“Biggie was like, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll just stand here until each one gets in’”: Mark Ronson recalls the time Biggie Smalls rocked up to an NY club event he was DJing in the ‘90s with “50 dudes from Brooklyn”Super producer Mark Ronson has looked back on his days DJing in the New York club scene in the ‘90s, in a conversation with Rick Rubin discussing his new book, Night People.
The book – titled, in full, Night People: How to Be a DJ in ‘90s New York City – arrives 16 September, and charts Ronson’s years as a DJ in the city’s vibrant nightlife scene.

READ MORE: The Great Gig In The Sphere: David Gilmour says he’s “hoping” to watch a Pink Floyd avatar show at the Las Vegas Sphere one day

On his motivation for writing the book, Ronson says: “Far more famous DJs than me have written books, but no one’s really written the book that just talks about what it’s like to be a gigging DJ. Not a superstar DJ, but that shit when you’re just going to work four or five nights a week, playing in bars and clubs and dealing with regular people.
“I don’t want to over-dramatise the emotional highs and lows, but there are these things that are baked into it. You’re the most solitary figure in the most action packed surroundings.”
In one particular memory that stands out, Ronson remembers DJing at a party attended by Biggie Smalls.
“It was obviously a fucking seismic event,” he recalls. “And even the way the club was shaped, this weird angle and corners, I barely saw him. I could feel the energy like, ‘Holy shit’ – Biggie and the crowd ripple, you knew something was going on.
“I remember at the end of the night… his security [and] promoter telling me [about] Biggie rolling up with 50 dudes from Brooklyn. Some of them had guns [and] swords.
“[Security told Biggie:] ‘Yo, I can’t let 50 dudes in right now.’ And Biggie was like, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll just stand here until each one gets in. You just let them in how you can. You balance them with girls, and then I’ll come in when it’s all done.”
Ronson adds that Biggie was “just standing there” with a “wad” of cash, “just giving a bill each time someone [came] in”.
Asked by Rick Rubin what, in his opinion, makes a great club, Ronson says venues which are more rudimentary are often better environments for DJ sets.
“The best ones, some of them were just a fucking corridor with two speakers,” Ronson says. “You know, the crowd is what makes the club great. I think the crowd and the DJ.”
He continues: “For me, my favourite places, 50 percent of them were basements. And I try to get into that in the book, I’m like, why was it a basement? Is there something like going underground where you’re just like, you’re getting a little closer to Satan’s real estate?”
Mark Ronson’s new book, Night People: How to Be a DJ in ‘90s New York City, arrives tomorrow, 16 September. Preorders are available now.

The post “Biggie was like, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll just stand here until each one gets in’”: Mark Ronson recalls the time Biggie Smalls rocked up to an NY club event he was DJing in the ‘90s with “50 dudes from Brooklyn” appeared first on MusicTech.

Imaginando launch VS 2 visual synthesizer Imaginando have announced the release of VS 2, the second version of their visual synthesizer for macOS and Windows.

Full FX Media releases Setekh, a FREE distortion plugin for Windows, macOS, and Linux
Full FX Media has released Setekh, a free distortion plugin with a minimal interface and a useful input/output gain link. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but Setekh delivers exactly what you want from a compact distortion tool. You get a solid analog-style distortion sound and a clean interface with one cool feature that helps speed up [...]
View post: Full FX Media releases Setekh, a FREE distortion plugin for Windows, macOS, and Linux

The Great Gig In The Sphere: David Gilmour says he’s “hoping” to watch a Pink Floyd avatar show at the Las Vegas Sphere one dayDavid Gilmour is open to the idea of a Pink Floyd avatar show at the Las Vegas Sphere, and says that sitting back and watching himself in digital form is something he’s always wanted to do.
The mighty spherical venue has hosted a number of huge gigs with legendary artists including U2, Dead & Company, and the Eagles – none of which involved avatars, however. Made popular by ABBA with their Voyage concerts, rock band Kiss are also rolling out a new virtual era.

READ MORE: “The idea that money from shows in big venues supports the smaller venues is just common sense”: Sam Fender’s arena tour raises over £100,000 to save UK grassroots venues

Given David Gilmour and Roger Waters’ ongoing rift, and the last time Floyd played live together dating back to 2005, an avatar show could be a way forward to bring the band’s music and their classic lineup to a live setting, albeit in digital form.
During a Q&A at the UK premiere of his Live At The Circus Maximus concert film at London’s BFI IMAX, Gilmour states (via MusicRadar), “The Sphere? Well, you know, I’m hoping one of these days, to go there and sit and watch myself doing it, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. My avatar, you know? So I don’t actually have to get up and do it.”
Interestingly, Gilmour also spoke of the Sphere in an interview with Rolling Stone just a couple of weeks ago, where he suggested he may also be open to doing something solo at the venue, though he admitted he has little idea on how the Sphere actually works: “They have been on and suggested that I might do something there. In the future, who knows. I haven’t got that far. It will be in there amongst the plans that we are to think about.”
Check out the video below to see how the venue looks from inside:

The Las Vegas Sphere hosts the largest LED screen in the world. It opened in 2023, also marking the largest spherical structure ever built, and cost over $2 billion to construct. Its all-encompassing sound is backed by science: “Wave-field synthesis is the magical math behind the best quality sound in the business,” explains the Sphere website.
“The Huygens-Fresnel Principle describes how sound waves propagate and combine into new wave forms. This allows Sphere to optimise for your ears, maintain amplitude over distance, and deliver immersive soundscapes with lifelike precision.”
Learn more about the Las Vegas Sphere, or head over to David Gilmour’s website to find out where you can catch his Live At The Circus Maximus concert film.
The post The Great Gig In The Sphere: David Gilmour says he’s “hoping” to watch a Pink Floyd avatar show at the Las Vegas Sphere one day appeared first on MusicTech.

Bots are flooding Deezer: Nearly a third of music uploaded daily is fully AI-generated, platform revealsDeezer has revealed that nearly a third of music uploaded to its platform is now fully AI-generated – a staggering rise from just 10 percent at the start of the year.
The French streaming service, which rolled out a new AI detection tool in January, says it is now receiving over 30,000 fully AI-generated tracks every day. In June, Deezer also became the first major platform to explicitly tag synthetic music, as the flood of artificially generated content shows no sign of slowing.

READ MORE: Fake artists, real opportunities: Hoaxes and scams are holding back the potential of AI music

According to Deezer, about 70% of plays for these AI songs have been detected as fraudulent and are part of a wave of bot-driven uploads designed to siphon royalties from the platform’s revenue pool.
“Following a massive increase during the year, AI music now makes up a significant part of the daily track delivery to music streaming and we want to lead the way in minimising any negative impact for artists and fans alike,” says Deezer CEO Alexis Lanternier.
Lanternier adds that Deezer has taken steps to quarantine the influx: removing fully AI-generated tracks from algorithmic recommendations, excluding them from editorial playlists, and tightening its fraud-detection systems.
“This way we ensure the impact on the royalty pool remains minimal, while providing a transparent user experience. And most importantly, we continue to fight fraudulent activity, which is the main driver behind uploading fully AI generated content.”
The surge has been dramatic. AI-generated content made up around 10% of uploads in January, jumped to 18% in April, and now stands at a record-breaking 28%.
While Deezer insists the platform isn’t being overrun just yet, the trend raises an uneasy question for the industry: if bots are already gaming streaming services at scale, what happens when AI tools become even faster, cheaper, and harder to detect?
The post Bots are flooding Deezer: Nearly a third of music uploaded daily is fully AI-generated, platform reveals appeared first on MusicTech.

Native Markets officially claims Hyperliquid's USDH stablecoin tickerNative Markets claimed the US dollar-pegged stablecoin ticker following a heated bidding war closely watched by the crypto community.

Retro x86 with 486TangTang FPGA boards are affordable, and [nand2mario] has been trying to get an x86 core running on one for a while. Looks like it finally worked out, as there is an early version of the ao486 design on a Tang FPGA board using a Gowin device. That core’s available on the MiSTer platform, which emulates games using an Altera Cyclone device.
Of course, porting something substantial between FPGA architectures is not trivial. In addition, [nand2mario] made some changes. The original core uses DDR3 memory, but for the Tang and the 486, SDRAM makes more sense. The only problem is that the Tang’s SDRAM is 16 bits wide, which would imply you need two cycles per 32-bit access. To mitigate this, the memory system runs at twice the main clock frequency. Of course, that’s kind of double data rate, but not in the same way as DDR memory.

The MiSTer uses an ARM processor’s high-speed channel to link to the FPGA for disk access. The Tang board lacks a high-speed interface for this, so the disk storage is now on an SD card that the FPGA directly accesses. In addition, the first 128K of the SD card stores configuration settings that the FPGA now reads from that on boot up.
One of the most interesting things about the development was the use of Verilator to simulate the entire system, including things like the VGA card. It was possible to simulate booting to a DOS prompt, although it was slower than being on actual hardware, as you might expect. But, this lets you poke at the entire state of the system in a way that would be difficult on the actual hardware.
Want to give it a try? The Tang boards are cheap. (We have one on a shelf waiting for a future post.) Or, you could go the simulation route.
MiSTer has really put FPGAs on a lot of people’s radar. If you prefer the C64, that’s available on a Tang board, too.

OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor says we’re in an AI bubble (but that’s okay)Like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Bret Taylor thinks we're in an AI bubble — but he doesn't sound too worried about it.

NUSofting Filter4Tongue FreeFilter4Tongue Free (100% free download - optional donation) [VST2/VST3 64-bit for Windows 10/11]**. - Hyper Wah - Acoustic Resonances - Drone Shaper - Formant Maker - Creative Equalizer - FSU FX - Features: BandPass x4 filter bank, two serial pairs in parallel routing. Symmetrical and divergent tuning of the filters. Non linear mode, selectable. Pink noise internal source. Saturation on overdrive. Modulator: envelope follower with loop mode and with four targets. - - - - - - - - - - Planned features for the expanded (paid) version: Precise tuning to tempered notes. Step LFO, with sync to host. Stereo mode. Oversampling. macOS AU/VST3 formats. Many more presets. Tooltips. Video tutorials. Updates and support. Read More

HEARS Perfection from Brainworx Brainworx have announced the release of HEARS Perfection, software which applies personalised EQ correction based on a short listening test.

Tesla board chair calls debate over Elon Musk’s $1T pay package ‘a little bit weird’Tesla's board chair is defending a proposed 10-year, $1 trillion compensation package for CEO Elon Musk.

The ‘endgame’ for US dollar stablecoins is no tickers — Web3 execUS dollar-pegged Stablecoins have become commoditized, diminishing the need for individual price tickers from the viewpoint of crypto users.

Send Images to Your Terminal With Rich Pixels[darrenburns]’ Rich Pixels is a library for sending colorful images to a terminal. Give it an image, and it’ll dump it to your terminal in full color. While it also supports ASCII art, the cool part is how it makes it so easy to display an arbitrary image — a pixel-art rendition of it, anyway — in a terminal window.
How it does this is by cleverly representing two lines of pixels in the source image with a single terminal row of characters. Each vertical pixel pair is represented by a single Unicode ▄ (U+2584 “lower half block”) character. The trick is to set the background color of the half-block to the upper pixel’s RGB value, and the foreground color of the half-block to the lower pixel’s RGB. By doing this, a single half block character represents two vertically-stacked pixels. The only gotcha is that Rich Pixels doesn’t resize the source image; if one’s source image is 600 pixels wide, one’s terminal is going to receive 600 U+2584 characters per line to render the Rich Pixels version.
[Simon WIllison] took things a step further and made show_image.py, which works the same except it resizes the source image to fit one’s terminal first. This makes it much more flexible and intuitive.
The code is here on [Simon]’s tools GitHub, a repository for software tools he finds useful, like the Incomplete JSON Pretty Printer.

KV331 Audio SynthMaster 3 PlayerSynthMaster 3 Player is a stripped down version of SynthMaster 3 tailored towards users who prefer tweaking existing presets over designing sounds from scratch. It comes with all the factory presets of KV331 Audio's SynthMaster One, SynthMaster 2 and SynthMaster 3 software synthesizers. Features Rich Content Library: SynthMaster 3 Player comes with 4400 factory presets designed by a world class team of sound designers: Arksun, Aiyn Zahev, Bluffmunkey, Brian Transeau, BigTone, Cipryan Bot, Davide Puxeddu, Demis Hellen, Electronisounds, Francis Preve, Gercek Dorman, Insigna, Howard Smith, Kevin Schroeder, Kurt Ader, Mirko Ruta, NatLife, New Loops, Nori Ubukata, Rob Lee, Selcuk Ergen, Xenos Soundworks, XTD, Ufuk Kevser, Venus Theory, Vandalism, Vorpalsound and Yuli Yolo. Multi-layer Architecture: Each SynthMaster 3 Player instance can have up to 16 layers. Users can add new layers by loading existing presets into layers through the preset browser. Limited Editing: Although users can not edit layer modules and modulation sources, they can edit all other layer parts such as keyboard zones, velocity zones, voicing, unison, arpeggiator, sequencer and insert FX. Multiple Layer Views: SynthMaster 3 Player provides 2 different views to edit layer parameters: Track View: This view is used for editing keyboard zones, velocity zones, voicing, unison, arpeggiator and sequencer parameters of multiple layers. Mix View: This view is used for editing insert FX and FX send parameters of multiple layers. Preset Previews: Presets in SynthMaster 3 Player have built-in previews. Users can listen to the preview of a preset by moving the mouse over the Play icon that is displayed next to the preset name on the presets list. In-App Shop: Multiple products are displayed on the Shop page, with their individual price and sale details. Free Player There is a free version of SynthMaster 3 Player that comes with 500 factory presets. It can be downloaded from KV331 Audio web site. Audio Demos Audio demos of SynthMaster 3 factory presets can be listened to on KV331 Audio's SoundCloud page https://soundcloud.com/kv331synthmaster/sets/synthmaster-3-player Read More

Sonora Cinematic release Aethervox vocal library Sonora Cinematic have released Aethervox, a new cinematic vocal instrument designed for Audiomodern’s free Soundbox sampler platform.