Antelope Audio’s Zenith 2 interface “bridges the gap between million-dollar studios and bedroom setups”Antelope Audio has unveiled Zenith 2, a new entry-level audio interface which aims to “bridge the gap between multi-million-dollar studios and bedroom setups”.
At just $299/€299, Zenith 2 arrives as Antelope Audio’s most affordable audio interface yet, pairing decades of audio expertise from Antelope with a super simplistic and effortless mode of operation.

READ MORE: BandLab’s Membership drops to its lowest price ever for Black Friday

At its core, the Zenith 2 features state-of-the-art AD/DA converters with 32-bit/192 kHz resolution and up to 123 dB of dynamic range, two discrete six-transistor mic preamps with 75 dB of gain – the same as those in Antelope Audio’s flagship Orion Studio interface – as well as integrated real-time DSP processing, with a Tube-Opto Compressor, Sky EQ and De-Esser at your disposal.
Antelope Audio also promises that each onboard DSP effect will be suffer zero perceptible latency, making it perfect for musicians, podcasters or streamers who rely on sharp, reliable tech to keep things running smoothly.

For live content, the Zenith 2 boasts built-in Loopback, seamlessly blending mic, music and stream audio. You can also monitor your sound via two independent headphone outs, each with its own dedicated volume control, as well as gain to drive high-impedance headphones. In terms of further I/O, there’s a stereo TRS monitor out, as well as a 5-pin MIDI input.
Elsewhere, the Zenith 2 boasts class-compliant, USC-C bus-powered connectivity for driver-free usage across Mac, Windows, iOS and Android devices. There’s also custom low-latency Mac and Windows drivers available, as and when required.
The Zenith 2 is available to pre-order now for $299. First shipments are expected in December 2025.
Learn more at Antelope Audio.
The post Antelope Audio’s Zenith 2 interface “bridges the gap between million-dollar studios and bedroom setups” appeared first on MusicTech.

NTS Thrives in the Spaces That Streaming Leaves BehindFrom our friends at MIDiA Research, a story about online radio and community building through NTS' Don’t Assume Day.
The post NTS Thrives in the Spaces That Streaming Leaves Behind appeared first on Hypebot.

Grant Applications Now Open for Family Alliance in Music SupportThe FAM Support Grant is open now through Dec. 1, offering $25,000 to help individuals and small businesses balance caregiving responsibilities while working in music.
The post Grant Applications Now Open for Family Alliance in Music Support appeared first on Hypebot.

Origin Effects launch the Bassrig Fifteen The Bassrig Fifteen features an all-analoguge signal path and promises to deliver the full experience of playing through one of the world's most praised studio bass amps.

Get the Sonic Academy SA76 Compressor for FREE when you share a freebie with a friend
Sonic Academy SA76 is a 1176-style compressor plugin for macOS and Windows. Thanks to a clever points workaround discovered by the BPB community, you can grab it for (practically) free right now. Yesterday, we covered the free JU-60 chorus, but it turns out that the far more exciting freebie might be hiding just behind it. [...]
View post: Get the Sonic Academy SA76 Compressor for FREE when you share a freebie with a friend

How I turned my DAW into an improv partner while producing my jazz albumThe jazz scene in my hometown of Manchester is open-minded and always evolving, but I discovered the genre while making hip-hop instrumentals and passing them to friends. I was listening to J Dilla, Madlib and Pete Rock, tracing those samples back to Ahmad Jamal, Herbie Hancock and Bill Evans. Jazz crept in that way – through the sampler. Eventually, I stopped digging for other people’s records and thought, ‘What if I could just record the thing I wanted to sample?’

READ MORE: Pianist Matt Wilde’s Prophet Rev2 provided the “secret sauce” for his debut album

That idea became the heart of my new album Find a Way. I wasn’t chasing a “jazz record” or an “electronic record”; instead, I took elements from those genres and discovered that there’s a lot more crossover in improvisation and music production than I first thought.

Capturing raw material
Most tracks started the same way: I’d sit at the Rhodes Mk1 that I restored, or my Yamaha U1, hit record in Ableton Live and play whatever came to mind for a long stretch. Afterwards, I’d pull out the phrases that felt good and build around them.
My Prophet Rev2, meanwhile, sparked the title track. I set up a repeating sequence with slow modulation so it never felt static, then wrote harmony against that pattern. Ableton’s Session View makes that approach natural, so I could launch ideas, record everything into Arrangement, and improvise first, edit later.
Image courtesy of Matt Wilde
Why drums took over
I recorded live drums for the album (the drummer, Oscar Ogden, was incredible), but once I began shaping tracks, I found myself programming the drum parts. Not to replace the human element, but to explore a more intricate, loop-based language with its own nuance. I still used bits of the live takes, resampled and chopped, yet programming became the focus
My main engine was XLN Audio’s Addictive Drums. The Vintage Dead and Dry kits sit perfectly with the Rhodes, piano and Prophet parts, giving that tight, pitched, present tone. I’d choose something like the Ludwig Blue Oyster kick, tweak EQ just a touch, and leave character shaping to Live – Goodhertz Tupe for harmonic weight, Soundtoys Decapitator for bite, and a UAD Pultec for overall tone. Keeping the same chain across tracks made it feel like one drummer moving between rooms.
For me, hi-hats are where so much feel and groove live. I’ll alternate articulations or vary velocity and timing manually so no two hits are identical. In my How I Actually Create Good Drums video, I demonstrate that process of going hit-by-hit until it grooves. Ableton’s MIDI editor gives you control over velocity and timing, and if you want a faster starting point, the Groove Pool or Velocity Device can add subtle micro-variations before you refine things by hand
Image courtesy of Matt Wilde
Drums that follow the music
Rather than forcing the music to fit the drums, I let the drums follow the phrasing. If a piano stab lands early, I nudge the snare. If a trumpet phrase needs space, I mute the kick. It’s not an imitation of a live drummer but a composition shaped by performance.
During a session with trumpeter Aaron Wood in Huddersfield, we kept it simple: trumpet, piano, Rhodes, laptop. The takes had that “could-fall-apart” excitement. In Live, I’d stretch or chop just enough to keep that energy – following his phrases with a snare-snare-snare, or thinning the kit so his tone could breathe. Because everything was in Session View, I could record those edits in real time and keep the interplay intact.
Image courtesy of Matt Wilde
Ableton has several features that genuinely suit an improviser’s mindset, and most of them shaped how I made Find a Way. Capture MIDI has become essential when I’m working with software instruments – it rescues ideas I’ve played but forgotten to record and turns those spontaneous moments into material I can actually use. When I’m playing hardware like the Nord Piano 5 or Prophet, those ideas usually come in as audio, but the same “capture first” mentality still applies: I record long passes, then pull out phrases that feel alive and build from there. Recording from Session View into Arrangement keeps that performance-led approach going. Instead of programming parts bar by bar, I can “play” the arrangement in real time and let the feel dictate the structure. And when I move into editing, Live’s Groove Pool is a quick way to introduce subtle timing and velocity variations before I refine everything by hand. Push 3, especially with MPE and standalone mode, has become part of that workflow too; I can sketch expressive ideas away from the laptop, then drop them straight back into Live when I’m ready to shape the track. All of these tools support a process where improvisation leads and production follows, which is exactly how this record came together.
Add my regular front-end – Soyuz 013 pair for upright piano, Genelec 8040s for monitoring, and AIAIAI TMA-2 wireless headphones for cable-free tracking – and it’s a setup built for spontaneity.
Image: Press
Imperfection as feel
The temptation in-the-box is to try and polish everything, but I try not to. I like the “accidents” that can transform the feel of a song, like a clap that lands slightly late, a tambourine tucked behind the snare, a one-off foot-close hat. Sometimes I’ll delay a layered clap by a few milliseconds so it “answers” the snare rather than lands on it.
One thing that’s helped me bring more life into programmed music is starting with a long, unbroken take before I even think about drums. I sit at the piano or Rhodes, record a long take, and let the harmonic phrasing lead. That performance becomes the structure the drums follow.
I keep my drum chain consistent across tracks and focus on small timing and velocity shifts rather than heavy edits. Those little movements are usually where the human feel sits.
And instead of programming an arrangement, I’ll perform it. Recording a pass from Session View into Arrangement feels like directing a band responding in real time and shaping the track as it unfolds.
This workflow helps me keep programmed music connected to the instinctive, improvisational side of playing.
Image courtesy of Matt Wilde
Closing thought
Working this way made it easier to enter a flow state. I found myself sitting at the piano or Rhodes most days, pressing record and letting those long improvised passes become raw material. Over time they felt almost like daily sketches — loose ideas I could return to, shape, and eventually build full tracks from.
Ableton began to feel less like a DAW and more like another instrument in that process, giving me space to follow the phrasing wherever it wanted to go. Keeping consistent chains on each instrument meant the mix developed as I played, which freed up headspace and let the music unfold without second-guessing.
Listening back to Find a Way, it feels honest. I can hear those early sketches in the final tracks — the spontaneity in the keys, the interplay with the drums, the moments we captured with the live players we did bring in. I’m proud of how we arrived here, and it’s a workflow I’ll carry forward.
If you want to hear how that approach sounds, I’ve broken down the Find a Way sessions and workflow on my YouTube channel.
The post How I turned my DAW into an improv partner while producing my jazz album appeared first on MusicTech.

Late To the Party - Albums You Wish You'd Discovered EarlierSometimes an album can sneak up on you and become a part of the soundtrack of your life, even years later. We at AllMusic embrace these late discoveries and proudly (and in some cases abashedly) present some of our personal "late to the party" albums. Don't let them pass you by.

Pro Tools templates: How to set them up to streamline your workflow
Learn how to streamline your music production process in Pro Tools with templates, whether you're recording, mixing, or mastering.

AudioThing B00GAB00GA is a studio and live instrument made in collaboration with Hainbach, designed to create experimental rhythms and tonal textures. Inspired by a rare piece of lab equipment, the Hewlett-Packard Word Generator 8006A, it offers a different way to sequence clicks, pulses, and noise. Use it to create tight grooves, off-kilter beats, and forever shifting micro-sound patterns. YouTube Video Read More

ETH falls to 4-month low under $3K: Is the bull market over?ETH price fell below $3,000 for the first time since July. Cointelegraph explains what is required for a trend reversal.

Building A Smart Speaker Outside The Corporate CloudIf you’re not worried about corporate surveillance bots scraping your shopping list and manipulating you through marketing, you can buy any number of off-the-shelf smart speakers for your home. Alternatively, you can roll your own like [arpy8] did, and keep your life a little more private.
The build is based around an ESP32 microcontroller. It connects to the ‘net via its inbuilt Wi-Fi connection, and listens out for your voice with an INMP441 omnidirectional microphone module. The audio data is trucked off to a backend server running a Whisper speech-to-text model. The text is then passed to Google’s Gemini 2.5 Flash large language model. The response generated is passed to the Piper Neural Voice text-to-speech engine, sent back to the ESP32, and spat out via the device’s DAC output and a speaker attached to an LM386 amplifier. Basically, anything you could ask Gemini, you can do with this device.
By virtue of using a commercial large language model, it’s not perfectly private by any means. Still, it’s at least a little farther removed than using a smart speaker that’s directly logged in to your Amazon/Google/Hulu/Beanstikk account. Files are on Github for those eager to dive into the code. We’ve seen some other fun builds along these lines before, too. Video after the break.

Meta releases a new tool to protect reels creators from having their work stolenOn Monday, Meta introduced Facebook content protection, a mobile tool designed to detect when a creator's original reels posted to Facebook are being used without their permission. The new tool extends to Instagram too.

Serato DJ: Host of new Crate management options lead its 4.0 updateFollowing a public beta period, Serato DJ’s latest update is good to go. With the company labelling Serato DJ 4.0 as “the biggest update yet to the software’s library interface”, the improvements to both the Pro and Lite editions include a slew of Crate management features and powerful new tools to streamline your workflow.
Inspired by its user base, the new update welcomes onboard feedback from customer support tickets, Reddit threads and other ideas directly from the Serato community. Most significantly, the DJ software has improved its Crate management, allowing far more flexibility when sorting, searching and organising your Crates.

READ MORE: Is Neural DSP Mantra just another channel strip plugin? Not exactly

In terms of organisation, you can now sort your Crates alphabetically, by date or even lay out your own customised order. There’s also the option to colour-code your Crates to make it even easier to navigate through your tracks.
Better yet, a new shortcut option also allows you to jump straight into your favourite Crates and tracks, which can be accessed via a handy right click menu. Even if a track isn’t worthy of being in your ‘favourites’, there’s another way of ranking your tracks by preference. You can give each track its own emoji-rating, making it easier than ever to scan through your Crates to curate a killer set.
The update also adds the ability to see the total playtime and number of tracks within a Crate within the Crate’s footer. This should be a total game changer if you’re in a rush, as you can just scan through your Crate info without having to actually open each individual Crate. Alongside that, you can even right click on a track to see any other Crates it features in, without having to hunt around.

Speaking of hopping in and out of Crates, there’s also a new option to add certain streaming tracks to your Serato DJ Crates. That means you don’t have to stress about hopping between Crates and Spotify playlists in the middle of a set, allowing you to fully keep your head in the game.
There’s also a new ability to ‘analyse’ your tracks. This means Serato can automatically detect the BPM, key and more about a track when you import a track into your library.
As well as the new organisational perks, Serato has introduced a new Slip Release feature to customise your release times in Slip mode. It should allow for some even more creative scratching potential – but this is one of the few features only available with the Pro version of Serato DJ.
The only other Pro-exclusive update is the expansive Crate Search. All other Crate organisational features, however, are included on Serato DJ Lite 4.0.
For more information, head to Serato.
The post Serato DJ: Host of new Crate management options lead its 4.0 update appeared first on MusicTech.

Genelec, Dolby Atmos, and Composer Niles Luther Bring Venice to Life at the Brooklyn MuseumThe Brooklyn Museum’s Monet and Venice, the largest exhibition of Monet’s work in New York in over 25 years, is offering visitors more than a visual experience. The exhibition culminates in an immersive 4.1.4 Dolby Atmos® sound installation designed by composer-in-residence Niles Luther and powered by Genelec monitors, blending sight and sound to create a multisensory encounter with Monet’s Venetian masterpieces.

Co-curated by Lisa Small, the Brooklyn Museum’s Senior Curator of European Art, the exhibition presents Monet’s 1908 Venetian paintings alongside centuries of depictions of the city, from Canaletto to the early 20th century. “This is the largest museum presentation of Monet’s work in 25 years in New York City,” Small said. “We wanted to create something that felt both emotional and innovative, something you can feel as much as see. The Genelec system and Niles’s score made that possible.”

In the final gallery, visitors are enveloped by Luther’s original composition, rendered in a 4.1.4 Dolby Atmos format. The system includes four Genelec 8330 two-way studio monitors at ear level (front-left, front-right, rear-left, rear-right), four Genelec 8320 overhead monitors, and a Genelec 7350 subwoofer, all calibrated via Genelec Loudspeaker Manager (GLM) software. The configuration allows the music to flow naturally throughout the space, overcoming the challenges of a large, reverberant gallery.

As Luther explained, “I wrote a symphonic multi-channel, 4.1.4, down-rendered Dolby Atmos installation in the final room where Monet's Venice paintings reside... When you use sufficiently advanced technology and it’s deployed in a very careful, meticulous and thoughtful way, you get to this point where it almost becomes an illusion. … When you walk into that space, does it stop your heart? Does it make you catch your breath? We have achieved that in the final gallery room.”

The composer described the creative challenge of translating the paintings into music. “From the creative side, as a composer, part of the challenge was how do I take what’s contained in these paintings, and then translate them into the language of music. … All of this was possible because we were able to calibrate it within GLM, and I was able to take my master file and just come into the museum and it just plays back beautifully on the calibrated system.”

The use of Genelec’s Smart Active Monitoring system was critical in creating a natural and transparent listening environment, allowing Luther and the museum’s technical team to refine frequency balance and control reverberation. Paul Stewart, Senior Technical Sales Manager at Genelec Inc., highlighted the importance of precision monitoring. “This installation beautifully demonstrates how precision monitoring can elevate the emotional impact of art. Genelec systems are designed to disappear sonically, and what remains is the artist’s intent,” he said.

Small emphasized the uniqueness of the installation within the museum setting: “It sounds incredible. I mean, the symphony is beautiful. The paintings are beautiful. The design in the gallery and the speakers just makes the experience what it is... You won’t get too many other Monet exhibitions where a full-scale symphony is part of the experience.”

Monet and Venice runs through February 1, 2026, at the Brooklyn Museum. The exhibition offers visitors a rare opportunity to experience one of Monet’s most iconic series not only visually but through an enveloping, symphonic soundscape.

Read the Monet and Venice Genelec case study HERE.

The post Genelec, Dolby Atmos, and Composer Niles Luther Bring Venice to Life at the Brooklyn Museum first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Musixmatch owner seized on rival’s Russia connection in Spotify talks, alleges court filingDispute may relate to LyricFind's historical provision of lyric services to Russian service, VKontakte
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