QUICK HITS: New IFPI CEO • WCM + EA • Believe + Kidding Aside • King Street Sounds is back!IFPI, the recording industry's worldwide trade group, has named Victoria Oakley its new CEO. Oakley will join IFPI in June from Portland, the global strategic communications and advocacy consultancy, where she is currently CEO.....
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On… DistroKid, Trefuego, modified audio, and the potential for a new ‘Napster Nightmare’Should distributors bear any responsibility for the spread of copyright-infringing modified tracks?
Source

Icon unveil Harrison 32Ci interface The 32Ci has been developed with the aim of bringing the sound of Harrisons renowned 32C console to the home studio. 

JBL Authentics 500 is a smart speaker with serious bass — and a questionable price tag£560, jbl.com
JBL’s family of speakers spans almost every size you could want, from portable consumer models and boomboxes right through to large-scale PA systems. The new Authentics 500 is somewhere around the middle; designed for use in the home, it’s bigger than its sibling the Authentics 300 (which has a carrying handle) but, at 8kg, it’s easy enough to move from room to room. JBL says the series is “inspired by retro design” – you can detect something of the spirit of Marshall amps in its black and gold, faux-leather finish.

READ MORE: Sonos Era 300 smart speaker review: Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio in an amazingly small unit

The classic approach extends to the top panel where you’ll find three large knobs for volume, bass and treble each with ring lighting showing the current value, along with a Bluetooth pairing button and a Moment button you can set up in the app to recall your favourite station or playlist from the hardware without needing your phone.
The rear panel hosts a microphone mute switch for privacy, 3.5mm aux input and ethernet port as well as a USB-C port which allows playback in the United States but outside that country, is just for servicing and charging devices. Also on the back are twin bass ports and on the underside, a large downward-firing woofer.
Lack of USB playback isn’t a huge issue since you’ll more than likely be streaming your music wirelessly in one format or another. After downloading the JBL One app for iOS or Android, you run through the set-up procedure which is very efficient – within a minute or two the speaker will be connected to your wi-fi network. It’s also possible to stream over Bluetooth should you be away from wi-fi though JBL doesn’t list the supported codecs meaning it’s most likely the regular SBC and AAC – when higher bit rates are supported, a company usually mentions it. AirPlay is supported of course, as are Alexa Multi Room Music, Chromecast and Spotify Connect.
JBL Authentics 500 (front)
It’s possible using Google or Amazon to link multiple units to the same source, should you own more than one. In the app you can configure voice-controlled streaming services including Amazon Music, Napster, Tidal and TuneIn though at present there’s no support for Apple Music or Deezer. JBL and Apple don’t seem to be able to sort this out for some reason which is a shame, though you can of course still use AirPlay to stream from your device.
This is a smart speaker so the built-in microphones – which are also used for periodic speaker self-calibration – will listen for your voice commands. Interestingly Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are available simultaneously, where normally you would have to select one or the other. It’s a nice touch if you have smart home devices that use both systems for example, since you can control them through one device. The assistant functions work very well, with the mics able to understand you even when loud music is playing.
We’ve mentioned the 6.5-inch downward-firing woofer but the speaker also has three one-inch tweeters and three 2.75-inch midrange drivers for a total of seven drivers overall. Although virtual Dolby Atmos is supported, you don’t get the true Atmos that requires the speakers to actually point in multiple directions inside the case like you see in the Sonos Era 300 for example. The design here is more conventional and the virtual Atmos works by processing the sound in a specific way when it detects an Atmos source. It works pretty well – you get an extra sense of separation playing a proper Atmos mix compared to regular stereo, but it can’t compete with the remarkable experience of a true Atmos system, even a compact one. Incidentally, the Era 300 is cheaper and is a superb system.
JBL Authentics 500 (side)
The Authentics 500 has a ton of power under the hood, with 270W of amplification, making it capable of going insanely loud and while like most compact speakers it does lose directional focus at very high volumes, it doesn’t distort in our tests. Listening at more normal levels reveals a very capable speaker with impressive stereo separation and though the lower frequency response rating is only 40Hz, the downward-firing design of the bass unit – just like a subwoofer — gives it an extremely powerful and well-rounded bottom end. There’s an in-app EQ as well as the two physical knobs (software and hardware are linked) but we find no need to tweak it for our tastes. Indeed, on a flat setting the bass is quite solid enough. High frequencies are clear and sparkly and mids well-defined, with vocals especially centering in the soundstage very nicely.
As the largest of the three Authentics models the 500 has the most driver units and highest power, and it’s certainly capable of some serious volume, all while being portable enough to move around your house occasionally should you wish. The low end is huge and doesn’t need any boosting with EQ in our opinion, and overall reproduction is very good if perhaps not best in class. Voice assistant integration works seamlessly, even if there are a few omissions in the supported streaming services.
One thing that will be an issue for some however is the price. This is a very good smart speaker, but at north of £550 it’s an expensive one. The virtual Dolby Atmos makes a difference but without physically multi-directional speakers, it’s never going to compare. The Era 300 costs £449 though it has a unique design that not everyone will love, and Sonos has parted ways with Google, meaning no Home support which is a no-no if you’re invested in Google Home kit. If you’re in Apple world a HomePod costs £299, though it’s a somewhat different proposition to JBL’s more conventional offering. The Authentics 500 is a fine, powerful speaker with good smart functions, though in a rather crowded marketplace we’d hope to see its price come down a little to make it a more attractive proposition.
JBL Authentics 500 (top)
Key features

3.1 and virtual Dolby Atmos sound
7 drivers including a downward-firing woofer
270 Watts total power
Frequency response 40 Hz – 20 kHz
Bluetooth 5.3, Wi-Fi
Aux input
Ethernet port
USB-C for charging
Amazon and Google voice assistants
Rear porting
Companion app
Physical EQ and volume controls
Weight: 8 kg
Dimensions: 447 mm (W) x 240 mm (H) x 255.7 mm (D)

The post JBL Authentics 500 is a smart speaker with serious bass — and a questionable price tag appeared first on MusicTech.

RELEASE DETAILS
Release title:
Solar eclipse
Main artist name:
Plexine
Release date:
10th Apr, 2024
https://publme.lnk.to/Solareclipse
#newmusic #Release #Music #indepedent #artist #experimental #hiphop

Recently read the terms of a "new" a16z funded #AI generative music startup. And what I saw in the TOS on the website was licensing terms to the tracks you actually generated - you simply own your music only when you pay your subscription and moreover your uploaded material can be used to train the model. Now it's beta and guys say it's free to generate up to 1200 tracks. Come on! Where are we going?! Read the terms at first please. ✌ #MusicTechnology #MusicBusiness

Raye Lights Up Coachella 2024(Raye photo by A Osborn/Coachella)

While the highlights of Friday (Lana Del Rey, Sabrina Carpenter, Deftones, Chloe, Hatsune Miku) were undeniably joyful, it was clear very early on after the lineup announcement that the Saturday of this year's Coachella Festival is the cherry day. When No Doubt was confirmed to be performing on Saturday, that fact was hammered home.

Arriving in the desert early on Saturday morning, we took a few moments to really admire the landscape. The festival itself is phenomenal but the surrounding area really is stunning. Snow-peaked mountains can be seen in the distance, while we sit in the sun.

Getting there early offered the chance to chill out in shade of the Speaker Stage tent, listening to talks by photographer and author Cory Richards, and many more. There's something fundamentally "Coachella" about listening to talks about mental health and societal change in front of a giant horse statue, while electronic music pulses in the background.

We soaked up the chill beats of Maddy Maia b2b Tottie at the DoLab stage when entering the festival proper; that's a wonderful place to relax early on because there are water spritzers spritzing everyone from the trees. It's like being in some sort of a rave botanical garden -- a vivid trip made real.

L.A. post-punks Militarie Gun shook off everyone's Friday night cobwebs at the Sonoma stage. Heavy and irked, they were the first of many punk (or at least punk-adjacent) bands on Saturday and they made some friends. On a completely different musical spectrum, soul singer and songwriter Erika de Casier charmed the Gobi stage crowd with her sultry tones and sweet tunes, while back at Sonoma Girl Mexican R&B singer and guitarist Girl Ultra overcame some early sound issues to put in a solid set.

Young Fathers (Photo by C Reagan/Coachella)

We caught a little bit of Kenya Grace (lively electro fun), before making a beeline for Scottish progressive hip-hop band the Young Fathers. It's been a decade since their debut album Dead won the Mercury Prize, and their second, White Men are Black Too is another fine slab of socially conscious, rhythmic, brilliant alt-rap. At Coachella, they made every minute count. Inspiring, intense, and magnificent.

Changing the tone completely, the Aquabats saw a line of people stretching across the field to get to their Sonoma set. We were able to catch three songs, including an opening "Pool Party" which saw them bring out the Yo Gabba Gabba characters. A perfect festival band, these superhero punks are goofy, silly, hilarious fun. But they also have a ton of great pop-ska-punk tunes.

The reason we had to leave the Aquabats early was the highly-anticipated set from British chanteuse Raye (who you have recently seen on SNL). Easily one of the highlights of the day, and probably the whole weekend, her nightclub jazz-meets-electropop-meets-R&B has drawn comparisons with Amy Winehouse but Raye is very much her own woman. Her set at the Mojave stage was simply incredible. Powerful, beautiful and devastatingly honest.

"Ice-Cream Man" details her own experience with sexual assault, and it just tears your heart out. Women around us in the crowd openly sobbed as Raye poured out her soul. The fact that this song resonates with so many women is just awful, that this is their shared experience, but Raye's ability to connect with her fans on such an emotional level has to be therapeutic for everyone.

Other songs, such as the nightclub-y ode to illicit substances "Mary Jane" and the pulsing brilliance of "Prada" proved that Raye is set to explode when her new album drops.

Incredible, and there was more to come.

The Aquabats (Photo by J Bajsel/Coachella)

Porting Modern Windows Applications to Windows 95Windows 95 was an amazing operating system that would forever transform the world of home computing, setting the standard for user interaction on a desktop and quite possibly was the OS which had the longest queue of people lining up on launch day to snag a boxed copy. This raises the question of why we still don’t write software for this amazing OS, because ignoring the minor quibbles of ‘security patches’ and ‘modern hardware compatibility’, it’s still has pretty much the same Win32 API as supported in Windows 11, plus it doesn’t even spy on you, or show you ads. This line of reasoning led [MattKC] recently to look at easy ways to port modern applications to Windows 95.
In the video, the available options are ticked off, starting with straight Win32 API. Of course, nobody writes for the Win32 API for fun or to improve their mental well-being, and frameworks like WxWidgets and QuteQt have dropped support for Windows 9x and generally anything pre-Win2k for years now. The easiest option therefore might be Microsoft’s .NET framework, which in its (still supported) 2.0 iteration actually supports Windows 98 SE, or basically within spitting distance of running it on the original Win95.

An interesting point here is that .NET was never released for Windows 95 by Microsoft, which raises the question of whether there’s such a crucial difference between Windows 95 and 98 that would prevent the .NET framework from running on the former. As [Matt] finds out during his investigation, the answer seems to be mostly that Microsoft never bothered to fully test .NET on Win95 due to the low marketshare of Win95, ergo this just throws up an error message about an unsupported OS.
In order to get around this, [Matt] had to write his own .NET installer, which first led him down a maddening rabbit hole of the internals of the .NET runtime and its installer. That resolved running the custom installer on Windows 98, but even with custom function wrappers [Matt] was left with a series of exceptions to debug and resolve, including an SSE2-related one due to lack of SSE2 support in Windows 95. All of this without access to the JIT debugger that’d exist on Win98 and newer.
Eventually he did get it working, however, with the results available on the GitHub project page. Since backporting .NET 2.0 was so much fun, he next embarked on backporting .NET Framework version 3.5 as well, opening another series of .NET applications for running on an OS that’s now nearly thirty years old. Even if a practical use case is hard to make, it’s absolutely a fascinating in-depth look at what has changed over the past decades, and what we may have gained, and lost.
Thanks to [Jonathan Dziok] for the tip.

TechCrunch Mobility: Cruise robotaxis return and Ford’s BlueCruise comes under scrutinyWelcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. It was another wild week in the world of transportation, particularly in the EV startup and automated driving industries. […]
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Danish Vintage LRC Meter Reveals InsideModern test equipment is great, but there’s something about a big meter with a swinging needle and a mirror for parallax correction that makes a device look like real gear. [Thomas] shows us a Danish LCR meter (or, as it says on the front, an RLC meter). The device passes AC through the component and uses that to determine the value based on the setting of a range switch. It looks to be in great shape and passed some quick tests. Have a look at it in the video below.
An outward inspection shows few surprises, although there is an odd set of terminals on the back labeled DC bias. This allows you to provide a DC voltage in case you have a capacitor that behaves differently when the capacitor has a DC voltage across it.
Block diagram for the MM2
The circuit can measure — as the name implies — resistance, inductance, and capacitance. The manual shows a nice block diagram if you want to understand what’s going on.
Physically opening it up was a bit of a puzzle. That older gear was often well-constructed. Inside are some nice PCBs, a lot of transistors, and beautiful wiring harnesses. Someone took their time building this unit, and it shows.
Usually, when you see gear like this, it is a bridge, and you have to zero the meter, but not so with the MM2. These days, you are likely to use a microcontroller to measure the charge and discharge rate.

Erica Synths refresh Perkons HD-01 Erica Synths have announced that they are planning on releasing a new version of their latest drum machine, and will be discontinuing the current production model.

Tesla drops prices, Meta confirms Llama 3 release, and Apple allows emulators in the App StoreHeya, folks, welcome to Week in Review (WiR), TechCrunch’s regular newsletter that recaps the past few days in tech. Google’s annual enterprise-focused dev conference, Google Cloud Next, dominated the headlines — and we had plenty of coverage from the event. But it wasn’t the only thing afoot (see: the spectacular eclipse). Lorenzo wrote about how […]
© 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

Who’s Afraid Of A CRT?Older consumer electronic devices follow a desirability curve in which after they fall from favour they can’t be given away. But as they become rarer, they reach a point at which everyone wants them. Then, they can’t be had for love nor money. CRT TVs are now in the first stage, they’re bulky and lower-definition than modern sets, and thus thrift stores and dumpsters still have them in reasonable numbers. To retrogamers and other enthusiasts, this can be a bonanza, and when he saw a high-end late-model JVC on the sidewalk [Chris Person] wasted no time in snapping it up. It worked, but there were a few picture issues, so he set about fixing it.

The write-up is largely a tale of capacitor-swapping, as you might expect from any older electronics, and it results in a fine picture and a working TV. But perhaps there’s another story to consider there, in that not so many of us here in 2024 are used to working with CRTs. We all know that they conceal some scary voltages, and indeed, he goes to significant lengths to discharge his CRT. It’s worth remembering though, that there’s not always a need to discharge the CRT if no attempt will be made to disconnect it, after all the connector and cable to the flyback transformer are secured by hefty insulation for a good reason. It’s a subject we’ve looked at here at Hackaday in the past. You could argue that, in some ways, newer TVs are harder to get into than these old CRTs.

Delays and Timers in LTSpice (no 555)If you need a precise time, you could use a microcontroller. Of course, then all your friends will say “Could have done that with a 555!” But the 555 isn’t magic — it uses a capacitor and a comparator in different configurations to work. Want to understand what’s going on inside? [Mano Arrostita] has a video about simulating delay and timer circuits in LTSpice.
The video isn’t specifically about the 555, but it does show how the basic circuits inside a timer chip work. The idea is simple: a capacitor will charge through a resistor with an exponential curve. If you prefer, you can charge with a constant current source and get a nice linear charge.
You can watch the voltage as the capacitor charges and when it reaches a certain point, you know a certain amount of time has passed. The discharge works the same way, of course.
We like examining circuits for learning with a simulator, either LTSpice or something like Falstad. It is easier than breadboarding and encourages making changes that would be more difficult on a real breadboard. If you want a refresher on LTSpice or current sources, you can kill two birds with one stone.

Getting It Done: The Week in D.I.Y. & Indie MusicThis week, our tips and advice for the independent, do-it-yourselfers out there covered how to use Amazon’s new Hype Deck marketing tool, how to perfect your next pitch, and more…
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