FSVR brings the Yamaha FS1R to your DAW as a FREE synth plugin
Musica Studio’s FSVR is a free, open-source recreation of the Yamaha FS1R for macOS, Windows, and Linux. The original FS1R is a 1998 rackmount synth that combined FM with formant synthesis. It can produce all of those classic metallic and glassy FM tones, but its formant sequences can also give you moving, voice-like textures you [...]
View post: FSVR brings the Yamaha FS1R to your DAW as a FREE synth plugin

Man who made $8 million in AI streaming fraud scheme given 18-month prison sentenceMichael Smith – the North Carolina man who was found guilty of a scheme to use bots listening to his AI-generated music to generate $8 million in streaming revenue – has been given an 18-month prison sentence.
Smith was charged by US federal prosecutors in 2024, when it was revealed his ploy began as far back as 2017. According to the Department of Justice, he created thousands of bot accounts across streaming platforms – including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music – and used software to make the bots continuously stream “hundreds of thousands” of AI-generated tracks he had made.
Smith pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in March, and agreed to pay $8,091,843.64 in forfeiture. It is estimated that Smith made around $14 million from the scheme over a period of multiple years.
Last week, the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York revealed that Smith had been given an 18-month prison sentence.

READ MORE: Colapso is a synth that plays the periodic table – somehow

“Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud by flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans,” US Attorney Jamie McDonald said following the sentencing [via Mixmag].
Following the sentencing, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) added: “This result sends a clear message that streaming fraud is a crime and has serious consequences. But enforcement is only one part of tackling streaming fraud – we also need to prevent, detect and disrupt fraudulent activity.”
“The global music industry is collectively doing just that through the Streaming Integrity Initiative which protects artists, rightsholders and fans and strengthens trust in streaming.”
In other AI news, Suno users turned their back en masse on the AI music generator platform following its v6 update last month. The update came after Suno came clean about its use of audio data taken from YouTube to train its models.
The post Man who made $8 million in AI streaming fraud scheme given 18-month prison sentence appeared first on MusicTech.

No, Kenneth Blume won’t stay in his laneKenneth Blume would like everyone to stop worrying about what to call him. Since the producer began using his given name professionally about a year ago, people have developed a habit of addressing him as Kenny, then immediately apologising. “I wish that there was a billboard,” he tells MusicTech from an emerald leather kitchen nook at his Putnam Hill studio in Los Angeles. Its message: “It’s okay to still call him Kenny.”
Kenny Beats, after all, is still the prolific producer who made hits with Denzel Curry, Vince Staples, and Freddie Gibbs, then turned his quicksilver studio process into the YouTube series The Cave. His friends still call him Kenny. And despite his evolution from hip-hop producer and internet personality into marquee rock producer, studio founder, and film composer, Blume insists the change was never meant to mark a clean break. “It’s not really a shift in any other way,” he says. “I just want to use my family name.”
Image: Evan Tetreault for MusicTech
The decision began at Sundance 2025, as Blume watched the premiere of Lurker, the Alex Russell-directed music-industry thriller he scored. Seeing “Kenneth Blume,” the name he shares with his father and grandfather, scroll past in the credits stirred something in him that Kenny Beats, an alias coined in middle school for his MySpace output, did not.
Part of that feeling came from everything the pseudonym had accumulated. Kenny Beats no longer referred only to his production work. It was also the on-camera personality trading jokes and improvising viral chart-toppers with Zack Fox on The Cave; the host of beat battles and tutorials on a popular and lucrative Twitch stream; the figure at the centre of the second-largest music community on Discord. Blume says there was “a bit of a difference” between that figure and the person his girlfriend, parents, and closest friends knew. Watching “Kenneth Blume” roll through the credits felt, in some small way, like “just being myself onscreen.”
“My style is just being invisible, making people feel like they’re getting as close as they can to whatever that dream is.”
The change nevertheless coincided with an expansion in his work and the opening of his own studio, some of which is immortalised in a clutch of doodles, notes, and Polaroids pinned to the wall behind us: There are the grinning mugs of Geese, whose zeitgeist-seizing Getting Killed was the first full-length recorded at Putnam Hill; Blume pouting in a long wig, flanked by Rico Nasty, whose RX dropped in July, and Shanny Wise of electronic duo Fcukers, who tapped Blume to helm their debut Ö; a hand-scrawled “=w=” from Weezer’s Gold Album sessions. All the while, Blume has continued to produce rappers, record more live instrumentation, and rely less on software. “Somehow the two, the name and what’s going on with the music, kind of lined up,” he says. “They’re both a little bit more organic than when I was younger.”
Even he can see the symmetry. “I guess using your real name and taking everything off, there’s kind of some through line,” he says. “But it wasn’t intentional.”
Image: Evan Tetreault for MusicTech
The internet conspiracy theory that Blume is distancing himself from hip-hop does not survive his credits. Before The Cave went viral, he worked with IDLES, hardcore band Trash Talk, and Rico Nasty, whose 2019 Anger Management mixtape folded punk and metal into rap.
“I do a metal song now, and they’re like, ‘When did you start doing this?’ And they forget about Rico Nasty, you know?” Blume laughs. “There were guitars there too!”
If there is a constant across those projects, it’s the method Blume brings to the room. “I never propose a genre, a sound, a reference, as far as where you should go with it or what I could hear you doing,” he says. Instead, he studies collaborators to a “nerdy, scary point”, combing old interviews, fan forums, and Discord servers for clues about what the artist might be reaching toward. By the time they enter the studio, he wants to understand not just the music they have made, but the music they may not yet know how to articulate.
His position as something of an outsider helps. “I’m not really authentic to any subgenre I work in,” says the Connecticut-raised Blume. “I’m so impure to everything.” That impurity is perhaps his fingerprint — less a recurring sound than a way of listening. Like the Dust Brothers and Dan The Automator, Blume has a knack for decontextualising sound and technique from genre, treating them as tools that migrate according to what a song or performance needs. But the impulse must come from the artist. “If they wanna cross genres or they wanna pull something from a complete other world, I, as a rule, think that can work,” he says. His role is to recognise the destination and clear a path toward it. “My style is being invisible,” he says, “making people feel like they’re getting as close as they can to whatever that dream is.”
Image: Evan Tetreault for MusicTech
One of Blume’s most lasting lessons from hip-hop is how to preserve spontaneity. He came up on stories of rappers arriving with fully written and rehearsed verses. But as artists such as Young Thug and Future pushed Atlanta to the centre of rap, he watched punch-in recording become the norm: record a line, pause to consider what comes next, maybe take a sip or a hit, then build the track bar by bar. “The first thing off the top of your head and the first time you say it becomes the prized thing on the record,” he says.
The first time he asked IDLES frontman Joe Talbot to write and record at the microphone, Blume recalls, Talbot was confused. He was accustomed to writing with the band or taking a demo away and returning with a completed vocal. Punching in introduced a different kind of risk, and ultimately became part of how they made multiple albums together. Rehearsal serves a band, Blume says, but “you need these records to have something that’s off the cuff.”
With Geese, Blume didn’t have to manufacture that instability. The Brooklyn quartet — “a real, real, real, real band,” he says — had spent months writing, demoing, and testing songs on the road, sometimes playing new material the night it was written. Some songs that would appear on Getting Killed had already been recorded in full, but the band still had not found what it wanted.
“You’ll see a lot more broken amps than shiny new ones. Geese’s Getting Killed broke a lot of my gear.”
Blume is wary of taking credit for the record’s vertiginous momentum. If Getting Killed sounds as though the band is holding on for dear life, he says, that is how it felt making it. “More so than some kind of crazy production technique or some insane gear manifesto, what made that record was capturing what was happening with them at that time authentically and not adding anything to it.”
He compares the approach to Steve Albini’s recordings, where drums sound less like an ideal assembled from studio wisdom than like drums heard by someone in the room. With Geese, the choices of the players remained paramount.
“There wasn’t any music tech involved that anybody couldn’t find and use themselves,” he says. “It was a performance-based thing.” Or, more simply: “That record’s kind of anti-production.”
Image: Evan Tetreault for MusicTech
The evidence remains scattered around Putnam Hill. “You’ll see a lot more broken amps than shiny new ones,” Blume says as we descend from the kitchen to the control and live rooms. “That record broke a lot of my gear” – including three of his guitars, to be exact, just to nail the solo in Bow Down.
Putnam Hill was designed to get out of the way of performances like those. He rounds a corner to a narrow hallway, whose chief function appears to be storing instruments, and points to an audio panel built into the wall. “There’s a shit ton of hallway on that album,” he says of Getting Killed. Everything from the passageways to the emerald couch upstairs is wired for recording. In the live room, a whiteboard proffers the operating ethos in blue marker: “Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.”
Blume built Putnam Hill in a former live-work space near USC after working from home began dictating what he could make. Recording more musicians and instruments simultaneously required more space. “I really just need a bigger room,” he remembers deciding. “I don’t need fancy gear.”
Image: Evan Tetreault for MusicTech
No single studio team understood his vision, so he hired the electricians, builders, and designer separately. Daniel McNeill, the engineer who still works beside him on every record, ran wiring beneath the floor and helped pack sand beneath the speakers. “Our blood, sweat, and tears is literally in the damn walls,” Blume says.
The finished studio does, in fact, contain plenty of fancy gear, much of it custom-built in Putnam Hill’s signature green. But every detail is designed to make the technology recede. Its 96 inputs and outputs keep hardware permanently connected and labelled inside the computer. A QR code supplies templates for Ableton, Logic, and FL Studio, so a laptop producer can use the analogue equipment without operating a patch bay. “A laptop producer and a tape producer should be equally as comfortable here,” Blume says.
Even its most bespoke instrument was created for immediacy. Blume and inventor Leon Dewan built the analogue Wandertone synthesizer around favourite synth sounds from SOPHIE, Gesaffelstein, Yeezus, Quincy Jones, and more. Every circuit and symbol was custom-designed; there is no text or LED readout. A “chaos circuit” sends a released note drifting unpredictably toward another. Blume has already put it to work on albums by Fcukers and Show Me the Body.
Image: Evan Tetreault for MusicTech
For all that engineering, Blume says nine consecutive albums made at Putnam Hill were recorded without a click, fixed tempo, or grid.
“I wanted this place to not ever feel like you can’t do anything,” he says. “‘Cause I know how that felt.”
The credits accumulating under the name Kenneth Blume bear out that sense of limitlessness: new albums by Denzel Curry and Show Me The Body, creative direction for jazz collective FATHERS, new singles with Wednesday and Chris Lake and Chris Lorenzo, and something new from IDLES, whose members are unpacking instruments and poring over the day’s tracking list as we head back upstairs.
“Okay, let’s begin!” Blume says.
“So it begins…” Talbot growls as the two clap hands and embrace.
Image: Evan Tetreault for MusicTech
Those expanding credits, however, have yet to settle the question of what Kenneth Blume sounds like. Another album made at Putnam Hill may complicate the answer further: the follow-up to his 2022 solo debut Louie, which is completed and due out in 2027. It came together at Blume’s “lowest point” and is “really sad, and really live”. It is about healing, he says, and not what anyone expects from him. But “I didn’t really have a choice.”
Creating it placed Blume on the other side of his own philosophy. After a career spent helping artists discover what they could not yet articulate, he relied on collaborators to do the same for him. “It’s definitely the first time I feel like I’ve truly been produced,” he says. “They pulled something out of me that I didn’t pull out of myself.”
Words: Andrea Domanick / @calamity.dre
Photography: Evan Tetreault
Location: Putnam Hill / @theputnamhill
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Soundtrap adds third-party VST3 and AU effects to collaborative projects
Soundtrap now supports third-party effects plugins in its collaborative music production app. The update lets you use effects already installed on your computer while working on a project with someone elsewhere. The point of Soundtrap’s new plugin support is that your collaborator can hear the processed track without having the same plugin. That could save [...]
View post: Soundtrap adds third-party VST3 and AU effects to collaborative projects

Classical Reviews September 2026Explore this month’s new classical releases, featuring Anne-Sophie Mutter, Joe Hisaishi, John Holiday, and more, with fresh takes on classical music and timeless traditions.

Will the HomeView be Apple’s first smart home success?Apple will announce a new smart home hub on Tuesday called the HomeView, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen There have been multiple reports that Apple was working on a new smart home product, but now it seems the product has a name and a launch date. Gurman […]

Littelfuse Announces Retirement of the EZ80Although the demise of the Zilog Z80 processor has long been predicted, it would seem that this moment has finally arrived. The owner of the Zilog name – Littelfuse – recently sent out PCN ZAC26-0074, notifying customers that they will be taking final orders for the eZ80 and all other microcontroller lines that they currently own.
Over at Mouser, eZ80 parts have correspondingly all been marked as “End of Life”. This comes a few years after the original Z80 and its peripherals were discontinued, with the eZ80 still being an alternative until now.
Any potential sellers will have to put in their orders today, with orders still accepted until December 21 2026, with final deliveries taking place throughout 2027 as Littelfuse winds down its MCU manufacturing. This means that for commercial customers are least this is pretty much the end of the road for any circuit that still uses the eZ80 or similar.
Many of us have fondness for the Z80, which also has led to a potential way that the Z80 can live on. This includes both the many open source cores that are compatible with the Z80, as well as real silicon courtesy of the TinyTapeout project.
Thanks to [Techokami] for the tip.

Luxora Audio Corella Summing MixerAdvanced Analog Inspired Summing & Bus Processing. Corella is a high-end channel-strip plugin that brings analog-inspired character and modern DSP precision to every channel in your mix. Each instance processes its own channel independently there's no signal combining or communication between instances. It's the consistency of that circuit character across your whole session that creates the cohesion of a real analog summing console. Three Color Circuits, Two Signal Paths. Corella's color section consists of three dedicated processing circuits: HARM runs in parallel with the dry signal, adding weight, presence and harmonic character while preserving the original signal. P-COMP uses parallel compression to add density and body while maintaining the openness of the direct signal. X-SAT is a series saturation stage that introduces progressively richer harmonics and deeper analog character as drive increases. Console EQ. Corella uses a classic console-style fixed-frequency EQ architecture: 90 Hz Shelf — Weight and body. 250 Hz Bell — Add body or reduce congestion. 3 kHz Bell — Presence and definition. 8 kHz Shelf — Clarity and definition. 16 kHz Air Shelf — Opens the top end without becoming harsh. Bus Dynamics — Glue, Punch, Density. COMP is a stereo-linked soft-knee bus compressor designed to bring the mix together. PUNCH shapes the transient response, allowing the mix to become sharper or softer. The center position remains neutral. DENSITY uses parallel compression to make low-level detail more consistent while retaining the character of the original signal. A Stereo Stage With a Mono Foundation. Corella's stereo section uses a true M/S architecture. The signal is encoded, processed and decoded again. WIDTH controls the stereo image from mono up to twice its natural width. MID and SIDE allow independent control over the center and side information. MONO LOW collects frequencies below the selected crossover point into the center, improving low-frequency stability and mono compatibility. Oversampling Up to 64x. Corella's nonlinear processing stages operate within the oversampled processing block to reduce aliasing and improve processing accuracy. Available settings: Off · 2x · 4x ·. 8x · 16x · 32x · 64x. Latency is accurately reported to the host at every setting. Read More

Saylor teases Strategy Bitcoin buying after ending September with STRC buybacksInvestors will have to wait an extra day to find out if and how much Strategy added to its Bitcoin treasury in the first week of October.

New Music Critique of Alexa KateContact: alexakatemusic@gmail.com

Web: alexakate.com

Seeking: Label, Booking, Management

Style: Pop

“The most important thing to me is that connection,” Alexa Kate says on her website. “Music creates a space where people can feel like they fit in. I’ve always just wanted to make people feel less alone.”

That connection is apparent on the songs she submitted. With “Good for Long,” she finds a way make herself vulnerable with some delicately expressive vocals and lyrics, before revealing the catchiest of choruses.

“The Aftermath” is less reliant on traditional pop structure, preferring to build a mood that fully envelops the listener. That songwriting dexterity hints at great things to come.The post New Music Critique of Alexa Kate first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Pointless Audio offers PortaTwin, a FREE Tascam Porta Two-inspired cassette plugin
Pointless Audio offers PortaTwin, a free cassette channel strip inspired by the 1987 Tascam Porta Two Ministudio. So, yet another tape emulation has arrived in what feels like a sea of them lately. I’m all for tape emulations, but I feel like there’s hardly anything new to offer in that segment of the plugin market. [...]
View post: Pointless Audio offers PortaTwin, a FREE Tascam Porta Two-inspired cassette plugin

Variety of Sound releases FREE edgeRunner retrograde analog processor for Windows.
Variety of Sound releases edgeRunner retrograde, a FREE analog processor plugin for Windows. It’s always a good day for Windows users when Variety of Sound releases a new plugin. You’re almost guaranteed to tick every box; it comes from a trusted developer with a history of high-quality releases built on a solid blend of technical [...]
View post: Variety of Sound releases FREE edgeRunner retrograde analog processor for Windows.

WeissKlang reveal KlangFormer 2 WeissKlang have just introduced a new and improved version of the plug-in that pairs up with their V13 modelling microphone.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella says AI models need an ‘emergency brake’In a Saturday morning post, Microsoft's CEO wrote that it’s time “to step back and assess the trust architecture” of AI.

CRSSD Lab has been hosting music-making workshops for years — why?It’s 32°C in San Diego, and CRSSD festival is brimming with short shorts, tank tops, sunglasses and ice-cold beers. The last place you might want to be is inside a black tent full of synths, screens and drum machines. But that’s where I am, at CRSSD Lab, and I’m not alone.
Festival-goers wander in and out of the Roland and Chapter One booths, peering at the Juno-X and a TR-1000 on the table; they flick through vinyl records and listen to them on a Technics SL-1200 and headphones. By 3 pm, a stack of vinyl, each wrapped in a paper bag, is already waiting for attendees to come retrieve their purchase at the end of the fest.
Vinyl crates at Chapter One Records’ booth at the CRSSD Festival. Image: Izzy Hassan
CRSSD Lab has been running for over eight years. The Lab is a tiny section in the centre of the CRSSD dance music festival at Waterfront Park, with the fest hosted twice a year in the spring and fall. Roland and Chapter One have become mainstays on the lineup, with the former returning twice a year to host workshops and artist demos, and the latter being a pop-up record store with local DJs performing intermittently throughout the weekend.
MusicTech already spoke with Roland and Chapter One in 2023 to learn about how CRSSD Lab operates. This time, I’m here to learn why the two brands keep coming back, and whether attendees are really having an “a-ha!” moment at CRSSD Lab.
“Who else do you see out here getting one-on-one with their end users?” says Mar Keith Anthony, Roland’s global brand relations manager. He’s right: Roland is the only music tech brand on-site, and has been for several years. Roland hosts similar pop-ups at Movement in Detroit and Stagecoach, the country festival that happens on the Coachella site each April.
“We’re creating and fostering collaboration, and teaching skills at the same time,” he explains. “People don’t know how simple music-making tools are these days. People walk in like, ‘Oh, I don’t make music,’ and I’m like, ‘I can literally show you in five minutes how to do it!’ That’s our goal. We’re just trying to inspire people to pick up instruments and make music.”
Roland booth at CRSSD Festival. Image: Izzy Hassan
Today, Roland has connected synths, drum machines, guitars and effects to Ableton Live. Attendees can come to the booth, learn about the gear and software, record clips into the DAW, and let the next person come through and lay down a new part. There’s also a Roland DJ-202 in the setup for those who just want to try mixing some pre-selected tracks. The area never seems to be bustling, but there’s frequently a gaggle of pals tinkering around and chatting to brand reps.
But is CRSSD Lab really having an impact? Are people truly leaving the festival and picking up Roland products when they get home?
“We get tons of feedback,” Anthony says. “A lot of the time, parents will come and say, ‘Oh, my kids want to get into music production, maybe this is an easy way for them to get started.’ This is also an opportunity for users to talk to us about products that are out. One guy came today and said, ‘Hey, if I come by early enough tomorrow, can I bring my laptop and record the samples into my computer using this machine?’”
Chapter One’s Max Coletto says his team sees a similar effect. Although the reason for the label and record store’s involvement seems obvious — to sell more records — there are a few other benefits to participating in CRSSD Lab. Namely, the Chapter One team are often giving dance fans their first experience with vinyl.
“It’s definitely a good feeder to our community in L.A,” says Coletto of CRSSD Lab’s impact. “We see really young first-timers—people who are getting into the electronic music—and we see 50 to 60-year-olds who have been listening to this music their whole lives… It’s always a nice little memory for them. It’s not just about getting the record, it’s about interacting with them. It’s a whole experience.”
Chapter One sells around 80 per cent of its stock at CRSSD Lab, from $5 dance singles to more expensive classic albums (Daft Punk’s //Random Access Memories// is one such record that I see a customer checking out while I’m there). The team is also finding out more about its target market.
“I’m definitely noticing a younger audience,” says Coletto. “I’m noticing an audience that doesn’t necessarily know specific artists or labels, but there’s a huge amount of curiosity because they’ve dipped their toes into this underground electronic music, and they’re really excited to learn. They ask about local labels and what artists to check out. There’s just a general curiosity among the younger crowd that’s really exciting because you can tell there’s an increased demand for this kind of slightly underground, left-of-centre music.”
DJ spinning vinyl at Chapter One Records’ booth at the CRSSD Festival. Image: Izzy Hassan
For Roland, its continued attendance is also crucial in better understanding the dance music fans that exist among its sprawling music production audience.
“Coming [here for] years is really about making sure the fans know that we’re part of the community as well,” says Anthony. “We’re invested in the continued creation of this style and music. It’s important being out in the elements like this. No one can speak to the products better than someone that works directly for the brand.”
Anthony and I go on to talk about the new Roland store in New York City, which is the brand’s first flagship store in the US. Much like at CRSSD, the store isn’t just about selling more gear, but a focused attempt to lure more people into synths and samplers by giving them valuable hands-on time with the gear. Ultimately, it’s about turning more music fans into music creators — and customers.
“We’re creatives, and we feel like music is the heartbeat of everything that we do,” explains Anthony. “So therefore, for us, that’s what we’re passionate about: creating more music makers.”
 
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