Dithering in #musicproduction was quite an interesting topic. Every dithering algorithm has it's own color (or sound character), it pretty much depends on the material - sometimes truncated conversion sounds better if there is a lot of "muddiness" or "wooliness" in the particular mix, better to pick up by ears imho. Also 32 to 24, 24 to 16, 32 to 16 are quite different conversions, TPDF is the most neutral dithering though (triangular "white noise" kind of)

SoundCloud is finally letting artists sell music directly to fans – with zero commissionSoundCloud has spent years being the place where you stumble across your next favourite artist. Now, it wants to be the place where you actually buy their music, too.
The company is currently testing a new feature that lets artists sell and deliver music directly from their SoundCloud profiles, meaning fans can discover a track, decide they want to own it and buy the download without being sent off to another platform.
Artists can set their own prices and offer music in formats including MP3 and WAV. More importantly, SoundCloud takes no commission from those sales. Once standard fees and taxes are deducted, artists keep 100% of the revenue.

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It’s a notable addition to a platform that has traditionally been much better at getting music heard than getting it sold. A stream might introduce an artist to a new fan, but a direct purchase puts actual money into the artist’s pocket.
SoundCloud says there’s already a sizeable appetite for that. Around 250,000 artists currently direct fans to external platforms to buy their music, with 2.4 million tracks linked to purchase pages. The company says more than 500,000 SoundCloud users are sent to those external sites every year, while 28% of surveyed artists either already sell downloadable music or want to start.
The feature will initially be tested with 200 US-based Artist Pro creators. Feedback from the beta will help shape the service before it rolls out to all eligible creators later this autumn.
Participating artists will be able to monitor their sales through Artist Studio and the Fan Support Dashboard. Direct sales will also add to SoundCloud’s existing artist monetisation tools, including Fan-Powered Royalties, Fan Support, on-demand vinyl and ticketing.
“Artists should be able to build their audience in one place, on one platform,” says SoundCloud CEO Eliah Seton. “SoundCloud has always been where artists find their first fans and build real communities. We’re continuing to bring more of what they need to grow their careers into that same experience, while letting fans directly support the music they love.”
SoundCloud’s move follows the lead of Bandcamp, which has long championed direct-to-fan music sales and launched its Bandcamp Fridays initiative in 2020.
Learn more at SoundCloud.
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Suno wants to offer tracks pressing to vinyl, really? Interesting move from the point of rights in #AI #MusicBusiness

Vibe coding of #musicproduction #Plugins with #AI ? - Sounds like the interesting experience, but I wonder how practical is it in details and interoperability in particular

Vibe coding has come for music plugins – are we witnessing a revolution?“AI works so well that now our internal sound designers can build products in two days that would have taken our entire dev team a whole year. It’s unbelievable.”
Casey Kolb, CEO of Lunacy Audio, had no plans to use AI in the company’s forthcoming plugin release. But while most of the music industry has been focused on deepfakes and full song generators, in the last six months something arguably even more impactful is happening in the world of music software. Lunacy is one of many developers just trying to keep up.

READ MORE: Anukari is a unique modelling synth that dares to be different, but how does it fit into my workflow?

“We’re trying to navigate this. It’s very weird; we weren’t even planning for it. It threw everything up in the air, and it was like ‘oh my god, maybe this is the future.’”
AI-assisted software development, or ‘vibe coding’, has the capacity to shortcut old practices, open the doors to complete novices, and have a foundational impact on the field of programming writ large. But what does this mean for audio development? In the case of Lunacy, that meant taking their human-made code and using AI to experiment and iterate on their designs at an astounding rate.
Kolb spent years building his team of human engineers. Talented audio developers are rare in his experience, and refining the development workflow took time. Before AI came onto the scene, the team at Lunacy manually coded CUBE, a sample-based virtual instrument and BEAM, a multi-effects plugin.
Lunacy’s next project, dubbed NOVA, invites people to build, share and remix plugins “like Google Docs for audio”. It never originally involved AI at all, but with the codebase already built, Kolb and his team took the chance to see what more AI could do with it.
Lunacy NOVA. Image: Press
“We had already built by hand a custom audio engine to make our product work. AI already has access to our algorithms and infrastructure paradigms, so all it is doing is coding – putting together the Lego blocks that we’ve handed it.”
If AI is having an impact for companies, it’s an even bigger shift for solo developers. As a former tech lead at Google and first-time plugin developer, Evan Mezeske wanted to combine his love of music with his background in programming. The result is Anukari, a weird and wonderful physics-based synth that takes inspiration from the 3D modelling environments usually found in video games.
At first, AI was simply a curiosity, and he did the first couple of years’ work the old-fashioned way. When Mezeske finally got round to seeing what AI could do, his initial reaction was mixed. “I was seeing it do things that I’ve spent my whole life getting good at […] and now there’s a robot that does my job. I went through a period where I was shocked and disoriented.”
“But at some point I realised I had to come to terms with the fact that this is how the world is now. I was like, okay, well, what does this mean for me? It means that I, as a solo entrepreneur, can’t afford to get help programming. But I can afford Claude.”
The allure of Large Language Models such as Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini is that you can talk to them in natural language and ask them to execute entire development cycles from design to testing to executing code. Experienced programmers might use it to bridge between languages they’re not familiar with, but people who have never written a line of code can also get AI to build their idea.
The danger here is that this paradigm might result in low-quality, buggy and uninspiring music software, as a consequence of developers not fully understanding the code being produced. This is something Kolb is aware of: “We don’t want everyone and their grandmother to come in and build awful things and share them. We’re trying to really curate the system such that it’s tasteful.”
Evan Mezeske. Image: Christopher Marchetti
Vibe coding might seem easy, but the reality is music software requires dedication and hard work to orchestrate something that not only operates, but performs well and sounds great too. Vibe coding might be a gateway to a new generation of plugin makers, but for Mezeske, the quality of new software will be determined by how much detail, direction and effort goes into the AI and Human working process.
“If vibe coding means I say ‘build Anukari’, it’s going to go off and do something awful. But in terms of the prompts that I gave Claude for the 3D renderer, it was something like a thousand chat interactions, starting with a huge thousand-line design essay and then a thousand iterations on that where I gave it feedback and provided direction. Is that vibe coding? I’m not sure. Personally, I think of vibe coding as somebody providing a lot less direction, in which case I think the results are going to be pretty poor.”
Furthermore, audio development comes with challenges that are highly unique to the industry. As Mezeske found out, audio software has to run on multiple operating systems, a long list of different DAWs, and there are all sorts of features worth considering from MPE to multichannel to microtunning and MIDI 2.0. “There’s just this vast surface area of contact points with other parts of software that are complex. It has to be in real-time, and on top of that it can’t crash. I mean, that’s insane, right?”
Anukari UI. Image: Press
At Lunacy, the secret recipe that goes into their DSP development is not something Kolb is ready for AI to cook with just yet. “It’s not perfect. Earlier this year, we were trying to figure out how Claude Code would fit into our workflow. If you used it on certain deep-level things like DSP algorithms or something, it would often fail or mess something up. It’s gotten better, but we kind of avoid using it on anything that’s too delicate.”
Nonetheless, AI has suddenly made music plugin and software creation exponentially more accessible, allowing musicians and producers to build bespoke tools that fit their needs exactly.
For Scott Young—a producer by night and a former front-end developer—AI helped him overcome personal learning difficulties to build his first plugin. Based in Hong Kong, he couldn’t find many local studios that were developing audio software, and so “found the courage to do it” himself. The result was Acetate, born from a need to create quick club-ready masters for the venues he was performing at.
Scott Young. Image: Press
Although Young’s project began as a means to solve his own problem, ultimately he’s determined to create a high-quality tool that others find useful too. “I wanted to make a statement that this could be done,” says Young. “That it could be done at studio-quality output. Just because I couldn’t do it on day one doesn’t mean that I can’t do it a year later.”
As the barrier to plugin development lowers, we might see a renaissance of plugins that are niche, esoteric, and unique — just as we did at the turn of the millennium with the introduction of the VST standard. On the other hand, we might be hit with a wave of bad plugins, poorly optimised or full of bugs, with bad actors hoping to make a quick buck.
In the current AI-sceptic landscape, getting the balance right for both users and plugin makers is difficult but necessary. For Kolb, it’s a matter of seizing the tools before they are co-opted by others.
Acetate analysis. Image: Press
“If you’re in the camp of ‘let’s never touch it, it’s only evil’, I think that’s wrong. We’re going to get swallowed alive by the evil tech giants if we do that. We need to find out how to harness this superpower in a way that feels creative so we can beat companies that are trying to bypass the creative process.”
At a time when the plugin and software market is arguably over-saturated, AI might—in the right hands— have a surprisingly positive impact on music software.
As Mezeske puts it: “To me, the cool thing about music is the human creative process and the way that that connects to other people. I like the idea of superhuman cyborg people realising ever more of their creative dream in more detail. If the AI tools are amplifying a human being’s creative process and the agent is helping realise that much more rapidly than they could on their own, I think that’s very cool.”
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Upcoming [release]

iZotope leaves the Native Instruments family after being acquired by Boris FX
iZotope has been acquired by Boris FX. It’s fair to say 2026 has been an eventful year so far for Native Instruments and all involved with the audio industry powerhouse, including iZotope. Recent months have been a time of uncertainty for staff and customers alike, with the future of multiple well-established brands hanging in the [...]
View post: iZotope leaves the Native Instruments family after being acquired by Boris FX

This KVM runs a P4 instead of a Pi.If you asked us to build you a KVM last week, we’d likely have reached for a Raspberry Pi. Now, thanks to [JonathanRowny], we’d seriously consider an ESP32-P4, because his IP KVM seems pretty capable.
He’s using the P4 hardware to its fullest, getting the supported 1080p graphics, and doing so in an interesting way– he’s got a commercial adapter board to try and translate HDMI signals to the camera input on his dev board. Conveniently enough, it’s the same ribbon-cable pinout as the RPi, which is not guaranteed by the CSI standard. Writing a driver to take that signal proved the hardest part– aside from the usual chip revision confusion that plagues this chip– and we can’t help but wonder if the client on the other side of the KVM-IP link might have an easier time doing the image processing that was required for a good image. Regardless, he’s got the code as it is now up on GitHub under the Apache license. 
As of this this writing, there’s no audio, and ironically for an ESP32 project networking is wired-only– but much more importantly, there is no security. So it’s a work in progress, but great to see the P4 in the wild doing something other than emulation. Not that we haven’t seen the P4 at work before–the Tanmatsu handheld also makes use of Expressif’s most powerful chip for a handy little terminal. Between the KVM and the handhelds, we cannot help but wonder how many of the projects that were once the provenance of a Pi will get squeezed into these overpowered microcontrollers. Sure, they can’t even match the original Pi in horsepower, never mind a modern Pi5, but how many times have you seen a Linux SBC seriously under-taxed in a project like this?
If you’re swapping Pi for P4– or doing anything else interesting– please let us know on the tips line.

Tidal won't pay to those #music #producers who upload “wholly generated” tracks by #AI starting from end of June #MusicBusiness #Distribution

Truth and history versus modern reality. I believe books are even more essential nowadays

Microtonality in #music #musicproduction

As crypto cools, a16z crypto raises a $2.2B fundAs some of the biggest VCs in crypto start to consider funding AI startups, a16z crypto's new fund will stay the course.

Claude can now be plugged into Ableton to assist with your music projectsClaude – the AI assistant and chatbot from Anthropic – can now be directly plugged into Ableton, as well as a raft of other creative platforms, including Blender and Photoshop.
The move follows the launch of Claude Design, a new product by Anthropic Labs that lets you collaborate with Claude to create “polished visual work” like designs, one-pagers and more.
With the new set of connectors for Claude, the popular chatbot is able to plug into Ableton, and act as an AI assistant within your music projects. Anthropic says its partnership with a “coalition of partners” – which also includes Blender, Adobe (Photoshop and Premiere Pro) and Affinity by Canva.

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Interestingly, Splice is also named in the list of brands integrating Claude into its products. It means producers can now search Splice’s catalogue of royalty-free samples directly within Claude.
According to a blog post on the Anthropic website, within these platforms, Claude can be used in a variety of ways. Users can ask Claude complex questions about the software, with the chatbot acting as a virtual tutor to help you better understand your workflow.
Elsewhere, Claude Code can write scripts, plugins, and generative systems for these platforms.
And perhaps most importantly for creatives, Claude can be used to take care of manual, repetitive tasks that get in the way of the creative process.
“Claude can’t replace taste or imagination, but it can open up new ways of working – faster and more ambitious ideation, a more expansive skillset, and the ability for creatives to take on larger-scale projects,” Anthropic says [via The Verge]. 
“AI can also help shoulder the parts of the creative process that eat up time by handling repetitive tasks and eliminating manual toil.”
Check out the video below for a walkthrough on how to integrate Claude into Splice:

Anthropic has also now become a Corporate Patron of the Blender Development Fund, helping the open-source platform to stay free, and to allow developers to “keep pursuing projects independently, and to focus on building tools for artists and creators”. Anthropic will give Blender €240,000 every year.
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I imagine this is quite logical thing and generally people don't want to listen to #music simply and automatically generated by #AI machines. There is some good stuff for #creativity support and is interesting as well in general. But I think it is good to smartly combine analog, digital and AI worlds...or not...there is not one right answer

Audiotool is hosting a “hackathon series” to teach people how to make virtual instruments, plugins and music education toolsAudiotool, a free multiplayer music studio, is launching a new initiative to get more people making virtual instruments, music-related games, and music education tools, without any need for coding skills.
The initiative, called Let’s Build!, partners with organisations and educational institutions around the world, and will run from 11 May – 6 July this year. This “hackathon series” will bring together students, musicians, music lovers, and developers to make apps and DAW extensions using AI-powered coding and NEXUS, Audiotool’s SDK.

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Events will happen online on Audiotool’s Dev Discord, as well as in real life at partnering organisations. The resulting projects will go before a panel of judges, including Manon Dave, Head of Future World Design at BBC Research & Development and award-winning music producer who has worked on projects for will.i.am and Idris Elba.
Along with top music schools, such as Berklee and NYU, Audiotool will collaborate with some of its long-standing supporters, including the Esports World Cup, Esports Nations Cup, and the WHO Youth Council. Let’s Build! is also supported by OpenAI, Base44, and ElevenLabs, among others.
Audiotool says that Let’s Build! is “the first step in what promises to be the complete transformation of music into a flexible world where everyone can play thanks to AI code assistants”. Andreas Jacobi, its co-founder and CEO, says its core ethos is to be “community-first”.
Jacobi says, “We have worked for years to remove barriers to collaboration, creativity, and exploration, and now technology is allowing us to tear down yet another – the technical barrier between a cool idea and an amazing new piece of software. If you can describe it, you can now build it. We can’t wait to see what community members, music-loving developers, artists, really anyone who’s excited about coding, come up with.”
Manon Dave adds, “I’m super excited to be invited to judge the Let’s Build! hackathon. I started out making tunes in my bedroom and hacking away on software similar to Audiotool, trying to find a unique sound for my music, so I know how powerful it is when you’re given the chance to get under the hood and bring your ideas to life.
“What Audiotool is doing here is opening that up even further, bringing creativity and coding together so people can build entirely new ways of making music. I’m excited to see what people create when you have the space to experiment.”
Find out more or sign up for free via Audiotool.
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