was leaving her role as chairman of Global Advertising & Partnerships at NBCU. Yaccarino worked at NBCU since 2011. Before that, she spent nearly 20 years at Turner as an executive vice president in advertising. In 2018, she was appointed by former president Donald Trump to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition.
It’s smart to put a well-known advertising executive at the helm of Twitter, since Musk’s leadership has tanked that key facet of Twitter’s business. Musk said he will stay on as chairman and “CTO, overseeing product, software & sysops.” With erratic content moderation policies and inconsistent, sometimes misleading verification systems, Twitter has bled advertisers. The company has also laid off critical teams for revenue generations, like its sales team.
Musk and Yaccarino already seem to have a bit of a rapport. Last month, Yaccarino interviewed Musk at an advertising conference in Miami, where she seemed complimentary of the business mogul.
“Elon has committed to being accessible to everyone for continual feedback,” she said onstage. “He’s also opened up himself to also participate in the new transparency and safety rules he posted yesterday. Just remember, freedom of speech does not mean freedom of reach.”
She also pointed out to Elon that “the people in this room are [Twitter’s] path to profitability.” Since its inception, Twitter’s most effective way to make money has been advertising, and Musk’s attempts to monetize the blue check have not been successful.
We don’t know whether the two of them were in negotiations at the time, but Yaccarino seemed motivated to sanitize the Twitter brand, encouraging audience members to voice their concerns to Musk in an Q&A. She echoed Musk’s viewpoint on freedom of speech as it pertains to advertisers, which is that freedom of speech doesn’t mean “freedom of reach.”
“If freedom of speech, as he says, is the bedrock of this country, I’m not sure there’s anyone in this room who could disagree with that,” Yaccarino said when interviewing Musk. “Could I get a round of applause for that?”
This story is developing…

Linda Yaccarino leaves NBCUniversal, adding fuel to the Twitter CEO fire

Elon Musk appoints new Twitter CEO, NBCU’s Linda Yaccarino by Amanda Silberling originally published on TechCrunch

Aberrant DSP Tectonic Tectonic is a multi-band toneshaping channel strip. Combining equalization, imaging, and dynamics processing, Tectonic is a complete sonic toolkit for anything from subtle sweetening to... Read More

Waves Scheps Parallel Particles Grammy -winning mix engineer Andrew Scheps has honed his art mixing artists as diverse as Adele, Jay Z, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Metallica. Now you can access his signature parallel processing... Read More