Looking at a bike built for the apocalypseSo-called bug out cars are a rather silly venture that serve little purpose more than snagging your jumper. The odds of a car working well through a nuclear winter are rather minimal. But what about a bicycle? On paper it’s a better choice, with extreme efficiency, reliability, and runs off whatever sustenance you can find in the barren landscape of a collapsed society. But [Seth] over at Berm Peak proved an apocalypse bike is at least as silly as a bug out car.
While a utilitarian bike fit for a cross-country trek across a nuclear wasteland can certainly be a reasonable venture, this particular bicycle is not that. This three wheeled monstrosity of a bicycle (is it still a bicycle if it has three wheels?) was built by [TOMO] for the Bespoked bike show’s apocalypse buildoff. It placed second among a number of strange bikes with features ranging from pedal driven circular saws to beer keg grills. But this particular example of apocalypse bike is easily the strangest example of the lot.

The features on this custom build are rather extensive, but the star of the show is the trailing link two wheel drive rear end. The third wheel was thrown on last minute with a random shock providing some measure of compliance to the rather unwieldy system. But while adding unnecessary complexity, the third wheel does offer the benefit of bringing along a number of spare parts on the last bikepacking trip of a lifetime. Moreover, it can be easily removed to get something resembling bicycle.
The aforementioned front of the bike while being an actual bike, is likewise a rather strange build. It’s best described as a fat-tired long nosed tall cargo bike. The removable cargo rack is quite effective in storing heavy loads by keeping the center of gravity near or below the axles, it can remain rideable with quite heavy loads. But, if ground clearance is needed, then simply remove the cargo rack, and the bike becomes a bike capable of navigating the nuclear wasteland it was made for.
While this is a silly and questionable bike, it’s certainly not the first strange bike we have seen.

Wide Blue Sound releases Tracer, a free beat-synced oscilloscope plugin
Wide Blue Sound has released Tracer, a beat-synced oscilloscope plugin that is free for a limited time. After the promo period, it will cost $39. There is no clear information about when the free offer ends, so if this sounds interesting, download it as soon as you can. To get it, you can simply enter [...]
View post: Wide Blue Sound releases Tracer, a free beat-synced oscilloscope plugin

Kreativ Sound Daft PlastiCZ Sounds — 102 Free Presets for reFX PlastiCZ (Legacy Release)Daft PlastiCZ Sounds is a collection of 102 original presets created for the reFX PlastiCZ synthesizer. This is a legacy release from Kreativ Sound — shared for archival, creative exploration, and inspiration. While PlastiCZ has been discontinued, the sounds still carry a distinct digital character — raw, synthetic, and slightly unpredictable. What's Inside – 102 handcrafted presets – Digital leads and synthetic tones – Experimental textures and sequences – Early Kreativ Sound design work. Sound Character – Raw digital timbres – Slightly unstable / lo-fi textures – Classic early VST aesthetic – Imperfect, exploratory sound design. Important. reFX PlastiCZ is a discontinued synthesizer. This soundset is provided: – for archival use – for experimentation – as a free creative resource. No updates or support are planned. Free Download. https://kreativ.gumroad.com/l/daft-free-plasticz-presets Read More

ASMR Choir from SRM Sounds Captured at the main live room at the composer’s Studio Richter Mahr facility, the collection includes four separate instruments that focus on close-miked, ‘tiny’ sounds.

Primary Wave makes strategic investment in Vietnam’s POPS Music – with plans to ramp up catalog deals in Southeast AsiaPOPS claims to be 'home to the largest catalog of Vietnamese and Indonesian music'
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Get Bloom Ensemble Strings Lite for under $1 at Plugin Boutique and claim a FREE gift
You can use the coupon code amacam8 to drop the price of Excite Audio’s Bloom Ensemble Strings Lite to under $1 at Plugin Boutique. Bloom Ensemble Strings Lite normally costs $29 and is already on sale for $19, but applying the code amacam8 at checkout brings it down to around $0.66 (the exact amount may [...]
View post: Get Bloom Ensemble Strings Lite for under $1 at Plugin Boutique and claim a FREE gift

Dynamic Range Day 2026 Friday 27 March will mark Dynamic Range Day 2026, the annual day of online activity that was started in 2010 by mastering engineer Ian Shepherd.

Your ears, your mix: Personalised Dolby Atmos headphone monitoring lands on mobileSonarworks has teamed up with Dolby to launch SoundID Tools, a free mobile app that allows you to generate Dolby Atmos personalisation profiles for headphone monitoring.
Available now on iOS and Android, SoundID Tools brings a surprisingly advanced piece of studio tech into your pocket. Using your phone’s camera to scan your head and ears, the app captures your unique physical characteristics and applies Dolby’s personalisation technology to generate a Dolby Headphone Personalisation profile – a calibration file tailored to how you perceive spatial audio.

READ MORE: A full Dolby Atmos set up for £169: Meet Majority’s new flagship Bowfell surround sound systems and soundbars

That distinction is key. Immersive audio isn’t just about speaker placement or binaural rendering. It’s shaped by the listener’s anatomy.
As David Gould, Senior Director of Content Creation and Distribution at Dolby Laboratories puts it, “Every creator’s physical characteristics are unique, which affects how they experience immersive audio over headphones. By combining Dolby’s technology with Sonarworks’ calibration expertise, the app enables more accurate Dolby Atmos monitoring.”
The process itself is designed to be frictionless. After a quick scan, the app generates a profile in minutes, ready to be loaded into the Dolby Atmos Renderer standalone app or used within supported DAWs via native Dolby Atmos rendering. No additional hardware is required beyond your phone and a pair of headphones.
Once applied, the improvements land where they matter most. Direction, distance, and height in a headphone mix become more accurately perceived, giving you greater confidence that your spatial decisions will translate. In practical terms, that means fewer surprises when checking your immersive mixes across different playback systems.
Credit: Sonarworks
The app’s promise is simple but ambitious: create a monitoring baseline that travels with you. Whether working in a professional studio or a makeshift mobile setup, the personalised profile aims to deliver consistent spatial accuracy, tonal balance, and mix confidence. No two creators hear a soundstage the same way, and SoundID Tools is built around correcting for exactly that.
For Sonarworks – whose SoundID Reference calibration software is used in over 300,000 studios worldwide – the collaboration marks a natural step into immersive workflows.
“At Sonarworks, our mission has always been to help creators hear their mixes accurately and with confidence, no matter where they work,” says Sonarworks CPO and co-founder Martins Popelis. “We are thrilled to partner with Dolby to help Dolby Atmos creators make great-sounding immersive mixes on headphones – and to deliver more value to the broad community of users who rely on SoundID Reference calibration for accuracy.”
With SoundID Tools free to download and Dolby Atmos profile creation available at no cost, personalised immersive monitoring is no longer a high-end studio luxury.
Learn more at Sonarworks.
The post Your ears, your mix: Personalised Dolby Atmos headphone monitoring lands on mobile appeared first on MusicTech.

Novation’s Launch Control 3 is a go-anywhere MIDI controller for almost every producer£130, novationmusic.com
Following the release of the Launch Control XL3 in 2025, Novation has redesigned its smaller sibling and put many of the concepts I love about the XL into a more compact form factor.
Launch Control 3 has been fully redesigned, dropping the toy-like look and feel of its predecessor in favour of a much more sleek, minimal and —dare I say it— Native Instruments-style finish. It’s still incredibly portable, however, and designed to be carried anywhere, taking up minimal space even on the smallest desk or table.

READ MORE: “An important tool regardless of how you make music”: Novation Launch Control XL MK3 review

The hardware is lightweight yet well-built, with a partly rubberised underside ensuring it stays still on any flat surface. It powers and sends data over USB-C or, when used in standalone mode, is powered by any USB-C power supply. The rear panel has three 5-pin MIDI ports – one in, one out and one that doubles as a MIDI thru, meaning the controller can be used to link MIDI hardware through its circuitry without the need for a computer. Plus, handily, incoming USB MIDI data can be routed onwards to the MIDI thru port.
As with Novation’s other gear, you manage the Launch Control 3 via the dedicated Components app, which is also available in your web browser. The app provides access to the configuration of the controls and lets you upload and download templates for various instruments and your custom setups. This works well, and the web app option means plugging into any computer and logging in lets you make edits even when away from home.
Image: Press
Launch Control has two main modes: DAW and Custom. Within DAW mode, there are two separate modes: DAW Mixer for setting levels, panning and sends, and DAW Control for tweaking your DAW’s plugins and devices. The front panel has eight assignable buttons and 16 endless rotary encoders with multicoloured dimming LEDs to denote their various functions, and adjustable response curves. There’s also a small but adequate OLED display, Page and Track select buttons as well as mode select, Shift and Function buttons.
DAW integration is key to Launch Control, and it has direct support for most major DAWs, including Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Cubase and FL Studio, with additional support for Pro Tools, Reaper, Studio One and more via the Mackie HUI protocol. As is often the case, Ableton Live integration is the smoothest, with the controller being automatically recognised and selected. Installing the Cubase script makes the controller appear easily in that software too, while Logic Pro’s script triggered an auto-set up process on loading, and successfully mapped itself.
Once set up, the hardware controls map to various parameters in your software. These vary by DAW, but essentially, in Mixer mode, the encoders will change fader levels, send levels and panning, and in DAW Control mode, they are mapped to devices or channel EQs and the like. Buttons control track solo, record arm and mute, depending on how you want them to behave. Navigating around tracks is easy too, though there are no transport controls mapped as part of the standard presets that I could find.
Launch Control 3 and Cubase. Image: Press
Specific mappings change slightly with each DAW, and some (like Cubase) have detailed re-mapping tools actually available inside a project. While you initially need to read up a bit about which mappings do what, the chances are you’re probably using one DAW most of the time so the learning curve isn’t particularly steep or long-winded; things do become familiar quickly. The HUI protocol is a bit more basic, as ever, but it does work as advertised.
It’s also possible to remap controls on the hardware, a process that the Components system makes extremely accessible. This also ties in nicely with the hardware control functions, where you can dig into the MIDI parameters linked to any controller-message function of any gear and map it directly to the controller. This is incredibly useful for taking hands-on control of things that might well be buried inside many levels of menu on hardware.
Of course, this requires some setup and figuring out which MIDI controller messages are linked to what, but it’s eminently achievable for anyone with a moderate grasp of music technology. The Launch Control has seven custom mode presets, accessible via the buttons, which are pretty much essential if you’re using it in any kind of live situation, jumping between devices or combinations of setups without needing to go back into configuration screens. The ability to have presets that control software and hardware at the same time is also valuable for the people out there running a mix of studio and live rigs.
Image: Press
Novation throws in some software goodies with your purchase, which is a nice bonus. After registering the hardware, you get access to limited-version DAWs, Ableton Live Lite and Cubase SE, plus plugins Klevgrand’s Fosfat transient designer, Baby Audio’s Parallel Aggressor effect and Output Movement, an effect modulator. There aren’t any individual software instruments bundled, though the DAWs have some of their own.
Launch Control 3 is a fun and flexible little controller but it does trade some functionality for portability. Although the full-size MIDI ports are handy for incorporating external gear there are no control voltage outputs like you’d get on some of the smaller Arturia controllers. The XL3 is significantly larger and by definition, less portable, and while the smaller model does a fine job of fitting a lot of that functionality behind mode and shift buttons, I do miss the dedicated transport controls of the XL. You can program things like Play and Stop using Components, but separate physical buttons would be so useful.
Perhaps those two are just examples of the compromises required to achieve this ultra-portability, and they’re probably not deal-breakers for most creators. In terms of price, £130 is reasonable, but perhaps fractionally high — it’s £50 more for the XL version, and other compact controllers like the Akai MidiMix are cheaper, though older and less elegant. Fundamentally, this unit gives you control over a wide selection of DAW mixing and plugin parameters as well as letting you bring external gear into the fold as well. And it does all this while taking up about as much space as a paperback, which is pretty impressive.
Image: Press
Key features

MIDI controller
19 endless rotary encoders with dimming LED lights
8 assignable buttons
Track navigation and page / mode / function buttons
USB-C power and data
5-pin MIDI in, out and thru
Monochrome OLED display
Support for leading DAWs and Mackie HUI protocol

The post Novation’s Launch Control 3 is a go-anywhere MIDI controller for almost every producer appeared first on MusicTech.

The AI skills gap is here, says AI company, and power users are pulling aheadAnthropic finds AI isn’t replacing jobs yet, but early data shows growing inequality as experienced users gain an edge, raising concerns about future displacement and workforce divides.

Warmth.dev Reel Deal Magnetic Tape SimulationReel Deal - Magnetic Tape Simulation Plugin Add authentic analog tape warmth to your digital recordings. What It Does Reel Deal simulates the sound of vintage reel-to-reel tape machines. It adds warmth, saturation, and subtle character that makes digital recordings sound more natural and cohesive. This effect is based on an advanced, physical simulation of magnetic tape properties, as a result of our original research. Features Tape saturation with adjustable drive and character. Variable tape speeds (3.75 - 15 ips) for different tones. Input and output gain controls. VST3 + CLAP + AU formats. macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), Windows, Linux. Sound 15 ips: Bright and clean, minimal coloration. 7.5 ips: Classic warm tape sound. 3.75 ips: Dark and lo-fi. Lower speeds sound darker. Higher speeds are brighter. Stacks with other Warmth plugins Reel Deal pairs well with other plugins in our lineup: Run it with Pale Horse Transparent Overdrive for tape-saturated drive tones. Use it with Keys for instant lo-fi piano. Combine with Tape Wobble for full tape sound. From Warmth - warmth.dev Read More

BTS comeback concert drew 18.4M global viewers says Netflix, as attendance figures spark debateThe group's first live performance since 2022 was streamed from Seoul's Gwanghwamun Square.
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The Most Intricate Of Freeform Digital ClocksDigital clock projects have been with us since the 1970s, when affordable LEDs and integrated circuits became available. In 2026 most of them use a microcontroller, but for the AliExpress fans there’s one that goes straight back to the ’70s with a pile of logic chips. You can make it on the supplied PCBs, but that wasn’t for [ALTco]. Instead, he made the circuit in free form, using six metres of brass wire.
The construction is anchored together by a set of busbars that carry sockets for a set of seven-segment and driver modules. The circuit is typical for the day, with a crystal oscillator and divider chain feeding the counters for the displays. There are a few clever tricks that older engineers might recognize in order to reduce the chip count. In this case that’s negated by an extra set of circuitry allowing the time to be set from a rotary encoder.
We’re impressed by the intricacy of the device, made bit by bit without a plan, it as some wires what thread their way between others. It’s a truly beautiful piece, and it reminds us of our circuit sculpture contest back in 2020.

Live Review: Trueblood and Prestyn Smith at The Observatory North Park, San Diego, CAToday's rising artists Trueblood and Prestyn Smith closed out their tour with two shows at The Observatory North Park San Diego, CA (3/20) and the Troubadour in West Hollywood, CA (3/22). This short run of six dates began at Brighton Music Hall in Boston, MA last month and followed with the Bowery Ballroom in N.Y.C., The Foundry in Philadelphia, PA, and the Songbyrd Music House in Washington D.C. All shows instantly sold out. These artists are a perfect pairing and had played shows together last year including a sold-out Ventura Music Hall show. Observatory North Park was the biggest show for both artists' careers with the exception of Trueblood playing Wango Tango last year. This sure was a historic night. The fans are very dedicated, with many having traveled from other states and parts of the world. The crowd, delighted as they were, threw homemade bracelets and other items onstage during the show. There was also a Meet and Greet following the Observatory show that lasted over an hour. This Sunday, Trueblood’s “Make It Out,” and Prestyn’s “Yellow Lights” are part of KROQ’s Locals Only playlist.

Seal Beach native Prestyn Smith, one of the greatest voices of this generation and the next big pop star, has been rising across TikTok and Instagram, hitting over 1,000,000 TikTok followers, over 620,000 Instagram followers (almost 700 posts), 547,000 Facebook followers, and 51,000 YouTube subscribers with her acoustic covers and videos playing guitar while riding a skateboard. Over the last few months, her Instagram followers have gone up by around 100,000. Top 10 Spotify plays adding to nearly 850,000. There has also been airplay on legendary L.A. radio stations Alt 98.7 and KROQ 106.7 and the band includes Hermosa and O.C. locals Cash Lane (bass), Ashwin Desai (guitar), and Jackson Daw (drums). Like Red Hot Chili Peppers, the band kicked off with a jam which led into Prestyn running onstage to a bunch of screaming fans. It was an incredible experience to witness. This nine-song set included all originals with the exception of Sabrina Carpenter’s “Because I Like A Boy." The opening song was  “Fell In Love,” which has a Jack Johnson vibe to it, with Prestyn plays acoustic guitar on it. It was the perfect song to open with and it was followed by her second biggest song “Can’t Lie” (105,710 plays). Next was one of her earlier singles (2024) “Angel On My Shoulder,” then “Because I Like A Boy," “I Meant It” (Released January 2025), and second to last was her biggest hit “Can’t Lie,” released this past November and has already accrued 223,074 plays and includes audience interaction clapping during the chorus. The closing song was her latest single “Yellow Light’s” (87,798 plays) which No Doubt’s Adrian Young recorded the drums on. This is an artist truly bound for greatness.

One of the quickest rising bands, San Diego Natives Trueblood consists of teenage brothers Mason (lead vocals/guitar), Dylan (lead guitar), Ethan (bass), and Cameron (drums). Their ages range from as young as 13 to 18 and they have been playing instruments for half their lives. Since November 2024, they've already accomplished hitting 3,000,000+ Instagram followers, 540,000+ YouTube subscribers, and over 15,000,000 top 10 combined Spotify plays. They have amassed a very dedicated fan base and have been bringing songs from artists before their time to the next generation which can be seen when the house music plays before their set—with much of the audience singing along with those songs. During the East Coast run, fans were lined up early in the afternoon in under 40 degree weather—the line stretched nearly a mile long line by the time doors opened. Their setlist kicked off with “Never Let You Down,” and included originals “Flood My Brain,” “Enemy” (performed acoustic), “21 Cents,” “Stuck,” “Paint A Picture,” and “Morning Shade.” For covers they performed Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Can’t Stop,” an acoustic version of Laufey’s “From the Start,” The Weeknd’s “Sweater Weather” (also acoustic), Franz  Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out,” and George Michael’s “Careless Whisper”—which was the final song.

Before the tour, Trueblood performed intimate local shows in Oceanside, San Diego, as well as Anaheim and Los Angeles (plus larger performances at Wango Tango and Soma Sidestage). The next generation of great rock bands is here.

Photos by Alex KluftThe post Live Review: Trueblood and Prestyn Smith at The Observatory North Park, San Diego, CA first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Steinberg unveil Nuendo 15 The latest version of Steinberg’s post-production-focused DAW has just arrived, and comes packed with new dialogue editing, sound design and mixing tools, as well as improved automation, simplified multi-channel managements and more.