Overloud Overloud Allan H Collection Rig Library for TH-UThe Allan H Collection is an official Rig Library expansion for Overloud TH-U, developed in collaboration with Choptones. The library captures the guitar tones and amplifier rigs associated with British jazz fusion and progressive rock guitarist Allan Holdsworth. It utilizes Overloud's proprietary Rig Player technology, which samples complete signal chains—including amplifiers, cabinets, microphones, and outboard processing—to reproduce specific hardware setups within the TH-U ecosystem. The collection covers multiple eras of Holdsworth's career, profiling the solid-state and tube amplifiers, custom speaker configurations, and stereo spatial effects that defined his legato lead and clean chordal phrasing. Profiles include recreations of setups based on vintage Pearce G2r, Yamaha DG1000, Mesa/Boogie Dual Caliber, Carvin Allan Holdsworth signature heads, and custom-modified Marshall topologies paired with matching cabinets and microphone placements. Key Features 34 Rig Models: Detailed profiles capturing amplifier, speaker, microphone, and studio preamp combinations. 17 Patch Presets: Pre-configured signal chains optimized for clean, crunch, and high-gain legato tones. Rig Player Integration: Compatible with the TH-U Rig Player module for seamless loading, macro adjustments, and signal chain customization. Hardware Profiles: Includes captures based on Pearce G2r solid-state preamps, Yamaha DG-1000 digital modeling preamps, Carvin Legacy, and customized tube amplifier rigs. Multi-Microphone Configurations: Rig profiles captured with industry-standard dynamic, condenser, and ribbon microphones. System Requirements & Compatibility Host Software: Requires Overloud TH-U (Full Version or TH-U Free Player). macOS: macOS 10.9 or higher (Intel Core i3 or Apple Silicon supported natively), 4 GB RAM, 64-bit host. Windows: Windows 7, 8, 10, or 11 (Core i3 or higher), 4 GB RAM, 64-bit host. Plugin Formats: VST2, VST3, AU, AAX Native, and Standalone application (via TH-U). Authorization: Overloud user account; online activation with multi-computer authorization support (no physical iLok dongle required). https://youtu.be/lIWsu4fX77k?si=6iFIKZK8TGpsA3X5 Read More

Thermoacoustic Sterling Engine is Now Fully 3D PrintableWould you like to make your own energy? Why, who doesn’t in this era of rising costs! A sterling engine always looks like a good fit for that: highly efficient, with no risk of a boiler explosion. A thermoacoustic sterling engine looks even better, since it has only one moving part at the output end. A thermoacoustic sterling engine you can 3D print yourself looks best of all, and that’s what [my engines] has on offer, now that even the burner and hot end of his thermoacoustic engine are designed for SLA metal printing.
We previously reported on the open-source engine, but there’ve been some improvements worth talking about. For one thing, he’s integrated a biogas/methane burner directly inside the 3D-printable hotend. For another, that 3D-printed design allows for an excellent heat exchange geometry that would be very hard to get any other way. The whole thing is open source with plans available at OwnEnergy.org, where you can find links to the apparently-mandatory Discord channel and now an old-style forum to actually collaborate on the design, which is open-source. The site is also now the home of all data and discussion about [my engines]’s homescale biogas plant, which is the power source for this little engine.
If you’d rather print a combustion engine, you can do that, too, but you’ll need more “vitamins” than this unit requires.

Get a free soft synth for Splice INSTRUMENT
Download our free soft synth preset for Splice INSTRUMENT—grab these presets during the drop window and they’re yours to keep forever.

Vanessa Bosåen exits Virgin Music Group, where she’s led the UK business since 2021She joined UMG in 2021 from Regent Street Records, the independent label and publisher she founded in 2014, having spent 15 years as a touring musician.
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Jesus Oyola releases Medallo Doubler, a FREE four-voice vocal stacker
Jesus Oyola has released Medallo Doubler, a free vocal doubler and stacker available through Patreon. I’ve used various vocal doubling plugins in the past, and I’ve never been 100% happy with the outcome. Most of them either create only two stacked voices or leave little room for adjustment. My first impressions of Medallo Doubler are [...]
View post: Jesus Oyola releases Medallo Doubler, a FREE four-voice vocal stacker

Tamber music creation suite gets a 2.0 update: here’s everything you need to knowTamber has launched Tamber v2.0, a “major expansion” of its music creation platform that features enhanced creative tools, new functionality, and native Windows support.
Launched in May of this year, the update lands pretty swiftly after its original arrival. It’s a creative suite powered by “sonic intelligence” (assistive, non-generative tech), able to transform your abstract thoughts and ideas into sound. Available natively on both Mac and Windows, it works alongside your existing digital audio workstation and production tools.

READ MORE: The best new music plugins this week, free and paid

So, what’s changed? Tamber’s five core tools – Gestures, Tamby, Librarian, City Packs, and Sonic Atlas – now operate as dedicated apps within one connected suite, allowing users to open the tool they need directly and move between them through a single account.
Let’s explore what each one does.
What are the new features of Tamber 2.0?
The Gestures tool allows creators to control vocal effects and virtual instruments using their hands via webcam. With v2.0, Gestures not only operates as a standalone instrument but is also now a VST3/AU plugin. It also has new built-in synth and vocoder engines and reduced latency.

Tamby, its “in-session co-producer” now appears as an un-obtrusive overlay that can be summoned when needed, and a new chat history also preserves previous prompts and actions. A Mini-Librarian search bar also now floats over your DAW and is joined by new Favourites and Crates tools.
More of Tamber’s City Packs are coming, which are full of original field recordings, with a new City Pack release due every month. On a similar note, its Sonic Atlas visual discovery app that allows users to explore popular music from different countries, cities and eras, now has a favourite tool.
How does Tamber work?
Tamber does not generate finished songs, stems or samples, and has never been trained on third-party audio, according to a press release shared with MusicTech. Instead, it helps musicians operate their own tools. The v2.0 release gives users “more control over which parts of Tamber they use and how those tools fit into their individual creative processes”.
“Almost all of this came from users telling us what they needed,” says founder Zoe Wrenn. “Gestures is a real instrument now – it has its own synth and vocoder engines, so you can play it on its own with no DAW at all, or load it as a plugin right into your session.
“We rebuilt Librarian from the ground up, and Tamby is something you can pull up mid-take without losing your place. I’ve been in my own sessions with it for weeks and it doesn’t feel like an update. It feels like a new product.”
Find out more via the Tamber website.
The post Tamber music creation suite gets a 2.0 update: here’s everything you need to know appeared first on MusicTech.

Meet the producers releasing albums on retro gaming consolesRemute doesn’t make it easy for his listeners.
While the experienced German electronic producer has a few records out on streaming, he’s invested much of his output into classic gaming cartridges such as Nintendo 64, Sega Genesis, Atari Jaguar, and Game Boy. That means to hear the music, listeners need to track down one of these old systems.

READ MORE: Vibe coding has come for music plugins – are we witnessing a revolution?

He doesn’t make it easy on himself either, though. Every time he made music for these apparatuses, he had to learn a new tracker software, which he plainly describes as “absolutely not easy to use.” His expertise in Ableton Live and other DAWs wasn’t much help either.
“The philosophy of a tracker and the philosophy of a digital audio workstation are two worlds. They’re two languages,” Remute, real name Denis Karimani, says. “Everything has to be pre-planned, and every step has to be noted into the tracker.”
A tracker is akin to musical coding. Every piece of audio has to be placed in the exact right order for the music to sound as intended because the system is playing it in real time. Not playing back a recording. One offbeat element disrupts the entire piece.
Payson Power, guitarist for the math rock band Daydream Plus, programmed a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) cartridge version of their new album Second to Last Day of Summer alongside bassist Kevin Sia. The NES version is called Extended Forecast.
Daydream Plus. Image: Press
NES uses FamiTracker, which only has four monophonic channels, plus a fifth for samples. So, to emulate a guitar strum playing chords requires precise placement of each note and string.
He also had to apply different volume envelopes to all of the notes in the chord to get that descending quality, which meant six different instruments. One for each note. If a note is supposed to have an effect like an arpeggio or an envelope, users have to create a separate instrument with that instruction built in, which applies it to any root note.
So, if a user forgets to change the instrument and puts in a whole series of notes, all of them would have the same effect, and if that’s not what they wanted from the song, they would have to delete them all and replace them with the proper programming.
As a math rock band, Daydream Plus songs feature virtuosic solos with bass, drums, and guitar flexing technical skill all over each other. Of the five channels available on FamiTracker, the first two, pulse 1 and pulse 2, are lead and rhythm guitars, respectively. When the album had another treble instrument, like a trumpet or saxophone, Power used the pulse channels as well because they have four built-in pulse widths, V00-V03. The higher the width, the thicker the sound. He kept the guitar as thin as possible on V00 for clarity in the fast-moving passages. The horns were width V02 so they could have their own warmer timbre.
Sia took care of programming the bass, which was on the third channel, triangle. It is a triangle wave an octave below pulses 1 and 2. For the drums, Power either made the sounds himself or grabbed them from somewhere else. He sampled a snare from the first game in the stealth action franchise, Metal Gear, which he then mixed to fit in the wider soundscape.

In order to make sure everything was correct, Power wrote out every single instrument and note on lined paper, and then copied everything, line by line, into the FamiTracker. Furthermore, because the cartridge itself is old technology, any mistakes or unused commands could actually affect its ability to play back.
“It’s gotta flow perfectly, and if there’s any dead space, or if you don’t have enough space, there are hacks to get around it, but they can mess up the cartridge,” Power says. Those kinds of glitches weren’t an option. He wanted to put the cartridge in his NES and have it run like one of his old games. “It had to be 100% perfect. It was horrifying, but it was fun.”
Karimani shares the same sense of pride in being able to work with these different trackers.
“It’s totally not live music. It’s scripted music, and it’s a very different approach. These limitations really force you to think about your music in another way, because you have to simplify everything. When you simplify your idea, and it still sounds cool, then it’s interesting,” Karimani says. “When you finally learn to speak the language of a tracker, you have full control of everything. That made it quite interesting for me, because it’s always the thrill of learning something new.”
Both Power and Karimani developed their affection for video game soundtracks in their youth. Power grew up with now-legendary games on multiple systems such as Final Fantasy VII (PlayStation 1), Earthbound (Super Nintendo Entertainment System), and DuckTales (NES).
Denis Karimani aka Remute. Image: Press
The title of the Daydream Plus album refers to the schooling years when he spent summers immersed in those digital worlds (and digital soundtracks). The second-to-last day was the last day of freedom before he had to start thinking about going back to school.
“I played DuckTales on NES every summer,” Power says. “The songs are just there in the background, going on loop, and man, [they’re] so good. I never get tired of them.”
Karimani discovered electronic music through the tunes in Sega Genesis games. One key reason for this is that the sound chip in the Genesis is a Yamaha FM synthesizer, and now FM is his favourite kind of synthesis to use in his own work.
“Everything sounded very digital. Very electronic. Like early techno music,” Karimani says. “The Sega Genesis really inspired me to be an electronic music artist.”
Karimani’s Genesis cartridge album, Technoptimistic (2019), used a tracker called DefleMask, which he calls the most advanced of all the trackers he’s used. It’s versatile because it can shift the UI to trackers for various systems, including the NES.
Within the Genesis editor, DefleMask is capable of polyphony on a single channel, and it captures the FM synthesis workflow within the software. When adding a new instrument, users can select from eight algorithms to direct the sound through different signal paths for four different oscillators, just like any other FM synthesizer.
Then, because each instrument can have four voices, there can be polyphony from two to four voices. Algorithm seven shifts from FM to additive synthesis because that algorithm has all four voices outputting together.
There is a certain level of irony in putting all this work into making these gaming cartridge releases. In the world of social media, where most people broadcast their creative efforts, the expected intention is to want more praise for what they built. However, by nature, only a very small number of people can truly enjoy these cartridges simply because so few of the systems remain functional.
And still, whenever Karimani puts out a new gaming release, he gets messages from fans who are seeking out one of the increasingly rare old-school gaming consoles because they want to hear his music in this unique presentation.
“This makes me really happy,” Karimani admits. “It’s an interesting path to hunt for the hardware to be able to listen to music. It makes the whole listening process more thrilling and more like an adventure.”
The post Meet the producers releasing albums on retro gaming consoles appeared first on MusicTech.

Rapid Flow release miniGRID Following on from the release of Omniclock, Rapid Flow have launched a new sequencer plug-in that can be used to introduce hardware-style timing shifts to software instruments. 

Love Synthesizers announce First Love pre-orders The First Love combines a responsive touchscreen with tactile controls, and has been designed to make wave morphing and FM synthesis more intuitive without sacrificing depth.

The Story Behind Fleetwood Mac's 'The Chain'

What Is Software What Is CompressionWhat Is Compression is a compressor that shows its work. One engine carries five behavioral models — Clean, Vari-Mu, FET, Opto, and Diode — and the panel lays the signal path out as stages: input, model, detector, curve, ballistics, and output, each with its own documentation a question mark away. An analysis view re-measures as you turn the knobs, drawing the static curve, the step response, and the gain reduction over time, so what you hear and what the compressor is doing stay one picture. AU and VST3 on macOS 13 and later, and VST3 on Windows. 14-day free trial with no restrictions. When the trial ends the plugin keeps working, with the Clean model only: the Vari-Mu, FET, Opto, and Diode models and the presets built on them lock until a license is entered. Nothing else changes — sessions open, settings hold, and audio keeps flowing. A license is personal and perpetual: it is issued against your email address, covers one person on any number of machines, covers the product rather than a version of it, and includes updates. Read More

SONY SUES UDIO AGAINSony Music has sued A.I. startup Udio for copyright infringement for a second time. Sony asserts Udio used over 30,000 recordings it copied without permission in order to train it’s A.I. models.

The lawsuit was filed by Sony on July 20, 2026, in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Sony had tried to add this belated claim to its first copyright case against Udio, but the court denied the motion.  

The first lawsuit was filed two years ago and was coordinated by the Recording Association of America and included claims by Sony as well as Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group. However, Universal and Warner settled and entered into licensing deals with Udio. Sony is still pursuing that lawsuit. Sony claims in the first action that the 30,117 recordings are “only a small portion” of what Udio used without authorization. 

The complaint in the second action states “Udio’s belated embrace of licensing only underscores the unlawfulness of its decision to copy Plaintiff’s copyrighted sound recordings, without a license in the first place.” The complaint further states “that a functioning market exists for licensing sound recordings for use in connection with generative A.I.” and that “Udio recognizes that using copyrighted sound recordings for this purpose requires permission.”

Sony is now the sole major label that has not entered into a licensing deal with Udio.  

At the present time, there is a lot of uncertainty about the legality of A.I. companies using copyrighted material. Under federal law, Sony could request damages over $4.5 billion, consisting of up to $150,000 for each infringed work. Consequently, Udio has a good reason to try and settle and enter into a licensing deal. Sony also has some incentive to settle since if they lose at trial, it could establish a bad precedent.

Sony also claims Digital Millenium Copyright Act violations for allegedly stream-ripping tracks off of YouTube using such tools like YT-DLP (this is a command-line program used to download audio and video from YouTube and many other websites).

Udio will argue as a defense that copying music for A.I. training is a “fair use” under federal law and consequently, no permission is necessary.

Fair use is a legal doctrine in the U.S.A. that allows for certain uses of copyrighted material. It is a common defense in a copyright infringement case. It seeks to balance the copyright owner’s interests with the public interest in the wide distribution and use of original works by allowing it as an affirmative defense in copyright infringement cases. It provides for limited use of copyrighted works without the permission of the owner.

In determining fair use the court considers: 

• The purpose and character of the use

• The nature of the copyrighted work

• The amount used as compared to the whole work 

• The effect of use on the value of the work

Time will tell if a fair use defense prevails.

GLENN T. LITWAK is a veteran entertainment attorney based in Santa Monica, CA. He has represented platinum selling recording artists, GRAMMY-winning music producers, hit songwriters, management and production companies, music publishers and independent record labels. Litwak is also a frequent speaker at music industry conferences around the country, such as South by Southwest and the Billboard Music in Film and TV Conference. Litwak has been selected as a “Super Lawyer” by Super Lawyer magazine for 2022-2025. Email Litwak at gtllaw59@gmail.com or visit glennlitwak.com.

This article is a very brief overview of the subject matter and does not constitute legal advice.The post SONY SUES UDIO AGAIN first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Spotify expands its share buyback program by $1.5B, raising total authorization to around $2.2BThe company's Board of Directors approved the increase, which Spotify confirmed in a press release on Thursday (August 20).
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The Enhanced Games — tech’s steroid extravaganza — didn’t pay off, as company posts $60 million lossAn effort to transform the world of sports through steroid use doesn't exactly seem to be bearing financial fruit.

Bitcoin breaks above 200-day moving average for first time since NovemberThe BTC price reclaimed its 200-day moving average for the first time in nine months as its rally gained momentum after the US Treasury expanded its bond buybacks.