BS-203 MacroAcidizer from Born Second The first virtual instrument from Born Second offers a recreation of two Roland classics: the TB-303 and MC-202.

Pixel Watch 5 Demonstrates Good RepairabilityAlthough we often find ourselves drowning in a seemingly unending sea of portable devices that are effectively e-waste once an internal component gives out, it’s good to remind ourselves that there are a few examples out there by large brands that manage to tick all the fancy feature boxes, while still being very much repairable. Case in point the Pixel Watch 5, a smart watch which much like its predecessor gets a 9/10 on [iFixit]’s repairability score.
No heat gun required, just undo the latch on the side of the watch.
Despite featuring an IP68 rating, opening it is as easy as taking out a few screws to release its latch. This allows the back to swing open, with not a drop of glue in sight, just an O-ring gasket that keeps moisture out and can be reused many times. Digging into the guts, there are color-coded screws that guide one’s hand as the very modular design is taken apart in a matter of minutes.
Being able to simply unlatch the back, and also easily obtain spare parts are two aspects that are a very welcome sight indeed. Although it’s much easier to just glue everything together, something like this latch-and-gasket approach is something that we hope that more manufacturers will copy for these small devices.
It’s potentially also an idea for one’s next DIY smart watch project, as tempting as reaching for that tube of glue may seem.

Hikers rescued after using Google Gemini for planningThe sheriff’s office said the hikers “were advised by Gemini to bring far less food and water than their group required."

Dehli Musikk SidStation ASIDSidStation ASID requires an Elektron SidStation. It contains no SID emulation and makes no sound on its own. The SidStation is a MOS6581 desktop synth with three voices, but getting those three voices to behave as three independent instruments from a DAW is awkward on the hardware alone. SidStation ASID solves that by streaming raw SID registers over the ASID protocol instead of sending MIDI CC. Every register is reachable, and each voice gets its own pitch and gate. One plugin instance drives one voice. Put an instance on each of three DAW tracks, pick a voice per track, and the three voices become three monosynths you can sequence apart. Put the unit in ASID mode from its front panel before playing. Per voice The four SID waveforms, combinable, with noise exclusive as on the real chip. ADSR envelope, pulse width, coarse and fine tuning, and pitch bend with an adjustable range. Hard sync, ring modulation, and the raw TEST bit. Portamento, with a legato or always trigger and a smooth or stepped glide. An eight step wavetable, each step carrying its own waveform, sync, ring, test, pulse width and arpeggio offset, with a step length in frames or as a host tempo synced note division, plus a table length and loop point. Three LFOs on pitch, pulse width and cutoff, with several shapes, a free Hz or host tempo synced rate, depth, mod wheel scaling, and a fade in delay. Shared across the three voices, since the chip has one of each The filter: cutoff, resonance, per voice routing, external input, and combinable low, band and high pass modes. Master volume, and a switch to silence voice 3 so it can serve as a pure modulation source for ring and sync. Around the sound A Commodore 64 styled pixel interface, colour coded per voice. Voice presets saved to disk, so a sound outlives the DAW project it was made in. A tempo readout, a Panic that releases every voice, and an Init that returns a voice to its default sound. A MIDI load meter, since the SidStation shares one slow MIDI port across all three voices. The plugin opens the MIDI port itself rather than taking routed MIDI from the host, and the port is shared by every instance. The plugin's own track is silent, so the hardware's audio comes back on a separate track fed by your interface input. There is no AAX build, so Pro Tools cannot load it. The Standalone app is the way around that. Free and open source under the GPL v3. Developed and tested against OS 1.11 R34 hardware on macOS. The Windows and Linux builds are not yet hardware tested. This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by Elektron. System requirements An Elektron SidStation, a MIDI interface connected to it, and a DAW that loads VST3 or AU. macOS 10.15 or later, Apple Silicon or Intel, signed and notarized. Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Linux x86_64. The Standalone app runs without a DAW. There is no AAX version, so Pro Tools is not supported. Read More

Initial D artist MOTSU releases FREE zero-latency vocal tuner MotTune MIDI
MOTSU and DeeJei.Tokyo have released MotTune MIDI, a free real-time vocal pitch correction and vocoder plugin for macOS and Windows. Initial D is one of my favorite anime series, along with Slam Dunk. I binged it back when I had time to binge, so getting an email from someone who worked on its legendary soundtrack [...]
View post: Initial D artist MOTSU releases FREE zero-latency vocal tuner MotTune MIDI

NEVER FOUND releases VT-Mini, a FREE vocal tuner for Windows
NEVER FOUND has released VT-Mini, a free vocal tuning and cleanup plugin for Windows. VT-Mini’s interface has two main panels. TUNE handles the pitch correction, and CLEAN combines a low-cut filter and dynamic de-esser on a single graph. The pitch section gives you Retune, Amount, Natural, and Variation controls, along with a choice between chromatic [...]
View post: NEVER FOUND releases VT-Mini, a FREE vocal tuner for Windows

RIPPLES releases Pulse, a FREE rhythmic volume shaper plugin
RIPPLES Music has released Pulse, a free rhythmic volume shaper plugin for macOS and Windows. Pulse combines sidechain-style pumping, rhythmic gating, and LFO volume shaping in a simple interface with an editable curve. This type of plugin was first made by Cableguys around a decade ago with their legendary FilterShaper. There have been quite a [...]
View post: RIPPLES releases Pulse, a FREE rhythmic volume shaper plugin

HEDD Audio update CTRL software HEDD CTRL 2.0.1 introduces per-band bypass of the system’s parametric equaliser, smarter device sorting, enhanced speaker highlighting and updated immersive format labelling. 

Home music studio setup: An essential equipment guide
From non-negotiables to powerful add-ons, learn about all the equipment you'll want to consider for your home music studio setup.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Once More, With Feeling at 3 Clubs, Los Angeles, CAWeb: threeclubs.comContact: info@threeclubs.comPlayers: Loyal Thomas Ruddell (Spike); Lauren Sperling (Anya); Lee Thomen; Mike Bowers (Mustard Solo/Ensemble); Susannah Corrington (Willow); Heidi Kendrick (Tara); Kelly Maryanski (Buffy); Ronnie Tullo (Dawn); Matt Zunich (Xander); Phil D’Amore (Sweet)

Sometimes, you see something advertised on a venue’s calendar, and you must blink to ensure that you read it correctly. Once the details are confirmed, you simply have to attend. There’s no way on God’s green Earth that this writer could see that Hollywood cocktail bar Three Clubs was hosting a live “parody” version of the musical episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, and not show up.

The “Once More, With Feeling” episode was the seventh of the sixth season of Buffy, originally airing in November 2001. So this insane hour of television is a quarter of a century old now and it’s developed quite the cult following. There’s a soundtrack album available, and it’s occasionally screened in movie theaters with attendees encouraged to dress as the characters, Rocky Horror style. A live parody was always the logical next step.

“The idea actually came from back in 2014 between me, original Director Jason Fliess, and a few other Buffy lovers in Chicago,” says Kelly Maryanski, who plays the role of Buffy and had a huge hand in the development of the show. “The first version of this parody show was produced as a one-night-only staged concert reading at Hamburger Marys in Chicago in 2015. We kept getting requests to bring it back, so we did pretty much every year after that until the pandemic. The cast and team rotated a bit with every reiteration of the show as gags and other stage directions were changed into what it is today.”

What it is, is a joy. There are clearly super-fans of the show in attendance, people who know every single word. A few did dress up, and they got to strut their stuff on stage at the beginning. Meanwhile, the fact that the show started with a live performance of the “Previously, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer” recap is hilarious, right out of the traps. 

The cast are full of beans; their enthusiastic, joyful, and genuinely heartfelt takes on these beloved characters is to be admired. Josh Whedon has been praised for the music he wrote for this bizarre episode, and they really shine on stage. 

Special mention for Ruddell as anti-hero Spike, and Kendrick for a delicate Tara, as well as Maryanski’s Buffy. But everybody was a ton of fun.

“This show was originally just going to be another one night only fun bar show, but as the fates have it, we are actually doing a residency at Three Clubs in Hollywood for the rest of 2026, performing once a month on Tuesdays (except for October),” Maryanski told MC. Try to get there.The post Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Once More, With Feeling at 3 Clubs, Los Angeles, CA first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

AI compute provider Nscale is looking for $3.5B in pre-IPO financingNscale, which recently struck a $45 billion deal with Anthropic, is in talks to raise additional funds in anticipation of an upcoming IPO.

Surprise nonfarm payrolls print sends Bitcoin back below 80KThe US economy added far more jobs than expected in August, pressuring Bitcoin lower as traders repriced the odds of a Federal Reserve rate cut this month.

Making a Pole Balance Itself With PropellersA fun trick with a pole is to try to balance it so that it can stand on one end. This can be done in a few ways, such as by exerting a force on either end to counterbalance any force that threatens to make it fall over. The approach that [Peter Ryseck] chose was to cobble together what is effectively a flying drone for on top of a standing pole, without cheating such as by simply lifting it off the ground.
Getting to the point where the drone could react quickly enough to changes in the pole’s orientation was the hardest part, as the quieter, larger propellers also have a lot more inertia. This ruled out using 10″ blades, while triple 5″ blades seemed to work well enough. For the avionics a standard quadcopter control board and software is used, with the programming such that it’ll react appropriately without causing additional instabilities.
Naturally making this work took some trial and error, with issues like oscillations plaguing the system. One unexpected problem was that the pole – taken from a pool fishing net – was flexible enough to add its own instabilities to the system. In the video all these issues and their solutions are explained in detail, along with the ultimate result. One very neat solution here for example is to have the pole lean into the wind, which is a more stable configuration than insisting on having the pole be at a perfect ninety degrees with the ground.

Aqeel Aadam Sound SightlinesMake any sound resonate Sightlines is a playable harmonic filter. Built from a bank of tuned resonant bandpass filters, it brings out a customizable set of musical frequencies in any sound. Tune it to a fixed frequency like a resonator, or send it MIDI to make it come alive as an instrument.. Great for adding tonality to percussion, turning found sound into instruments, building synths with shifting harmonic balance, and more. Use it subtly to make noise and texture follow the key of your composition, or go all-in on modal synthesis. Roam the harmonic series Sightlines' filters are tuned like the overtones of a string – each band a natural harmonic of the root note. Customize, randomize, or modulate the volume of each band independently. Then go further – stretch and morph the harmonic series to explore versions of the series not heard in nature before. Play it or pass through it Sightlines loads as an instrument or an audio effect. As an instrument, it filters noise or samples, or skips the filters entirely and plays as a harmonic synth. As an effect, it adds motion, stereo spread, and a distinct tonality to anything you run through it. Set it all in motion Manipulate any control in Sightlines with a fully fledged Modulation matrix, including multiple LFOs, sequencers, smooth random sources, and performance effects. Connect to Sightlines' sibling application, Waymaker, for direct sequencing over Sightlines' pitch without setting up MIDI routing in your DAW. Full preset control over every parameter. Manual Video manual and demo iOS listing Read More

Accentize Chameleon wins Emmy Award Two years after winning an Engineering, Science & Technology Emmy Award for dxRevive Pro, Accentize have been recognised once again for their reverb-matching plug-in.