Volume.com Announces the 2024 BeachLife Music Festival FreeLivestream in Partnership with Music Gives To St. Jude KidsVolume.com and BeachLife Festival have announced the free livestream for the eagerly awaited 2024 BeachLife Music Festival, slated for May 3-5 in Redondo Beach, California. The free stream will be in partnership with Music Gives to St. Jude Kids. 

This year’s festival boasts a lineup featuring iconic artists such as Sting, Incubus, My Morning Jacket, Dirty Heads, DEVO, Trey Anastasio & Classic TAB, Seal, Local Natives, Fleet Foxes, and many others. For fans unable to attend in person, Volume.com provides a free and exclusive portal to experience BeachLife Music Festival live, offering a unique opportunity to enjoy the performances from anywhere. You can claim a ticket for this free event today to get a reminder and learn more about the Music Gives to St. Jude Kids Partner In Hope program. To discover other recent livestreams or to sign up for upcoming events, visit Volume.com. 

Fans of BeachLife 2024 are encouraged to pair their good vibes with a great cause—St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital®. Between incredible BeachLife acts, festival-goers and festival-viewers can become a St. Jude Partner in Hope. Contributions from St. Jude supporters ensure that families never receive a bill from St. Jude for treatment, travel, housing, or food so they can focus on helping their children live. A Partner in Hope can give today by texting GIVE to 62-62-62 and, in return, will receive a Music Gives to St. Jude Kids t-shirt.

Volume is not just a platform; it's the destination for a thriving livestream ecosystem where artists can flourish and grow their businesses. Volume has been diligently expanding its library, attracting a growing roster of artist-users, podcasters, and venues to join its platform. Select streams are now available for on-demand viewing on Volume, offering audiences diverse performances and discussions. Among these are Andy Frasco’s World Saving Podcast, Chris Shiflett’s Shred with Shifty, with episodes featuring Blues extraordinaire Joe Bonamassa, Brent Mason, John Osborne, and more. Other events that have been featured on Volume include The BMG/BBR CMA Pre-Party featuring Jelly Roll, Lainey Wilson, and more; Warren Haynes Christmas Jam featuring Slash, Phil Lesh, Tyler Childers, Gov’t Mule, and others; and various in-studio streams from Lightning 100 featuring artists such as The War And Treaty, Grace Potter, Vera Bloom with BadCulture, The Foxies and a recent secret show with Sheryl Crow.

In the changing world of music, certain venues and festivals remain at the forefront by embracing Volume Livestreams—a modern approach to music broadcasting. Notable pioneers include BeachLife Music Festival, Nashville establishments 3rd & Lindsley, The Basement East,and venues like West Hollywood’s Troubadour, Charlotte’s Neighborhood Theatre, BurlingtonVermont’s Nectar’s, and NYC’s The Bitter End. These locations have adapted to the age to ensure that live music remains vibrant and accessible on a scale. 

For more information, visit www.volume.com.

Compiling and Running Turbo Pascal in the BrowserWhen a friend of [Lawrence Kesteloot] found a stack of 3.5″ floppy disks, they found that it contained Turbo Pascal code which the two of them had worked on back in the Summer of 1989. Amidst reminiscing about the High School days and watching movies on VHS, [Lawrence] sought a way to bring these graphical applications once more back to life. Not finding an easy way to compile Turbo Pascal code on Mac even back in 2013 when he started the project, he ended up writing a Turbo Pascal compiler in JavaScript, as any reasonable person would do in this situation.
SPIDER.PAS in its full glory. (Credit: Lawrence Kesteloot)
As noted by [Lawrence], the compiler doesn’t implement the full Turbo Pascal 5.5 language, but only the subset that was required to compile and run these applications which they had found on the floppy disks. These include ROSE.PAS and SPIDER.PAS along with three others, and can also be found in the GitHub repository. As can be seen in the online version of the compiler, it captures the feel of programming Pascal in 1989 on the command line.
Naturally, the software situation has changed somewhat over the last decade. We’ve recently seen some promising multi-platform Pascal compilers, and of course you could even run Turbo Pascal in DOSBox or similar. That might make this project seem irrelevant, but being able to write and run Pascal applications in more ways and on more platforms is never a bad thing.

Epidemic Sound’s royalty-free music is played 2.5bn times per day on YouTube and TikTok, but company still struggles to turn a profitThe company says there are now 26 million videos on YouTube and TikTok featuring its music
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Universal Music Group generated 51% of its 2023 recorded music revenues in North America… and 8 other things we learned from its new annual reportMBW takes a deep dive through Universal's latest in-depth financial report
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Omnisphere is “one of the most inspiring instruments,” says TouristTourist has commended the “inspiring” presets found on Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere plugin synth, hailing it as a solid “starting point for sounds”.

READ MORE: Mike Dean leaks a glimpse of Moog’s Muse, a forthcoming mystery synth

The British producer and Grammy-winning songwriter – real name William Edward Phillips – hailed Omnisphere in the latest episode of My Forever Studio. It’s a podcast on which artists, producers and musicians dream up a fantasy studio setup, picking a limited number of items.
In this episode, the award-winning plugin (Version 2.8 was launched in 2021) is named by Tourist as a key starting point when starting a new project. He also emphasises his desire to find instruments that “inspire him”.
“It’s one of the most inspiring instruments,” Tourist says of the plugin. “You open it and it’s like, you know, it’s such a good starting point for sounds.”
He also addresses the stigma surrounding the use of presets in music production, emphasising the importance of embracing inspiration in any form. He asserts, “If you find inspiration in a preset, don’t in any way judge yourself for thinking like that. You’re immediately pissing on your own fire of inspiration.”
“It’s so important that that inspiration is what carries you through the rest of the record because there’s nothing wrong with it, you know? That’s me embracing using presets. So much of my music is just Omnisphere presets, but that’s fine.”

At another point in the episode, Tourist discusses the preciousness around collecting treasured gear that doesn’t end up being used by its owners. He says, “Your studio is not a museum. You don’t want to feel intimidated by it. You want to feel like you can revel in its creativity. I’m not like ‘This one here…’ Like a fucking wine cellar.”
“The emotional value of something sometimes is what you create with it. To some extent, these things are tools and the tools allow you to make magic, and the magic is what you need to get from these tools.”
Listen to the episode below:

My Forever Studio invites guests, in the form of producers, musicians, songwriters and studio engineers, to dream up a fantasy studio they’ll make music in forever. This studio can be anywhere in the world, but there is a catch – each guest is only allowed to pick six studio items. Before you ask, no, these cannot be plugin bundles. *sounds the ‘no bundles’ klaxon*
Find all episodes of My Forever Studio via MusicTech.
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Plugin Boutique is offering its “lowest prices ever” on a range of Universal Audio UAD pluginsThere’s an age-old adage: you can never have too many plugins. Okay, that isn’t a thing, but it’s true, right? Until the end of this month (30 April), you can grab a number of killer savings on Universal Audio UAD plugins over at Plugin Boutique.
Universal Audio’s UAD plugins are some of the best in the biz, and you pick up a select number for as little as $29 apiece until the end of the month.

READ MORE: Get Excite Audio’s VISION 4X Lite or Audified’s U78 Saturator totally free with any purchase at Plugin Boutique

Up for grabs for $29 each are a selection of effects – Pure Plate Reverb, Studio D Chorus, Oxide Tape Recorder, Brigade Chorus Pedal, and Waterfall Rotary Speaker – while there are a number of other products with up to 80 percent discount applied, too.
They include the Manley Tube Preamp, which is available for $74 at a 50 percent discount, Verve Analogue Machines for $99 at a 50 percent discount, PolyMAX Synth for $39 at a whopping 80 percent off, Waterfall B3 Organ with a cool 75 percent off, and Ravel Grand Piano for $39, again with a huge 80 percent knocked off its price tag.
Universal Audio UAD plugins usually come with pretty high price tags – reflective of their demand and standing among professional producers – so now’s your chance to grab one or two – or even the whole lot – while saving an awful lot of money.
As we say, these deals are available until 30 April (less than two weeks to go), so act fast if you want to treat your in-the-box studio setup to a cheeky little upgrade.
For more info, head to Plugin Boutique.
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MPG Awards: Discounted balcony tickets The MPG are kindly offering the Sound On Sound community a 40% discount on balcony tickets for the upcoming MPG Awards 2024.

My Forever Studio: Tourist wants antiques, not museum pieces“When I was 13 year old, my dream was a laptop and an audio interface, and nothing else”, says Tourist. Luckily, for the Grammy-winning producer and songwriter, he’s in the right place.
On the 66th episode of My Forever Studio, the podcast presented by MusicTech and Audient, British artist Tourist joins us to dream up his fantasy Forever Studio. Of course, he must adhere to the rules: only six musical items are allowed in his studio, beyond a computer, DAW and audio interface.
In the show, Tourist — real name Will Phillips — tells us about the one app he can’t live without, why he doesn’t agree with “sneery” synthesizers and collecting gear as relics, and the importance of not shying away from presets.

Tourist’s celebrating the upcoming launch of his fifth album, Memory Morning, which he says is “one of those albums that really took shape as I wrote it. I had absolutely no point of reference to start from, and that was equal parts liberating and daunting.”
“Often my music draws from specific life events but this album really lives in and was borne from my imagination. I wanted to write something that felt like it whisked you away, an album that felt like a ‘place’, its own world, somewhere you might find new corners with each listen.  It truly is the first album I’ve written that feels like the sum of all of my influences.”
In the past decade, Tourist’s blend of emotive, melancholy and synth-driven dance music — which he once coined “SDM – sad dance music” — has garnered a devoted fanbase and critical acclaim across the globe. In 2015, he was awarded a Grammy for Song Of The Year for co-writing Sam Smith’s Stay With Me, and has racked up millions of streams on tracks such as Run and We Stayed Up All Night. 

 
In the previous episode of My Forever Studio, Benn Jordan revealed the extremely budget rig he mixed and mastered his early music on, explained why less than half of all synth owners make music, and shared the only Forever Studio item he really couldn’t live without.
The My Forever Studio podcast sees artists, producers and engineers create their dream fantasy Forever Studio, wherever they want in the universe. However, there are strict rules in the Forever Studio. Our guests are permitted a limited number of items in their creative space, so they must choose carefully. There will be nostalgia. There will be anecdotes. There may be gags. But there will be no bundles!

Subscribe to My Forever Studio on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and check out all episodes so far via musictech.com

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Lewitt’s Ray microphone tries to solve an age-old problem with recording vocals£299/$349, lewitt-audio.com
The fundamentals of studio microphone technology have remained relatively static over the years, with few major developments in recent decades — except for the now-common all-in-one USB microphone. Rarely does a manufacturer try to address an issue which is just sort of accepted as an inconvenient part of the recording process But that is what Lewitt has done with its new Ray microphone. So how is it different from other microphones?

READ MORE: AstroLab is one giant leap for Arturia — but will it really take off?

Ray looks like a conventional all-analogue studio condenser mic, connected to your interface by XLR and using phantom power. It ships with a shockmount and a magnetic pop filter that attaches neatly to the body and is small enough not to look unsightly should you be using the mic on camera. The build quality and finish are excellent, and it looks pretty cool too.
Ray’s unique innovation is what the company calls “autofocus for your voice”. Anyone who has used a microphone knows that your voice gets quieter and thinner the further away you are from it, and increasingly loud and boomy as you come up close. The way this has always been managed has been to regulate your physical distance, being careful not to go too close or too far away when speaking or singing. It’s so ingrained that you don’t really think about it – but what if there was another way?
Lewitt has come up with a system it calls AURA which, when activated, is able to dynamically adapt the microphone’s level and tonal qualities based on your distance from it. It all happens inside the mic and though the developers don’t explicitly reveal how, it uses some kind of infrared beam or sensor coupled with DSP to judge distance and then adjust level.
This is activated using a simple button on the mic — otherwise it just operates in regular, non-adjusting mode — and is something of a revelation. You can move back and forth by a couple of feet (obviously not really far because there are practical limits) and the level remains consistent. Producers would normally use some compression to achieve a similar if not identical result, though that can come with the issue of latency and the effect is also printed onto your take. And riding a gain fader during recording is not really practical.

With the dynamic feature on you quickly forget that you are not supposed to be shifting position since the audio level in your headphones doesn’t change – it’s surprisingly easy to get used to. When you get very close to the mic, male voices especially will exhibit more low end but the proximity effect isn’t evident and you do have to get really quite close to experience this anyway.
There’s a second feature that uses the AURA technology and that’s “mute by distance”, the other button on the mic body. Choose one of several pre-set distances and when you move further away the mic will mute itself. Again, you can approximate it using a software or hardware noise gate, but finding the right threshold setting can be fiddly.
The practical uses for this are pretty compelling. For singers it means you can step back between takes or verses, muting the mic and ensuring that bleed, background noise or off-mic chatter are not picked up, saving editing time later. For podcasters, it means you can swing the mic off to one side if it’s on a boom, or physically move back to temporarily mute the mic. This doesn’t mean that you’ll have to do no editing, mixing or processing after recording but it can cut down on the amount of work by letting people mute and unmute themselves in real time.
Whether you use these features or not, Ray delivers a clean and neutral-sounding signal via its one-inch gold-sputtered capsule with a cardioid pickup pattern that rejects sound from behind. There’s a very low self-noise level of 8dB and a sound pressure upper limit of 131 dBSPL so loud performances aren’t a problem. Favoured by engineers and producers working with artists including Justin Bieber and the Rolling Stones, Lewitt’s mics enjoy a good reputation and certainly here it’s well justified.

Is the AURA stuff enough to make Ray stand out in this price bracket? We think so.
It’s a stellar mic to begin with — if it wasn’t, no extra features could make up for that. But these are genuinely useful additions. While both the auto-gain and the auto-mute will be helpful for all users, we’d suggest that the gain will be particularly appreciated by singers, who tend to move to differing extents during a performance and whose vocals can naturally vary in volume. If you want to capture those variations you can of course just turn the gain feature off.
Small variations in volume are less of a problem for streamers or podcasters but many could still make use of the auto gain. For these people, being able to mute yourself while others speak for longer periods by just moving back slightly will also be a really useful thing to be able to do. While these are mostly possible to achieve in a more long-winded and arguably less effective format by using live mixing or plugins, here it’s super simple. Just a couple of button presses on the mic will do it.
The price, while reasonable for a high-performing studio mic, might count out more casual content creators. Otherwise, Ray is an easy recommendation for anyone recording vocals, be it singing, spoken word, podcast or voiceover. Being analogue, it’s going to have to be connected to an interface or mixer with phantom power so perhaps not one for the run-and-gun crowd, but Ray is an innovative solution to a problem so long established in the recording world that we had stopped noticing it was a problem.
Lewitt Ray key features

Cardioid condenser microphone
1-inch gold sputtered capsule
AURA technology for voice autofocus
Mute by distance feature
“Record-ready” sound
Supplied with shock mount and magnetic pop shield
8 dB self-noise
131 dBSPL sound pressure tolerance
Configurable distance mute settings
Works as regular mic with autofocus turned off

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Battalion drum machine from Unfiltered Audio Battalion aims to combine the character of iconic drum synths with the programming flexibility and sampling features offered by modern drum machines. 

Your Livestream Strategy Sucks! K-Pop’s lessons on reaching a global audience Haven't had much success with live streaming lately or given up altogether? If you're going to learn from anyone, look at how live-streaming contributed to K-Pop artist's global success.....
The post Your Livestream Strategy Sucks! K-Pop’s lessons on reaching a global audience  appeared first on Hypebot.

Beginner’s guide to getting more YouTube Subscribers with Ads [Brian Hazard]Calling all music promo newbies! Here's a step-by-step breakdown of how to get more YouTube subscribers with ads. ....
The post Beginner’s guide to getting more YouTube Subscribers with Ads [Brian Hazard] appeared first on Hypebot.

Why must musicians get the short end of OpenAI’s Bad Business Model?Tech companies claim AI needs free access to copyrighted materials for proper and accurate training, leaving artists uncompensated for the use of their property and with more AI-created competition.....
The post Why must musicians get the short end of OpenAI’s Bad Business Model? appeared first on Hypebot.

“Your studio is not a museum”: Tourist says you shouldn’t be precious about treasured gearMusician and songwriter Tourist has discussed the act of collecting studio gear but not using it, making the statement, “Your studio is not a museum”.

READ MORE: Tourist: “Sampling is mind-blowing; it’s the biggest advancement in music technology since the early 80s”

The British electronic music producer and Grammy-winning songwriter discussed the topic during the latest episode of My Forever Studio, a podcast on which popular music makers tell listeners about a dream studio.
In this episode, Tourist talks about the preciousness people can have over gear, suggesting instead that it should be used, not gawked at. “This one was owned by David Bowie’s personal assistant,” he jokes. “If you like feeling important, then that’s great,” he says.
“Your studio is not a museum. You don’t want to feel intimidated by it. You want to feel like you can revel in its creativity. I’m not like ‘This one here…’. Like a fucking wine cellar.”
“The emotional value of something sometimes is what you create with it,” says Tourist – real name William Edward Phillips. “To some extent, these things are tools. The tools allow you to make magic, and the magic is what you need to get from these tools.”
Listen to the episode below:

Funnily enough, Phillips’ statement contrasts what The Flashbulb musician Benn Jordan said when he guested on the same podcast last week.
On that episode, which you can listen to Apple Podcasts, Jordan defends synth collectors who don’t regularly use their equipment to make music, saying, “There’s no shame in it at all”.
“The people who buy music gear and are keeping the companies afloat, I would say more than half of them are not really making music on it,” he says. “They’re just collecting it and playing with it.
“Even DAWs and software. They just buy the software, they play with the knobs, they listen to it for a second, and there’s no shame in it at all. Everybody pretends they’re making music, but there are a lot of people who just like collecting synths and collecting DAWs and learning. Because they’re not producing music that people are listening to, for some reason they’re not as validated. I think that’s nonsense because it is a hobby one way or another.”
The My Forever Studio podcast, created in partnership with Audient, sees guests in the form of musicians, producers, songwriters and studio engineers conjure up the image of a fantasy studio. This music-making space – and its contents – must be where they make music forever. The catch? Each guest must pick only six studio items, and that does not include plugin bundles. *sounds ‘no bundles’ klaxon*
Find all episodes of My Forever Studio on MusicTech.
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Denise Audio Releases Motion Filter Plugin With 43% OFF Intro Price
Today, Denise Audio launched the Motion Filter digital filter plugin at an introductory price of $39 – 43% off the list price of $69.  Motion Filter is a 64-bit only Windows and macOS release for VST, VST3, AU, and AAX. Denise Audio describes Motion Filter as a “state-of-the-art digital filter with two configurable motion modes to [...]
View post: Denise Audio Releases Motion Filter Plugin With 43% OFF Intro Price