Watch This RC Jet Thrust System DanceAn EDF (electric duct fan) is a motor that basically functions as a jet engine for RC aircraft. They’re built for speed, but to improve maneuverability (and because it’s super cool) [johnbecker31] designed a 3D-printable method of adjusting the EDF’s thrust on demand.
Before 3D printers were common, making something like this would have been much more work.
The folks at Flite Test released a video in which they built [john]’s design into a squat tester jet that adjusts thrust in sync with the aircraft’s control surfaces, as you can see in the header image above. Speaking of control surfaces, you may notice that test aircraft lacks a rudder. That function is taken over by changing the EDF’s thrust, although it still has ailerons that move in sync with the thrust system.
EDF-powered aircraft weren’t really feasible in the RC scene until modern brushless electric motors combined with the power density of lithium-ion cells changed all that. And with electronics driving so much, and technology like 3D printers making one-off hardware accessible to all, the RC scene continues to be fertile ground for all sorts of fascinating experimentation. Whether it’s slapping an afterburner on an EDF or putting an actual micro jet engine on an RC car.

Native Instruments Announces Traktor Pro 4 DJ SoftwareNative Instruments today announced Traktor Pro 4, the latest version of their flagship 4-deck DJ software. Building on the core features that made Traktor Pro the go-to software for hundreds of thousands of DJs around the world, the latest version brings next-generation creative tools including flexible beatgrids, high-quality stem separation, Ozone Maximizer, and Pattern Player. Wherever you are and whatever you’re playing, Traktor Pro 4 gives you the freedom and flexibility to mix your own way.

What’s new in Traktor Pro 4? 

Stem Separation powered by AI and RX Transform the way you mix and remix with stem separation powered by AI and iZotope’s legendary RX technology. Precisely isolate and manipulate drums, bass, instruments, and vocals individually. With each stem waveform right in front of you, you can apply filters and effects with a high level of accuracy to get everything sounding just right. 

Flexible BeatgridsTraktor Pro 4’s flexible beatgrids are ideal for moving between genres or mixing tracks with a changing tempo. With flexible beatgrids you can precisely follow each tempo change throughout a track, enabling highly accurate looping, beat jumps, beat effect layering, and beat alignment—all without impacting the audio quality.

Pattern PlayerBring the sounds of iconic drum machines and leading producers to your sets. Pattern Player is packed with percussion kits including the signature drums of industry legends like Rebekah, Luke Slater, Len Faki, Chris Liebing, Dubfire, and many more. 

Ozone MaximizerTake your sounds and sets to new heights while protecting the mix from clipping and distortion. Ozone Maximizer utilizes technology from iZotope’s award-winning Ozone mastering software. Its Intelligent Release Control allows you to finally boost the loudness of your sets without distortion. 

Traktor Pro 4 features

Core functions

Complete control over up to four decks in Track, Stem, and Remix Mode

Highly reliable Sync to keep everything sounding on point

[New] Advanced flexible beatgrids for precise effects, looping, navigation and mixing between tracks with changing tempo

[New] Ozone Maximizer with iZotope’s award-winning technology to boost loudness while preserving transients and dynamics

Mix recorder to record your sets

A range of EQs and filters modeled on industry-standard mixers

Key detection and shifting feature for harmonic mixing

Smart Playlists for efficient library organization

[New] Two free months of Beatport Streaming Advanced or Beatsource Streaming

Creative tools

40+ studio-grade Native Instruments effects to transform your tracks, available in four chainable Deck FX slots

Mixer FX for quick and easy effect layering

[New] High-quality stem separation powered by iZotope’s pro-grade RX technology, including four-track waveform display

[New] Pattern Player packed with drum patterns from iconic drum machines and the signature sounds of leading producers

Additional free remix sets available to download

Reliable looping, hot cues and beatjump functions, plus high-quality timestretch algorithm

Remix decks for adding samples and effects and triggering them in sync with the rest of the mix

Integration and compatibility

Best-in-class timecode vinyl tracking

Plug-and-play support for CDJs and most club mixers

Ableton Link and MIDI clock support for seamless integration with hybrid performance setups

Deep MIDI mapping for personalized mapping of any compatible hardware and software

Compatible with all Traktor hardware and mappable with any DJ hardware

Supported audio formats: MP3, WAV, AIFF, Audio CD, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, non-DRM AAC
The post Native Instruments Announces Traktor Pro 4 DJ Software first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Ripple Phaser plug-in from Minimal Audio The latest plug-in from Minimal Audio promises to add character and movement to sound sources thanks to a variety of filter modes and in-depth parameter control. 

How Ten Turn Pots Are MadeIt is easy to think of a potentiometer as a simple device, but there are many nuances. For example, some pots are linear — a change of a few degrees at the low end will change the resistance the same amount as the same few degrees at the high end. Others are logarithmic. Changes at one end of the scale are more dramatic than at the other end of the scale. But for very precise use, you often turn to the infamous ten-turn pot. Here, one rotation of the knob is only a tenth of the entire range. [Thomas] shows us what’s inside a typical one in the video below.
When you need a precise measurement, such as in a bridge instrument, these pots are indispensable. [Thomas] had a broken one and took that opportunity to peer inside. The resistor part is a coil of wire wound around the inside of the round body. Unsurprisingly, there are ten turns of wire that make up the coil.
The business end, of course, is in the rotating part attached to the knob. A small shuttle moves up and down the shaft, making contact with the resistance wire and a contact for the wiper. The solution is completely mechanical and dead simple.
As [Thomas] notes, these are usually expensive, but you can  — of course — build your own. These are nice for doing fine adjustments with precision power supplies, too.

From the $2bn+ copyright lawsuit against Verizon to Shamrock’s rights portfolio acquisition… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-UpThe biggest stories from the past week – all in one place…
Source

Jimin, one of K-pop’s biggest superstars, has a dedicated in-app hub on TikTok for his new album ‘MUSE’K-Pop is one of the fastest-growing genres on TikTok
Source

Ex-Spotify, Sofar exec Jim Lucchese named President Berklee College Of MusicMusic tech veteran Jim Lucchese has exited his position as CEO of Sofar to become the president of the Berklee College of Musics. Lucchese founded the pioneering music analytics firm Echo Nest, which Spotify acquired in 2014, where he also served as an executive.
The post Ex-Spotify, Sofar exec Jim Lucchese named President Berklee College Of Music appeared first on Hypebot.

Arturia Summer Sale Arturia are offering a generous discount on their range of individual software instruments, effects and sound banks until 13 August 2024.

How to get music on Spotify playlistsFor indie artists, getting music on a Spotify playlist can be crucial to success. This guide offers strategies for optimizing profiles, consistently releasing music, pitching to playlists, engaging with user-curated playlists, and promoting your music beyond Spotify.
The post How to get music on Spotify playlists appeared first on Hypebot.

Inside a Social Media Music Marketing Campaign: How CyberPR does itLook inside a successful social media music marketing campaign from veteran music marketers CyberPR. It covers essential tactics for increasing visibility, engaging fans, and boosting music career growth through targeted social media.
The post Inside a Social Media Music Marketing Campaign: How CyberPR does it appeared first on Hypebot.

Harrison announce LiveTrax software LiveTrax offers multitrack recording and playback, making it possible to capture live shows and carry out virtual soundchecks, and boasts seamless integration with Allen & Heath’s range of live consoles. 

Mass global IT outage hits music producers – BandLab and FL Studio users among those affectedMusic producers have been hit as part of a mass global IT outage that has left airlines, banks and businesses around the world scrambling to respond.
Popular digital audio workstations (DAWs) BandLab and FL Studio are among those affected, with users reporting widespread downtime over the last 24 hours while accessing the platforms and their various services.

READ MORE: AlphaTheta’s proposed acquisition of Serato blocked: “We disagree with and are disappointed by the ruling of the New Zealand Commerce Commission”

According to the FL Studio subreddit, Image-Line’s (the makers of FL Studio) servers have come under a DDoS Attack as of 17 July.
“If you are getting errors from Image-Line’s servers, this is why. You haven’t been singled out or blocked, this is just a side effect of the DDoS Attack. There is nothing consumers can do at the moment other than to wait,” says the post. Meanwhile, users can follow FL Studio’s social media accounts for the latest updates.
Image-Line's Servers Update July 18 2024 | MEGATHREAD byu/The_Art_In_Atrophy inFL_Studio

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A post shared by FL Studio (@flstudio)

As for BandLab, the cloud-based music creation and collaboration platform earlier today announced that its cloud service provider is back up and running, and that its servers have been restored. [Editor’s note: MusicTech and BandLab are both part of Caldecott Music Group.]
Unexpected Downtime byu/BL_Community_Team inBandlab

BBC reports that the disruptions are related to issues at cybersecurity software firm CrowdStrike, which are affecting Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The company claims that a “defect” in one of its content updates is to blame.
“This is not a security incident or cyberattack. The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed,” says CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz.
The post Mass global IT outage hits music producers – BandLab and FL Studio users among those affected appeared first on MusicTech.

“Do people care about tracklisting?” PinkPantheress says she doesn’t listen to albumsAfter declaring earlier this year that no song needs to be “longer than two minutes 30 seconds,” British pop star PinkPantheress has offered yet another hot take on music consumption in the modern era.
In a new interview with Kids Take Over, the Boy’s a Liar singer reveals that the order of songs in an album doesn’t matter to her.

READ MORE: Swedish House Mafia to perform at Will Ferrell’s house party

“I don’t listen to albums, I just listen to songs,” says PinkPantheress. “That’s why when it came to my own album, I was like, do people care about tracklisting? I couldn’t believe it.”
“When I saw people review my album, some people were like, ‘it’s a great album but the tracklisting doesn’t make sense.’ I’m like, just listen to the songs!”
The musician, who owes much of her early success to TikTok, later clarified her comments on X (formerly Twitter), arguing that imposing limits on how music should be made or listened to only serves to hinder one’s enjoyment of it.
“All that to say, there is no right or wrong way to consume or make music,” she states. “It’s people trying to say there is that stops people from enjoying and creating art in whichever form they want. Who cares if I listen to albums in full lol. It’s music, it’s meant to be unique to everyone.”
Elsewhere in the chat, PinkPantheress also shares that she’d like to be more involved in producing for other artists, saying: “If somebody wants to call me into a studio, I always think it’ll be under the guise of doing production or writing.”
“But at some point they’ll be like: ‘can you just jump on the song?’ I would love to be more behind the scenes of other people’s music.”
Watch the full interview below.

The post “Do people care about tracklisting?” PinkPantheress says she doesn’t listen to albums appeared first on MusicTech.

AlphaTheta’s proposed acquisition of Serato blocked: “We disagree with and are disappointed by the ruling of the New Zealand Commerce Commission”New Zealand’s competition regulatory agency, the Commerce Commission, has denied clearance for AlphaTheta’s proposed acquisition of Serato.
AlphaTheta, Pioneer DJ’s parent company, announced last year an over $50 million buyout of the New Zealand-owned and headquartered music software firm. The proposed merger — if passed — would bring under the same umbrella Serato and Rekordbox DJ, which together account for 90% of market share in the DJ software business.
The move was met with significant pushback from US audio equipment manufacturer InMusic (parent company of Akai, Denon DJ, Moog Music), who cited fears of a monopoly situation, arguing that the buyout will “eliminate competition” and “hurt the DJ community”.

READ MORE: Behringer reveals smaller UB-Xa D synth which comes without a keyboard

On the decision to decline, NZCC chairman Dr John Small said that the Commission was not satisfied that the merger would not have the effect of “substantially lessening competition” in the markets for DJ software and DJ hardware.
“While other DJ software providers would remain in the market, we did not consider these rivals, or the possibility of a new DJ software provider entering the market in the near term, would be sufficient to replace the level of competition that would be lost with the merger. We therefore could not exclude a real chance that the merger would result in a substantial lessening of competition for DJ software, resulting in price rises to consumers and/or a lower quality software offering.”
As Serato’s DJ software is currently integrated with many brands of DJ hardware, the agency is concerned the merger would make it harder for DJ hardware rivals to compete with Pioneer DJ.
“The evidence before us indicated that the merger could give ATC [AlphaTheta Corporation] the means to either eliminate or worsen DJ hardware rivals’ ability to integrate their products with Serato,” said Dr Small.
“We were also concerned the merger would provide ATC with access to its DJ hardware rivals’ commercially sensitive information, including information about unreleased products shared in the integration process, which could provide ATC with a competitive advantage and lessen the incentive on both ATC and its rivals to innovate.”
In a joint statement, AlphaTheta and Serato said they “disagree with and are disappointed by the ruling of the New Zealand Commerce Commission against the acquisition.”
The proposed agreement is one that would have capitalised on both parties’ “complementary expertise” and “accelerated” their combined ability to deliver incredible products to DJs and Producers around the world, said the companies.
“Regardless of the disappointing outcome of the judgement, we remain excited about the future,” said Yoshinori Kataoka, president and CEO of AlphaTheta. “Through this process we have built on our 15 year relationship with Serato, leading to the commencement of a number of exciting new projects for DJs and Producers.”
Serato CEO Young Ly added, “While it’s not the decision we wanted, the Serato business has never been in a better place, and neither has our relationship with ATC. Through the process we have not taken our eye away from what we do best and our pipeline of future innovation is incredibly healthy, including a number of projects with AlphaTheta and other industry partners.”
The post AlphaTheta’s proposed acquisition of Serato blocked: “We disagree with and are disappointed by the ruling of the New Zealand Commerce Commission” appeared first on MusicTech.

How will AI impact the next generation of DAWs? These developers have their sayAs Apple, Google and Microsoft integrate machine learning and artificial intelligence into their consumer tech products en masse, the music production space is loudly finding novel ways to harness AI — with mixed results. From impressive stem separation tools and smart plugins to litigious text-to-music services such as Suno and Udio, you can bet there’s some form of AI already infiltrating your studio. But is it a threat?

READ MORE: Will RIAA’s lawsuit against Udio and Suno really be the win we’re hoping for?

While major DAWs are making tentative steps towards incorporating AI and machine learning – like Logic Pro 11’s generative Studio Assistant instruments — it’s the smaller developers who are seemingly doing the truly innovative, out-there thinking right now. Notable among them are Hit’n’Mix, developers of RipX DAW, Moises.AI, which makes a multi-platform app for pulling apart and modifying existing music and Wavtool, a browser-based system for generating, editing and remixing music.
AI has been on the mind of Martin Dawe, founder of Hit’n’Mix, for a very long time. His roots go back over 30 years when he first started to toy with the idea of audio separation. “In about 1997, I came up with the idea of scanning sheet music, and the guys at Sibelius contacted me and asked me to meet up. We still sell PhotoScore with Sibelius. A few years later, I started doing audio separation, trying to convert it into notation, and throughout the ’00s that developed into achieving higher and higher quality. By about 2010, I had the basic bones of Hit’n’Mix and we actually launched it to see if the technology could start to deconstruct music tracks.” Dawe continues, “About four years ago, we released Hit’n’Mix Infinity which was the first pro version of the technology, and then machine learning algorithms were incorporated and we went more into audio source separation as well as audio cleanup.”
Geraldo Ramos, co-founder and CEO at Moises.AI had a much more recent conversion to the cause. “The development of Moises began in late 2019. I’m a drummer and always wanted to find a way to take a song and separate the tracks so I could mute the drum part and play the drum part myself alongside the rest of the song. I thought AI could be used to make this happen and then I thought, ‘Why not start a business?’ It was like a weekend hackathon. That Monday, I shared my work with Eddie Hsu (my co-founder and COO) because he’s an accomplished musician and knows music so well. He was pretty excited about it so we kept working on it.”
Hit’n’Mix RipX DAW. Image: MusicTech
Keith Chia, developer of Wavtool focused their efforts on the browser platform. “We launched in March 2023, but development on WavTool started quite a while before that. The idea of WavTool came about when Sam Watkinson was working on a number of various web audio projects to experiment on what was possible with audio manipulation within a browser. Eventually, he created a platform to tie together all these experiments, which took the rough shape of a proto-DAW.”
Why has AI taken off so rapidly in the last two years? Part of it is purely technical, with companies like Apple building ever-more-powerful neural processors for its Apple Silicon computers, while certain graphics cards available for PCs are also capable of hugely accelerating the power-hungry processes that make AI work. But it’s also a corresponding surge in the development of software tools as people start to see what is possible, especially in terms of generating music, and demand increases.
Moises’ Ramos expands on this, “AI has been powering music software for a while —we’ve been using AI since 2019. But new and improved AI models are coming to market constantly, and that’s definitely accelerated in the last couple of years. Part of it is the growth in R&D and development, but also strong interest and demand from the marketplace. There’s a big appetite for quality AI tools in creative fields”.
Wavtool’s Chia gave us his thoughts on the rise of AI: “Generative AI has definitely been having its moment in the last year by removing the line between creation and consumption. The act of making art has been simplified by removing entire chains of complicated tooling from the process — people can create a song just by inputting a text prompt. It’s a very simple way of igniting the creative spark in people by showing them that they can flex their creative muscles without having to spend thousands of hours mastering an instrument or learning complicated production software. We’re giving them an easy way to still rely on AI to navigate the difficult parts of the music creation process while enhancing their expressiveness, creativity, and play.”

RipX DAW is arguably the most powerful AI music suite out there at the moment, and also the closest to the kind of desktop DAW you might recognise – though it has tools that go way beyond what others currently offer. Riley Knapp, a drummer, producer and songwriter who is now working as an AI business strategist for Hit’n’Mix explained that, in his view, the product solves an important problem with catalogues and tracks that you potentially don’t have stems for. So for example you could now separate them out and get into cleaning up audio in ways that were not possible five years ago. In other words, you can deconstruct mixed tracks and pull out what you need to edit, clean up or otherwise modify.
The experience of using AI to generate music is very different to learning an instrument or even programming MIDI in a grid. At first, it can seem alien, but as Chia explains, it’s just progress.
“Voice and text interactions are now becoming more commonplace — verbal instructions can be translated to precise technical adjustments using AI. Interfaces and processing power are now increasingly decoupled with cloud computing, and devices won’t need to be tethered to the studio any more. It’s an exciting time to experiment with all sorts of new ways to make music, and it’s difficult to tell what will stick around, but technological innovation has been a constant in the progression of the music industry.”
Even if you haven’t used it yet yourself, you might have heard more AI-generated or AI-assisted music than you realise. Riley from Hit’n’Mix fires us some surprising stats, including that 60 per cent of independent artists are already using AI in their music creation workflow, but only 15 per cent want to discuss it. “It’s very taboo right now,” Riley says. “That’s the other beauty behind AI-generated music: a lot of these companies are being very ethical with it. AI music is built in a way that essentially allows copyright-free material to be generated from other material for which those users can be paid. That’s another area that can really be valuable because you’re able to go in and see the DNA within the sounds and you’re able to track and trace and understand what that musical DNA is within even AI-generated music. It’s a very exciting time.”

And do these developers worry about the possible copyright implications of tools that let you unpick, unmix and remix other peoples’ music? Chia, on the whole, thinks not. “Human music is not going away, even though full-AI-generated music is going to be extremely good. The fact is, humans have strong tendencies towards community, creativity, fandom, and personal growth, and creating and sharing original music is one of the most powerful ways these tendencies are expressed. We don’t think the presence of new kinds of music will change these facts of human nature. With the right tools, AI will make the creation of original, human-authored music much more accessible by helping creative people focus on the parts of the production process that they do best.”
While AI-generated music might not always match human composition for style and quality, RipX thinks its hyper-detailed editing tools can remedy that. Says Riley, “it’s transformed into a creative tool that solves the problem of generative AI music being unlistenable a lot of the time — chaotic or robotic.” And this could help its wider adoption, aiming to produce an end result with AI that’s more acceptable to most people’s ears. It’s also likely that auto-generated music will become less robotic in time as the tools used to make it improve.
We ask Martin Dawe how his software RipX DAW actually works, or at least to have it explained to us in layman’s terms. “The ripping is split into two main processes. The first is using machine learning, where the machine learning algorithm works out how to separate the full track into different stems. The second process is converting it into the RipX audio format, which gives you the separated notes, and that’s a bit more tricky to explain but essentially it finds all the frequencies that are available and then groups them into notes. And each of these notes contains not just vibrations, they contain things like the frequency of the harmonics and their level, stereo position, all this type of thing.”
Credit: Hit’N’Mix
Once the data has been analysed, it’s presented in a unique way that’s quite unlike what you might be used to in a conventional DAW, but it’s rendered completely malleable and doesn’t need to be re-processed each time you edit it. When you are changing the pitch or other characteristics of that data, it doesn’t require any complex digital signal processing algorithms once it’s in the RipX format, according to Dawe.
So it’s capable of deconstructing whole mixes into a format that’s almost uniquely flexible. But we’re interested to know who they are aiming this toolkit at. Dawe says “it’s a very, very broad product.
“There’s a lot of remixers and DJs but an equal number of musicians who use it to look at songs and work out what notes are played so they can learn a tricky guitar part. Plus, obviously, producers wanting to adjust sounds inside a mix. I don’t think there’s any kind of musician that wouldn’t get some sort of benefit out of it.”
Just a couple of years into AI and machine learning becoming more mainstream in music production, we are already able to do things that were impossible not so long ago, especially the ‘unmixing’ of tracks and the generation of music based on simple prompts. But where do things go from here? Geraldo Ramos says there will be “tremendous growth in generative AI music applications.” He warns that “only those who can find a strong market fit and business model will survive.
Geraldo Ramos, CEO at Moises.AI
“It may also depend on how the legal landscape evolves. For those companies following the infringement-as-business-model strategy, changes in the legal landscape may determine the winners and losers. Companies will see incredible growth in the same way the industry benefited from the MIDI standard and the opportunity it created for synthesizers, samplers, and drum machines. It’s my hope that as music tech becomes more capable with AI, it will have a democratizing effect that empowers creators.”
Chia, meanwhile, explains why he thinks AI is going to become a crucial part of music production. “For the next few years, we expect the quality of models that generate and manipulate audio to improve dramatically. We expect AI song generators to get much more creative and controllable. We expect to see new kinds of audio manipulation becoming possible, as existing techniques are applied in novel ways and new techniques are developed. These improvements will give experts more options, while improvements in more broadly applicable tech (like multi-modal LLMs) will make natural language interfaces for music creation more and more effective for beginners. The forms of AI we’re working with today will evolve and change, but AI as a category of technology is only going to become more important.”
The last word goes to Dawe, who concludes by explaining “We’ve got our finger on the pulse of AI. With this Rip format, we have the advantage of being able to build it from the ground up rather than having to go back through 30 years of code and try to reimagine it. So we’re very aware of all the different tools coming out, and we’re really just thinking about what the best integrations would be, what the best ways to go about collaborating with some of these technologies would be, and making sure that we’re at the forefront of it, whatever it is. Because as we all know, these things change day to day. Whatever it may be, we will be at the forefront of having the best interface to use AI music in an ethical, creative and fun way.”
AI is only going to get more advanced and more commonplace — and, despite concerns voiced by some, it seems likely that it will augment rather than replace humans’ input into the music-making process. We can expect to see more major DAW developers take further steps towards implementing sophisticated AI tools into their software while smaller companies continue to innovate. Not everyone will think AI belongs in the studio but producers should be prepared for it to become a part of the musical landscape, whether they choose to embrace it or not. Those that do can expect development to continue at speed.
Read more about AI in music production.
The post How will AI impact the next generation of DAWs? These developers have their say appeared first on MusicTech.