UJAM launch UFX Reverb Version 2 Building on the success of its predecessor, UFX Reverb Version 2 introduces an expanded set of controls along with additional presets, filters and Finisher effects.

Cast Your Vote in the AllMusic 2024 Readers' PollAs the year winds down, we want to hear from you. Vote for your favorite albums in our 2024 Readers' Poll.

Google Gemini: Everything you need to know about the generative AI modelsGemini is Google’s long-promised, next-gen generative AI model family.
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Why tech giants like Amazon may hesitate to adopt BitcoinBig Tech has a great flow of cash on hand. Currency devaluation makes them lose purchasing power. Is Bitcoin a treasury solution to fight against inflation? Amazon is the next to decide.

Steven Hill is new A2IM Board ChairA2IM (American Association of Independent Music) representing over 600 independent record labels, has today announced Steven Hill, Head of North American & Global Marketing at Warp Records, as the new Chair of its 2024-2025 Board of Directors.
The post Steven Hill is new A2IM Board Chair appeared first on Hypebot.

Good Lighting on a Budget with Cordless Tool BatteriesIt’s perhaps not fair, but even if you have the best idea for a compelling video, few things will make people switch off than poor lighting. Good light and plenty of it is the order of the day when it comes to video production, and luckily there are many affordable options out there. Affordable, that is, right up to the point where you need batteries for remote shoots, in which case you’d better be ready to open the purse strings.
When [Dane Kouttron] ran into the battery problem with his video lighting setup, he fought back with these cheap and clever cordless tool battery pack adapters. His lights were designed to use Sony NP-F mount batteries, which are pretty common in the photography trade but unforgivably expensive, at least for Sony-branded packs. Having access to 20 volt DeWalt battery packs, he combined an off-the-shelf battery adapter with a 3D printed mount that slips right onto the light. Luckily, the lights have a built-in DC-DC converter that accepts up to 40 volts, so connecting the battery through a protection diode was a pretty simple exercise. The battery pack just slots right in and keeps the lights running for portable shoots.
Of course, if you don’t already have DeWalt batteries on hand, it might just be cheaper to buy the Sony batteries and be done with it. Then again, there are battery adapters for pretty much every cordless tool brand out there, so you should be able to adapt the design. We’ve also seen cross-brand battery adapters which might prove useful, too.

Why Jack Dorsey’s Tidal is focusing on building new DJ tools and content in 2025Which digital streaming platform values DJ the most right now? Among the major players, you’d likely think of Apple Music as the champion of DJs, with its Boiler Room partnership, new Club radio station, and a regular flow of DJ mixes from acclaimed artists. Spotify, meanwhile, rolled out its AI DJ feature in 2023, which has been less well-received. But Tidal — now owned by Twitter founder and Block Inc chairman Jack Dorsey, who acquired it from Jay-Z in 2021 for $297 million — believes it’s the frontrunner in supporting the careers and artistry of DJs.
“DJs play a vital role in the music industry, not only as curators but also as creators, who often transition into roles such as music producers, songwriters and performing artists,” says Seattle-based Dan Murphy, head of partnerships at Tidal. As a DJ who confesses that he’s “very, very early” on in his hobby, Murphy and the Tidal team have found that DJing can be an attractive entry into the music industry, but they’ve also discovered that not everyone sticks around for long after spinning their first tune.
“Our data shows that around 50 per cent of first-time DJs quit within the first six months,” Murphy says. “And the reason is, it’s difficult to be a DJ.”
To encourage more beginner disc jockeys to keep at it — and to get more pro DJs using its service — Tidal has amped up its offering of DJ-focused content in the past five years or so. That doesn’t just include more DJ mixes on the platform, but also means integrating the service into DJ software such as Serato, Rekordbox, Algoriddim DJay and even Tribe XR. Plus it now hosts  a library of sound effects, weekly updated charts, launched the Artist Home, and partnered with DJ brands such as AlphaThera to provide educational content to new DJs so they can learn the basics from day one.
Image: Tidal
Once a DJ has honed their skills, they may even get a shot to join the Tidal Rising program.
Chicago-based artist Ariel Zetina, who was the first DJ to join Tidal Rising in 2023, says that she’s “eternally grateful” for Tidal’s support. “The music industry is so vast, and my primary source of income is in a gig-based nightlife economy. Tidal Rising has allowed me to meet and hear from professionals in more fields (such as music publishing and songwriting). [Being on the program] lets a larger audience see and respect your work.”
The program, which selects just over a dozen artists per year, is designed to provide grassroots acts with direct-funding opportunities, marketing support, playlist coverage and more. It’s also been an early supporter of some pretty high-profile acts, from Dua Lipa and Teddy Swims to LP Giobbi and beyond.
“I mean, being in the same program as Megan Thee Stallion and Chloe x Halle? Incredible,” adds Zetina.
Image: Tidal
Murphy says that Tidal’s goal is, and always has been, to “create a music platform that empowers artists to find success on their own terms.”
“We’ve always been artists first, ever since Jay-Z acquired Tidal back in 2015.” (That high-profile relaunch in 2015 included appearances and on-stage signatories including Daft Punk, deadmau5, Madonna, Calvin Harris, Beyoncé, Alicia Keys and Kanye West, among others.) “We serve artists as our primary customers, and DJs are artists, and therefore an extension of this focus for us.”
With Dorsey at the helm, the company is now looking at its artist userbase in a similar fashion to how its sister companies, Square and Cash App. Murphy says that Square has been building a customer base of independent businesses with its point of sale products, and that Cash App has helped individuals find simpler ways to manage their finances. Now, Tidal wants to “give emerging artists direct ways to manage their business identity,” and “help them run their careers like a business,” Murphy adds.
Image: Tidal
The elephant in the room is that Tidal is by no means the most popular DSP, with a reported 2.1 million subscribers in 2020, which Spotify beats by about 300 times with its 640 million users. And with a standard Tidal subscription costing around the same as a Spotify subscription at $11 per month ($20 with a DJ subscription), can it really support artists with better royalties? According to Viberate, the service does offer the most royalties per stream at $0.0125 to $0.015. But the value in Tidal for artists, says Murphy, lies in its other offerings.
Tidal is renowned for its catalogue of lossless format, hosting over 110 million tracks in HiRes, FLAC and Dolby Atmos with offline listening. Currently, the platform is publishing 200,000 new HiRes tracks every week. This is a potential boon to DJs— by integrating Tidal into their workflow, they have instant access to this massive library of lossless tracks.
Elsewhere, Tidal’s Artist Home portal, launched in 2023, is a hub for artists to control their profiles on the platform. Tidal Collabs, meanwhile, encourages artists to discover and connect with recommended collaborators, leveraging different fan bases. There are also songwriter tools that allow them to manage their credits and ensure accurate compensation.

Murphy explains that, in the past year, Tidal has invested in expanding this toolset with DJs squarely in mind.
Now, with BPM and key signature metadata, DJs using Tidal can find new tracks on the fly to fit the music they’re playing. Tidal became the first streaming platform to officially license stems from record labels for use in DJ software and hardware (such as Denon DJ and Numark gear), meaning you can mix various elements of a track in real-time.
Data is playing a major role, too. Tidal’s vision is that artists and DJs will be able to check where and how often their music has been played by DJs, offering insight into potential new markets and territories. “We want to give artists insights that treat them and help them run their careers like a business,” adds Murphy.
Tidal launch event #TIDALforALL at Skylight at Moynihan Station on March 30, 2015 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images For Roc Nation)
On paper, this all sounds pretty impressive. Intriguingly, though, the star-studded line-up of advocates at the 2015 relaunch of Tidal has remained relatively quiet about the platform. Despite these flashy new tools, the dance acts among them — deadmau5, Daft Punk, Calvin Harris — have barely supported Tidal publicly since signing those contracts onstage for a 3 per cent share in the company. Does Tidal need these big artists to start pushing the platform again to be successful?
Dorsey doesn’t think so. When discussing whether Tidal would lean on such big artists advocating the platform, he took to Twitter in 2021 to say: “We’re going to start small and focus on the most critical needs of artists and growing their fanbases.”
In 2025, Tidal seems ready to extend these offerings to DJs. “Success, for me,” says Murphy, “is that Tidal becomes a consideration and part of every DJ’s toolkit; whether it’s access to content, [finding] inspiration, giving them new tools that are powered by a Tidal subscription…but I think more importantly, that we truly do help DJs grow and manage their career again.”
Read more music industry features. 
The post Why Jack Dorsey’s Tidal is focusing on building new DJ tools and content in 2025 appeared first on MusicTech.

After Spotify’s $100bn market cap milestone, Daniel Ek cashes out another $28mSpotify's co-founder and CEO has sold $248.3 million-worth of company stock so far this year
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The Disappearing CapacitorAs part of a phosphorescence detector, [lcamtuf] has been working with photodiodes. The components, like all diodes, have some capacitance at the junction, and this can limit performance. That’s why [lcamtuf] turned to bootstrapping to make that parasitic capacitance almost disappear.
The technique appears in several Analog Devices datasheets that presents a mystery. An op amp circuit that would normally limit changes to about 52 kHz has an unusually-placed JFET and claims to boost the bandwidth to 350 kHz.

The JFET turns out to be in a voltage-follower configuration. The photodiode sees approximately the same voltage on both terminals, so the internal capacitor can’t charge and, therefore, doesn’t impose any limits on rate of change.
Of course, a better way to think of it is that tiny changes cause an immediate response to counteract them, and so the capacitor’s charging and discharging are kept to a minimum.
It really isn’t important that the capacitor is not charged, but rather that the capacitor doesn’t increase or decrease charge. This leads to a second design, which imposes a DC bias voltage on the diode but prevents any signal from causing the capacitor to change from its precharged value.
Photodiodes seem exotic, but honestly, all semiconductor diodes are photodiodes if you let the light get to them. It seems that capacitors and op amps are always at loggerheads.

TASCAM December 2024 News: TASCAM's Portacapture X8 Brings Creative Versatility to Rico Casazza's WorkflowAs an electronic music producer, DJ, and film sound designer/location sound recordist, the ability to capture a wide array of sonic innovation keeps Rico Casazza very busy. As a music producer, he has been creating electronic music for over 15 years. As a film sound designer, he records sounds on film sets, focusing primarily on dialogue. He also captures a variety of ambient sounds, which he uses to add various textures to his projects. And to capture all this and more, Casazza relies on the versatility and creativity inspired by his Portacapture X8 Portable Audio Field Recorder from TASCAM.Since 2007, Casazza has released music under his own name and other aliases in both vinyl and digital formats. These efforts have given him the opportunity to work as a DJ while also performing live sets of his own music. He also teaches sound design at the Prague Film School in the Czech Republic and has worked as the main sound designer on numerous independent films—earning several sound design nominations in the process. His passion for music and sound design has resulted in many creative opportunities. He discussed his use of the TASCAM Portacapture X8, which is central to much of what he does creatively.“For songwriting, I use the Portacapture X8 to record percussion sounds to build my drums in electronic music projects,” Casazza explained. “Sometimes, I also capture sounds with interesting textures, which I then load into Ableton Live, my preferred DAW for music composition. In Ableton, I can transform and modify these sounds to create something entirely new, similar to Musique Concrète.”Casazza also uses his Portacapture X8 for various types of sound design work. “As a location sound mixer, recording sound is an important part of my daily routine,” he reports. “I capture dialogue, foleys, and ambiances for film sound design. I also have a page on freesound.org where I upload various sounds that I've collected worldwide for free download, as I believe in giving back to the community I'm part of.”When queried about the various Portacapture X8 features he finds so well suited to his manner of working, Casazza focused on the recorder’s 32-bit floating point recording capability and its various presets. “The Portacapture’s 32-bit float recording mode is a game-changer, especially for recording loud percussive sounds. Sometimes, striking an object hard risks distortion, but with the recorder’s 32-bit float capability, I don’t have to worry about that. I can lower the gain in post-production and retrieve the sound quality, ensuring clean recordings even in intense sessions.” “The ability to switch between the Portacapture’s specific field recording presets, like Nature, Birds, Vehicles, and City, has been incredibly useful,” Casazza added. “Each preset tailors settings like mic sensitivity, EQ, and dynamic range, which optimizes the recorder’s audio for different environments. This feature is especially helpful when I need to capture the unique characteristics of each soundscape accurately. The Portacapture’s field recording mode is fantastic. Being an avid ambience recordist, I find it the best way to customize recordings with different ambience presets—enabling me to capture a wide variety of soundscapes with precision.”The Portacapture X8’s Manual Mode enables the operator to customize one’s own settings for various types of recording tasks—providing the highest level of flexibility for capturing sounds. Here too, Casazza is finding the feature to be very beneficial. “Thus far, I've used the manual mode with the built-in microphone, but I can see it being ideal for filmmaking when you need four inputs, such as a boom mic and three radio mics. The ability to adjust gain staging between the gain and volume fader, along with the option to assign panning, makes it a highly professional multi-track recorder.”With much of today’s electronic music and audio gear, questions inevitably arise. Hence, responsive and capable support services are crucial for assisting customers. Here too, Casazza was very complimentary of TASCAM, “I have always found TASCAM to be very supportive of its customers. They clearly have musicians and recording enthusiasts on their support team—and since they understand what you’re trying to accomplish, they are very helpful. While I’ve only had the Portacapture X8 for a few weeks, I have used the TASCAM DR-40 handheld recorder for over 10 years. In the process, I’ve also learned how TASCAM approaches audio recording, which makes it easier to adapt to a new piece of equipment.”Before turning his attention back to the business of the day, Casazza offered these parting thoughts on his Portacapture X8, “I feel incredibly fortunate to have this fantastic device, and with each use, I discover more of its potential. It's the perfect recorder for world travel, offering professional multi-track recording with a range of powerful features. The touchscreen adds a sleek touch to the design, making it even easier to navigate. The built-in microphones have impressively clean preamps with a very low noise floor. While recording my voice for a tutorial, I was amazed by the crystal-clear quality the recorder delivered. This is a very capable recording tool and I’m confident others will find it equally compelling.”To learn more about Rico Casazza, visit him online at https://rico-casazza.com/ and https://www.instagram.com/ricocasazzamusic/.The post TASCAM December 2024 News: TASCAM's Portacapture X8 Brings Creative Versatility to Rico Casazza's Workflow first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Antonious Porch, SoundCloud’s General Counsel and Chief Diversity Officer to exit; Ama Walton promoted to EVP & General CounselPorch to join magazine publisher Condé Nast as its new General Counsel in February
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Slate Digital upgrade Virtual Mix Rack Slate Digital have announced the release of the latest version of their award-winning virtual-analogue channel strip software.

Venus Theory has created another free instrument, and this one captures “the sound of winter”Venus Theory, a sound designer and content creator, has launched another free instrument as part of his Auras collection.
The latest addition to the free range is Eraphine, a brand new sample library delivering “the sound of winter”. Inside you’ll get a range of seasonal sounds including a downtuned ‘frost’ violin, a range of stirring vocal recordings (created by his wife, captured using premium microphones and a tube preamp), plus decorative granular soundscape texture accompaniments.

READ MORE: 10 free sample packs for sci-fi and experimental sounds

The Auras range was created by Venus Theory, whose real name is Cameron, as part of a mission to make inspiring and easy to use music tools that are completely free of charge with “No Strings Attached. No stupid subscription bullshit. Just Sound.”
Eraphine was originally made several years ago, but this revised edition features completely remastered and optimised samples, brand new presets, and puts the entire library into the new ‘auras’ engine. According to Venus Theory, this brings a new life to the sounds with added velocity, dynamics, and expression controls alongside the more refined ‘layers’ system, bringing it into something that feels “distinctly organic and alive compared to the original”.
Eraphine joins Volts, a synth library sourced from recordings of over $200,000 worth of synthesisers, and polyscape, which explores the cinematic sounds of the Polybrute 12 synthesiser from Arturia (you can hear this below), creating a trio of free Auras instruments. And, that’s not all, as Venus Theory says there are more exciting free releases on the way.

“Since launching this project, there have been over 24,000 downloads of these free releases and in that time I’ve received so many cool messages from y’all about how you’ve been using them in your music and projects and how much the releases have helped you out,” comments Venus Theory. “So, I figured why not cap off 2024 with a surprise release to bring something new to the ‘auras’ series!”
Auras:eraphine is available now to download for free. Check out more from Venus Theory.
The post Venus Theory has created another free instrument, and this one captures “the sound of winter” appeared first on MusicTech.

How to Create a Social Media Calendar for MusiciansBoost your marketing game with an easy-to-follow social media calendar for musicians.
The post How to Create a Social Media Calendar for Musicians appeared first on Hypebot.

Music Tech News: #1 for UnitedMasters • DAWn wins • EVA expands • Rostr adds app • un:hurd + IndieKnow • BootlegIn the latest music tech news: UnitedMasters artist FloyyMenor recently had the #1 global song on TikTok. It's the latest proof that indie and diy musicians can now compete on a global stage.
The post Music Tech News: #1 for UnitedMasters • DAWn wins • EVA expands • Rostr adds app • un:hurd + IndieKnow • Bootleg appeared first on Hypebot.