IK Multimedia offers FREE Mesa Mark III guitar amp this month
IK Multimedia is giving away a free Mesa Mark III and matching cab for new AmpliTube 5 Custom Shop (CS) users throughout July. AmpliTube 5 CS is the free version of IK Multimedia’s virtual guitar and bass workstation for Mac and Windows. Mesa/Boogie launched the Mark III in 1985, and the amp is a three-channel, [...]
View post: IK Multimedia offers FREE Mesa Mark III guitar amp this month

73K Fake Tickets worth $49M on sale for 5 DC Venues in last 6 MonthsFive Washington DC area venues were hit with 73,000 speculative tickets worth $49 million on sale by ticket resellers during the first half of 2024, according to an analysis by the Fix The Tix coalition.
The post 73K Fake Tickets worth $49M on sale for 5 DC Venues in last 6 Months appeared first on Hypebot.

Hack All The Things, Get All The SchematicsWhen I was growing up, about 4 or 5 years old, I had an unorthodox favourite type of reading material: service manuals for my dad’s audio equipment. This got to the point that I kept asking my parents for more service manuals, and it became a running joke in our family for a bit. Since then, I’ve spent time repairing tech and laptops in particular as a way of earning money, hanging out at a flea market in the tech section, then spending tons of time at our hackerspace. Nowadays, I’m active in online hacker groups, and I have built series of projects closely interlinked with modern-day consumer-facing tech.
Twenty three years later, is it a wonder I have a soft spot in my heart for schematics? You might not realize this if you’re only upcoming in the hardware hacking scene, but device schematics, whichever way you get them, are a goldmine of information you can use to supercharge your projects, whether you’re hacking on the schematic-ed device itself or not. What’s funny is, not every company wants their schematics to be published, but it’s ultimately helpful for the company in question, anyway.
If you think it’s just about repair – it’s that, sure, but there’s also a number of other things you might’ve never imagined you can do. Still, repair is the most popular one.

Repair, Of Course
Asked to pay for a schematic? You can most likely find it elsewhere for free.
It’s an old chestnut that tech marvels of the past used to come bundled with schematics, and that’s no longer the case. Indeed, they are often top secret. For laptops and phones, one part of that is extensive NDAs that cover information on many a chip within them, including schematics. That said, somehow, this hasn’t stopped certain companies like Clevo, who has been seen putting their designs’ schematics right inside the service manual, for example, the P75xZM_ESM.pdf.
Still, schematics are a market; repair shops earn their keep from being able to fix devices, so a PDF is likely to leak one way or another, often it just takes time. For certain laptop manufacturers and series, this doesn’t happen, but most of all it seems to depend on popularity. In a way, schematics being leaked is a decent indicator that a product is popular enough to hit repair shops en masse, creating demand for underpaid workers to bring a loaded microSD card with them on a trip back home from the factory employing them.
I’m aware that companies sometimes can’t publish much, and, it’s still interesting how publishing schematics and other repair documents is not more popular with companies, despite everything it brings. During my call-in laptop repair days, travelling around with a tiny Asus netbook in my toolbox that used to be a makeup suitcase, I can remember one specific phrase I heard often: “yeah, we don’t like %BRAND%, we’ve had our %BRAND% device break and it couldn’t be fixed”.
Companies Who Publish Nevertheless
When it comes to publicly shared schematics, for instance, Framework laptops have adopted a “Raspberry Pi” approach – share schematics that concern external ports, where no NDAs could conceivably be involved, and even publish further specifications about these ports. This has created a vivid hacking and modding ecosystem around Framework, attracting a good amount of people, and this part in particular is something other companies could do as well. I’ve talked aplenty about the Framework ecosystem already, and I mention the schematic involvement there quite a bit, too!
It’s not just about connectors – there’s plenty of places in a laptop where failures are likely to occur, like power management. Intel might scoff at the CPU and Thunderbolt part pinouts being published, but schematics for these aren’t usually involved in a laptop repair anyway, what fails is usually power management, and chances are, just the schematic pages for that could be published without violating an NDA. Raspberry Pi’s schematics used to work in this way; sadly, RPF has given up on publishing Linux-powered Pi schematics due to being stuck in a perfectionism loop – the Pi 5 schematics are nowhere to be seen, and the USB-C-fixed Pi 4 schematics aren’t available either.
Pine64 is a strange case – their products are not open-source, in large part due to their operation’s scale landing them in a cloning-happy environment. Still, they publish a ton of the information that you might want. Pine64 publishes schematics for their products, and is forthcoming with things like – for instance, ever broke a barrel jack socket on your Pinecil? It’s a rare fault, but in case you somehow have, they stock replacement sockets. Of course, Pinecil schematics are available too, in full, same goes for PinePhone and most of their other products.
I was particularly active in the Pinecil community of the Pine64 discord, and thanks to schematics being accessible in a searchable way, we could help people fix their Pinecils on a community basis, across timezones, often quicker than the tech support could give them a response. In fact, because of the conversations happening in an official Pine64 community, Pine64 tech support could read the conversations in our channel, and avoid repeating many of the debugging steps with the Pinecil owner in question. It really helped that, everything they had to do over email, we could do over real-time chat! Schematics were a crucial part of that, from tracing what could it be that’d die from a reverse polarity what was shorting out the 3.3 V regulator, to the part numbers.
A good few failures were relatively common, and a few community members across different continents, including me, stocked up on some of the commonly involved parts and mailed them out to people in flat envelopes. Compared to the Pinecil sales numbers, the number of failures that we handled was pretty low, but we did help a good few people; generally, people were quite happy about fixing something they own, as opposed to getting a new iron and putting the broken one into a cupboard drawer!
here’s a trace you can cut to protect your old Pinecil from FUSB failure, and gain 24V support as a side effect
It wasn’t just replacing components – together, we narrowed down a particularly common fault that would kill Pinecils or at least make their USB-C PD power input inoperable, and figured out a fix that, in the end, involved simply cutting a trace. The gist is, a pin of a specific IC on the Pinecil was connected directly to the power input rail, this pin specifically was sensitive to overvoltage, killing the chip in a way that sometimes would even pull down the entire 3.3 V rail. What’s interesting, it didn’t have to be connected to that rail at all! The community designed a fix, people have applied it for both failure immunity and also being able to use 24 V bricks. Later on, Pine64 applied the fix to a new batch of the Pinecil hardware, which is now immune to this fault.
Before the ability to just cut the trace was figured out by [Thanos the tank engine] and others, I managed to design an addon board that’d down-regulate the voltage with a Zener diode, and even published the files for it. After all, you can design a whole lot if schematics are available!
Build All The Cool Stuff
Hackers have long used schematics to design things like addons – physical board attributes, you can redesign with calipers in hand, but schematics capture everything else. All those consoles put into tiny formfactors, made possible because of the motherboard being cut down? Schematics were likely involved in one way or another.
having schematics how [Wificable] could figure out there are two separate PCIe links on this connector, and make a riser exposing them both at the same timeFriends of mine have done the same kind of schematic-inspired design, on a number of occasions – in particular, [Wificable] has designed an MXM reuse adapter and a good few MXM cards only thanks to available schematics, and her TinyRiser, an adapter that pulls extra PCIe from a particular lineup of Lenovo Tiny computers, was only possible because we could get find the relevant PDF in a Telegram group.
Got a technical question the manufacturer doesn’t expand on? A schematic is a reliable way to check.
It’s not just addons, it’s also finding information you can’t find otherwise. Wondering what your laptop’s USB-C port does, whether it supports DisplayPort, or charging input? The manufacturer’s website might not be helpful at all, but the schematics show it all instantly, on the page with the block diagram. I’ve seen a product being developed, an ExpressCard slot adapter housing an SSD, that researched laptop schematics to figure out 3.3 V current limits on the ExpressCard slot and how they were implemented in different laptops.
Tapping into the iPhone battery market to get a reliable source of slim batteries for your project? Use the schematics to find the battery connector pinout – and the connector part number. Remember the M.2 card with a 1:2 PCIe switch, that I’ve shown you the design process of? That one was only possible because of a laptop schematic we found featuring the ASM1182e chip. Schematics often contain part numbers, and these are super helpful – you could consult one of the connector bibles, or you could simply copy the part number for a connector out of a schematic PDF and get the exact part number necessary.
Remember that Sony Vaio P motherboard rebuild project I’ve started? I’ve just recently received the v1 PCBs of a motherboard I designed, now they’re waiting to be assembled, and I couldn’t have had done this without all the connector pinout information I found in the schematic. In particular, it might be that this motherboard replacement will be impossible to adapt to the second revision of these Vaios, since, as far as I’ve seen, that revision’s schematics haven’t leaked. Well, either way, expect an article about the new motherboard soon!
There’s way, way more you can learn from schematics as you go. One of my current projects requires learning a fair bit from the PinePhone schematic and specifically its LTE modem that boasts open firmware, as part of uncovering yet another series-worthy topic; naturally, you will hear about that one soon. Schematics keep a treasure trove of hacker-friendly information in them, and information deserves to be free.

How Musicians find sustainable success in a turbulent music business [Keith Jopling, MIDiA]A new study looks at how Musicians find sustainable success in the turbulent music business, their strategies to thrive in unpredictable times, and how chaos can even fuel stability.
The post How Musicians find sustainable success in a turbulent music business [Keith Jopling, MIDiA] appeared first on Hypebot.

Eraser #AI tool by #YouTube to delete the copyrighted music from their user videos without affecting speech. I doubt it would work if there're vocals in tracks. #MusicIndustry #Creators

Fix The Tix Day of Action this TuesdayThe Fix The Tix coalition's Day Of Action is tomorrow, Tuesday, July 9th. The day will harness artists and fans to push Congress to pass comprehensive ticketing reform.
The post Fix The Tix Day of Action this Tuesday appeared first on Hypebot.

YouTube’s revamped eraser tool uses AI to remove copyrighted music without impacting other audioYouTube has launched an updated eraser tool which allows its creators to remove copyrighted music from their videos, without affecting speech, sound effects or other audio.
Previously, videos flagged for copyrighted audio were muted or taken down entirely. The updated tool is in its early stages however, and YouTube does warn that the “edit might not work if the song is hard to remove”.

READ MORE: “Human-created works must be respected”: 50 major music tech brands sign Principles for Music Creation with AI

As first reported by TechCrunch, the updated eraser tool was launched on 4 July. It utilises an AI-powered algorithm to cut just the song used, and leave the rest of the video intact. YouTube chief Neal Mohan shared the news of the launch to X along with a video.
In the footage, it is explained that the company had been testing the eraser tool for a while, but it wasn’t as accurate in removing copyrighted tracks as they wanted it to be. Now, the use of an AI-powered algorithm brings a “big improvement”, and users have the choice to mute all sound or simply erase just the music within their videos.
Find out more below:

Good news creators: our updated Erase Song tool helps you easily remove copyright-claimed music from your video (while leaving the rest of your audio intact). Learn more… https://t.co/KeWIw3RFeH
— Neal Mohan (@nealmohan) July 3, 2024

YouTube is attempting to make big strides with AI right now – last week it was reported that the company had been offering lump sums of money to the “big three” major labels in hopes of rolling out AI music licensing deals with them.
The move follows the launch of its AI tool Dream Track last year. The feature allowed users to create music using AI voice imitations of famous artists. The platform has allegedly been in talks with Sony, Warner and Universal to try to convince more artists to allow their music to be used in training AI software.
To find out more about YouTube’s eraser tool, including step-by-step instructions for its use, visit YouTube Support.
The post YouTube’s revamped eraser tool uses AI to remove copyrighted music without impacting other audio appeared first on MusicTech.

“Everything is f**king shit” Hardwell rages at SAGA Festival organisers after equipment failureDutch DJ Hardwell recently halted his set at the SAGA Festival to rage against the event’s “shit” equipment and alleged non-payment.
Addressing the crowd in the middle of his set, Hardwell blasted: “This fucking festival didn’t pay me any fucking money to be here tonight, but I’m still here! I’m still here.”

READ MORE: Behringer is exploring “direct-to-customer shipping” with delivery from its factory

The DJ then expressed his frustration with production issues, blasting: “I’m fucking here. And their equipment, everything is fucking shit. Nothing is working.”
“Listen SAGA, if I’m here for you guys, I want to perform for you guys. The whole equipment, everything is letting me down. I can’t perform. It’s impossible for me to perform.”
“The whole fucking DJ booth is shit. Fucking shit. I’m so sorry I have to cancel the show. Fuck SAGA Festival!”
In the video, multiple festival staff could be seen behind the DJ deck, presumably to fix the technical issues as Hardwell goes on his tirade.

HARDWELL canceled his show at SAGA Festival right now due to the festival's terrible production team. pic.twitter.com/e2DrIRFoRK
— A L E 𝕏 (@_alexvdcorput) July 6, 2024

SAGA Festival has since issued a statement refuting Hardwell’s claims. The organisers asserted that had they been informed about the equipment issues, they would have acted promptly to resolve them. The team also noted that all the equipment was transported to Romania from the Netherlands along with the DJ and that Hardwell was indeed paid for his appearance.
“Well, Hardwell, we’re sorry that Rita Ora, Sickick, Loreen, and all the DJs on five other stages got to play on the first day of SAGA and you didn’t,” the post read. “The equipment travelled all the way from the Netherlands, just like you. The same set seems to be working perfectly fine for Will Sparks right now.”
Read the full statement below.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by SAGA Festival (@saga_festival)

The post “Everything is f**king shit” Hardwell rages at SAGA Festival organisers after equipment failure appeared first on MusicTech.

Sonicware reveal LIVEN Ambient Ø The eighth release in Sonicware's LIVEN series has been designed specifically for creating atmospheric soundscapes.

RELEASE DETAILS
Release title:
ULTRAAVX (deluxe)
Main artist name:
Plexine
Release date:
19th Jul, 2024
https://publme.lnk.to/ULTRAAVXdeluxe
#newmusic #Release #Music #indepedent #artist #experimental #Psychedelic

Behringer is exploring “direct-to-customer shipping” with delivery from its factoryTired of lengthy wait times, shipping delays, and the disappointment of dealers not stocking the gear you crave? Music gear enthusiasts may soon have reason to celebrate as German audio equipment manufacturer Behringer says it is exploring a “direct-to-customer shipping” option with delivery straight from the factory.

READ MORE: YouTube reportedly offering “lump sums of cash” to major labels for AI music licensing deal

The move would “help ensure faster delivery and access to all our products, especially those not carried by our retailers,” says Behringer in the Facebook post.
“We do cherish our super partner relationships and would consider this as an additional channel to ensure we can reach customers in areas currently under-served,” the company adds.

As it stands, the proposed direct-to-customer shipping model would represent a significant shift in Behringer’s distribution strategy. Currently, like most manufacturers, Behringer relies on a network of retailers and distributors (e.g. Sweetwater, Thomann, Amazon) to get their products into the hands of users.
By cutting out intermediaries and shipping directly from their production facilities in China, Behringer could significantly reduce delivery times and potentially reduce costs associated with traditional distribution channels. For fans, this means quicker and greater access to the company’s wide range of products and new releases.
And while the response to Behringer’s latest suggestion appears to be mostly positive judging by the comments section (“This is great for people who live in remote areas,” said one) several users have also raised questions about how the company would deal with issues like returns, gear repairs, and customer service.
“Great idea, but it should include the same kind of return policy/ guarantee that a dealer normally gives,” wrote user John Rasmussen, while another warned: “You’d have to be able to do a great job at it. Sweetwater is great. I get great service from them. I’d want Behringer to match or exceed the service I get from them.”
Visit Behringer to see its latest lineup of products.
The post Behringer is exploring “direct-to-customer shipping” with delivery from its factory appeared first on MusicTech.

Martinic AX Chorus is FREE for 24 hours (only A FEW hours left!)
Martinic is offering the AX Chorus plugin for FREE to celebrate the Holland soccer team’s success in the European Cup. The AX Chorus plugin emulates the MN3009 Bucket Brigade (BBD) chip, a key component in AKAI’s AX73 and AX60 synthesizers. While these analog keyboards may not have achieved the iconic status of classics like the [...]
View post: Martinic AX Chorus is FREE for 24 hours (only A FEW hours left!)

Seed VCs are turning to new ‘pro rata’ funds that help them compete with the big firmsThree companies with new funds deploy capital to support seed and Series A VCs looking to exercise their pro rata rights.
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China to ramp up brain chip program after teaching monkey to control robotThe country’s current progress appears to be on par with Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

New Battery Has no AnodeConventional batteries have anodes and cathodes, but a new design from the University of Chicago and the University of California San Diego lacks an anode. While this has been done before, according to the University, this is the first time a solid-state sodium battery has successfully used this architecture.
Sodium is abundant compared to lithium, so batteries that use sodium are attractive. According to the University of Chicago’s news release:
Anode-free batteries remove the anode and store the ions on an electrochemical deposition of alkali metal directly on the current collector. This approach enables higher cell voltage, lower cell cost, and increased energy density…

Of course, there are also downsides. In particular, making anodeless batteries with liquid electrolytes can be easier to build, but the liquid forms solids that impede the battery’s performance over time.
The new battery uses an aluminum powder as a current collector. Interestingly, while this is a solid, it flows more like a liquid. Combined with a solid electrolyte, the battery flips the usual idea of a solid cathode and a liquid electrolyte.
We are always interested in new battery tech. However, we rarely see them out in the wild. Maybe AI will have better luck.