Get 30% off u-he Repro at Plugin Boutique for a limited time
You can now get 30% off the u-he Repro at Plugin Boutique for a limited time. Repro (includes Repro 1 and Repro 5) combines the sound of two legendary synths by Sequential: the Pro-One and the Prophet 5. Plugin Boutique’s 30% discount means you can buy Repro for $104 (usually $149) until the offer ends [...]
View post: Get 30% off u-he Repro at Plugin Boutique for a limited time

Charli XCX has invested in consumer tech brand NothingNothing – the consumer tech brand behind a series of market-shaking smartphones and ChatGPT-integrated over-ear headphones – has announced Charli XCX as its latest investor and first Global Brand Ambassador.
Though details of the partnership are minimal at this time, a post made on Nothing’s socials shows Charli wearing a pair of Nothing (a) over-ear headphones and ear (3) earbuds, and holding a (4a) pro smartphone.
“This isn’t a traditional endorsement deal,” the brand writes. “Charli is investing in Nothing and helping shape what we build from here. The campaign today is just the start. Charli is the first of more to come.”

Charli xcx is joining Nothing as our latest Shareholder and our first Global Brand Ambassador.
This isn't a traditional endorsement deal. Charli is investing in Nothing and helping shape what we build from here.
The campaign today is just the start. Charli is the first of more… pic.twitter.com/kTMorITK4N
— Carl Pei (@getpeid) May 12, 2026

And in a true display of hospitality, Nothing says it put its new guest and shareholder Charli XCX in a room for five days straight to test the battery of its Headphone (a) model. “It lasted the whole time,” the brand confidently writes.

“Our first Global Brand Ambassador and latest shareholder, Charli XCX brings her genre-crossing instincts to our new partnership,” the brand says. 
“Together, we’re changing how things are done – with music and tech for a new generation.”
“When I’m creating, I’m always thinking about how my work will be experienced out in the world and I love how Nothing headphones sound and are designed,” says Charli XCX [via Rolling Stone]. “Its ethos of prioritising creatives is really something I look for when working with a partner.”
“I’ve been a fan of Charli’s work for years, and what struck me when we started talking was how much we agreed on,” adds Nothing co-founder and CEO Carl Pei. 
Credit: Nothing
“The tech industry has spent a decade making everything quieter, more minimal, more monotonous. Charli has spent her career going the other way in pop. We want Nothing to feel more like that.”
Other music artists who are investors in Nothing include the one of the biggest artists in the world by Spotify monthly listeners, The Weeknd, and legendary DJ trio Swedish House Mafia.
Nothing has made waves in the consumer tech world since its foundation in 2020. Last year, we got our hands on the brand’s Nothing (1) headphones, commending their class-leading battery life and alluring looks and giving them a solid 7/10 rating.
Learn more about the new partnership at nothing.tech.
The post Charli XCX has invested in consumer tech brand Nothing appeared first on MusicTech.

Cavitation Fractures is a new FREE fluid-dynamics distortion plugin for macOS
Unusable Engineering has released Cavitation Fractures, a free distortion plugin for macOS inspired by fluid dynamics. I love distortions in general, and I especially enjoy trying new ones that don’t follow the standard overdrive/clipping playbook. Cavitation Fractures is one of those. It’s different but not weird in a way that you don’t know how to [...]
View post: Cavitation Fractures is a new FREE fluid-dynamics distortion plugin for macOS

Reason 14 now available With the launch of the latest version, Reason has been treated to a visual design overhaul, gained some powerful new sequencing capabilities, kitted out with new built-in effects and more. 

Get 92% off the Solid State Logic Fusion Bundle at Plugin Boutique (limited-time offer)
You can now get 92% off the Solid State Logic Fusion Bundle at Plugin Boutique in a limited-time offer. The Solid State Logic Fusion Bundle delivers the core elements of the SSL Fusion analogue 2U rack processor. SSL Fusion Bundle includes five distinct plugins, each taken from a section of the hardware unit. Fusion HF [...]
View post: Get 92% off the Solid State Logic Fusion Bundle at Plugin Boutique (limited-time offer)

Black Lion Audio introduce the Auteur 8DAT Black Lion Audio’s latest delivers an eight-channel preamp and master clock unit that can be used to expand any interface with spare ADAT I/O.

Ranking the Neil Young Albums from His First DecadeAuthor Daniel de Visé walks on through the first 10 studio albums (and one live album) that make up Neil Young's first Decade (more or less). Where does Harvest rank against Rust Never Sleeps? And how do relatively underground releases like Zuma and On The Beach fit in? Let's take a Journey Through the Past.

Finally, texts between Android and iPhone users can be end-to-end encryptedGoogle had urged Apple for years to support RCS texting to make communication between each company's devices more seamless.

A Song That Changed My Life: Friko on Frank Ocean, Cursive, Broken Social Scene and Kamasi WashingtonA Song or(four) that Changed My Life: Niko Kapetan: Frank Ocean’s “White Ferrari,” Bailey Minzenberger: Cursive’s “What Have I Done,” David Fuller: Broken Social Scene’s “Guilty Cubicles,” and Korgan Robb: Kamasi Washington’s “Truth.”

The Band Members: Niko Kapetan, lead vocals, guitar; Bailey Minzenberger, drums; David Fuller, bass guitar; Korgan Robb, guitar.

The Storytellers: Niko Kapetan, Bailey Minzenberger, David Fuller; bass, Korgan Robb.

The Songs: Stripped down and spectral, Frank Ocean’s layered vocal performance on his career-defining deep-cut “White Ferrari” rests above sparse soundscapes with a fragmented narrative that folds the listener into a free-flow state of winding introspection. Its experimental structure and haunting, minimalist production brought a unique form of alt-R&B to the mainstream, replacing the traditional quick-fix “hook” with lingering, emotional suspension.

Cursive's slow-burner “What Have I Done” utilizes still, echoing guitars that build toward a clamorous crescendo, where earnest vocals break and call out for an internal reckoning. The track’s unflinching way of presenting discontent and malaise serves as a poignant litmus test for the era, offering an additional tool within the post-hardcore arsenal — revealing how a voice can serve as a” cutter” just as much as a distorted, dissonant guitar chord.

Emotive artistry thrives within the sparse textures of Broken Social Scene’s ambient lo-fi instrumental “Guilty Cubicles.” Crafted with a soothing guitar set alongside a meditative rhythm, the track creates a hypnotic lull where audiophiles swim within a slipstream of nocturnal nostalgia. The melancholic mood-piece served as a foundational atmospheric statement for the indie underground, proving that moving storytelling could emerge purely through texture, repetition and sonic drift.Where Fuller found weight through minimalism, Robb discovered it through scale and accumulation. Kamasi Washington’s massive, complex jazz composition “Truth,” commissioned by the Whitney Museum and built around a two-chord vamp, improvisationally expands outward, creating an immense music mural. The climactic track, where five distinct melodies of the preceding movements converge into a Harmony of Difference, showcases how interweaving melodic lyrical threads can layer and converge to create a sonic suite of collective transcendence.

Though emerging from vastly different musical lineages and stylistic forms, each track constructs an immersive emotional world through texture, tonal depth, and atmospheric composition — a philosophy that closely mirrors Friko’s own approach to creating music.

The Background: Arising from Chicago’s Hallogallo DIY underground — a scene named after a track by the motorik Krautrock band Neu! and galvanized by a handmade fanzine of the same name — Friko began taking shape just prior to the 2020 lockdown. Originally formed by vocalist and guitarist Niko Kapetan and drummer Bailey Minzenberger, the band fine-tuned their expansive, indie-rock songwriting, ultimately demoing and self-recording what would become their breakout release, We’ve Been, Where We Go From Here.

As the world reopened and live music returned, Friko expanded into a quartet with the addition of bassist David Fuller and guitarist Korgan Robb, allowing the band’s cinematic tendencies to fully emerge, widening in scope and emotional depth. With the recent release of their sophomore album Something Woth Waiting For, the band further deepens these creative throughlines, pushing their expansive songwriting further by leaning into the power of patience. By treating atmosphere as architecture, Friko’s new music creates emotional  spaces where memory, abstraction, and nostalgic longing are held.

The Story: To understand Friko is to understand the emotional spaces they build from the music that shaped them.

Across four distinct listening experiences —ranging from deep-alt R&B to expansive jazz murals — a shared sonic language emerges. It is a language built on intense immersion. Each of these tracks arrives with its own sense of being.

Niko Kapetan’s entry point arrived in high school while driving late at night through the Midwestern highways between Chicago and Champaign-Urbana. In the maze of vast cornfields, Frank Ocean’s “White Ferrari” revealed its full weight. “I like the way the song stitched together,” Niko says. “The hip-hop and rap elements mixed with the indie elements... that’s what impacted me at first.” Beyond the genre-bending, it was the structural freedom that stuck. “I wanted to make music that wasn’t just a song in the classic sense. I wanted to lean into that sense of rambling vocals and the idea that a song could be very abstract.”

While Niko found power in fragmented narratives, Bailey Minzenberger found it in the heavy pull of emotional memory. Hearing Cursive’s “What Have I Done” in middle school, the song’s existential themes hit with premature, profound gravity.

“I’m holistically a big fan of melancholic music,” Minzenberger explains. “A piece of music doesn't necessarily have to be sad to feel melancholic. For me, melancholy is just feeling every edge of an emotion.” The track’s slow-burning arc and lead singer Tim Kasher’s frayed delivery provided an unintentional outline for Friko’s own cathartic crescendos. “The lyric ‘I spent the best years of my life waiting on the best years of my life’ is so potent. It captures that feeling of always chasing something just out of reach.”

For David Fuller, the formative moment was Broken Social Scene’s “Guilty Cubicles”— a three-minute ambient instrumental that appeared almost by accident while studying film. “It taught me that a band can be so much more than just a band with one sound; they can do anything they want,” Fuller says. That realization expanded to how he hears space today as a sonic open field. “It blew this whole door open. It’s a meditative song that has grown with me, or I’ve grown around it.”

Korgan Robb also found his throughline of pure instrumentalism in the expansive convergence of jazz. Kamasi Washington’s “Truth,” a thirteen-minute epic composition built on a simple two-chord vamp, showed him how five movements could interweave into one final song on Washington’s Harmony of Difference.

“I was really into bebop and trying to learn how to play jazz, and then this song comes along with a string section, horn section, and two drummers,” Robb recalls. “It helped me focus on what I love about jazz — how those layers are built. It’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.”

This same commitment to layering — the idea of stacking distinct emotional threads of varying until they accumulate into a complete world — is the philosophy that anchors Friko’s current work on Something Worth Waiting For. The new tracks draw elements from each band member’s emotive archive, creating a unified soundscape where Kapetan’s abstraction, Minzenberger’s catharsis, Fuller’s submerged textures, and Robb’s improvisational phrasing overlap into a singular atmospheric soundscape.

“On this record, we were exploring patience — not being afraid to sit in something,” Minzenberger summarizes. “Things don’t need to change constantly; it’s okay to just inhabit a moment. We’re pushing ourselves to sit in that space, just like the songs that changed us.”

Photo Credit: Adam PowellThe post A Song That Changed My Life: Friko on Frank Ocean, Cursive, Broken Social Scene and Kamasi Washington first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Price predictions 5/11: SPX, DXY, BTC, ETH, XRP, BNB, SOL, DOGE, HYPE, ADABitcoin looks set for another blockbuster week, but potential resistance at $84,000 could complicate the rally. Will altcoin consolidation continue?

It’s a Water Clock, Jim, But Not as We Know It — It Has DigitsGuess what time it is– that’s right, clock time! It’s always clock time, and when it’s clock time at Hackaday the weirder the better. So, how about a water clock that’s not actually a water clock? The water here has nothing to do with timekeeping, but is what’s driving the display. Fair to say that [Strange Inventions] is living up to the name of his YouTube channel.
You can get the idea from the header image: each digit is formed by a fifteen-segment display made up of glass bottles. A stepper-driven peristaltic pump and some membrane-pump boosters fills the bottles as needed with dyed water, while emptying is accomplished simply by having a servo dump the water into a trough. It’s an interesting, albeit messy, way to generate a display.
It wasn’t the original idea– well, the bottles were the original concept, but flipping them was not. Dumping the bottles has the advantage of not needing oodles of pumps or taking five minutes to sequentially fill and drain the bottles at each digit. The linkage to get the servo to flip all nine bottles in one go took some troubleshooting– we can relate, since the physical half of such projects usually is the hard part– but after many modifications the 3D printed mechanism worked, and we think the results are worth it.
If you’re looking for the other kind of water clock, we featured one of those before, too. This one is also of ancient style, but makes use of modern electronics. It occurs to us that if one was really, really ambitious, they could expand this [Strange] project into a very damp flip-dot style display.

Transfigured Orchestra Vol 3: Cinema Brass from Sonora Cinematic The third instalment in Sonora Cinematic's Transfigured Orchestra series delivers a versatile collection of brass sounds that range from “quiet, intimate tones to bold, majestic textures”.

Revealed Recordings Revealed Serum 2 Melodic Leads Vol. 1Revealed Serum 2 Melodic Leads Vol. 1 is a collection of 50 presets and MIDI, built for producers seeking the highest standard in melodic lead design. Inside, you'll discover a variety of expressive sounds, from lush soaring tones to warm, evolving textures that stand out in the mix with depth, polished clarity, and emotion. You'll also find 50 original MIDI files crafted to bring each lead to life, giving you powerful starting points for your own hooks, themes, and anthems. Among every preset having modwheel assignments, each preset is assigned all eight macro controls, providing quick modulation options to customize and evolve your riffs. With Serum 2 Melodic Leads Vol. 1, you'll have a suite of source sounds for anthemic themes across Melodic Techno, Trance, and beyond. Reveal Yourself. Revealed Serum 2 Melodic Leads Vol. 1 - Details 1 Main Preset Category: LEAD (50). Revealed Serum 2 Melodic Leads Vol. 1 (MIDI) - Details MIDI (50). 50 presets, 50 MIDI Core synthesizer patch mapping and programming All presets assigned intuitive modwheel parameters All presets assigned all eight macro controls for easy tweaking and multiple sound variations. Preset format(s): .SerumPack (Full Bank) Note: Presets Require Full Retail Version of Xfer Record's Serum 2 version v2.1.2 or later Approx. 7.85MB compressed .zip download. Read More

Searches for wired earphones are up 88% – what’s behind the resurgence?Once upon a time, untangling wired headphones was regarded as a gruelling, Sisyphean task; put them in your bag for a second, and the earbud gods would weave them into a fresh, inconceivably challenging knot. Solidified by the death of the headphone jack, the dawn of the wireless earbud forever saved music lovers from the arduous chore – or so we thought.
Last year, The Guardian claimed that the ‘white wire’ of old school headphones has unexpectedly become the ultimate symbol of ‘digital fatigue’. As the world becomes increasingly AI-ridden and digital, many are winding back the clock and finding comfort in simpler forms of entertainment. The shift comes as a way of rebelling against an era of ever-updating iPhones, instead embracing practical tech that was built to last.

READ MORE: The best headphones for music producers, DJs and musicians to buy right now

If you hear anyone discussing ‘going analogue’, they might be fishing out their old iPod, or opting for a film camera instead of snapping smartphone photos. The resurgence of wired earphones is just another way of ‘going analogue’ – and according to a new study by Digital PR consultancy Cupid PR, Google searches for ‘wired headphones’ have spiked to around 2.6 million in the past month.
The figure is an 88% rise from May 2025, suggesting that the shift is more than just a passing ‘nostalgia’ trend. Take the vinyl revival – some considered the 2022 boom to be a ‘trend’, with the year marking vinyl’s highest number of sales since 1990, but vinyl has continued to draw in music fans. While 2022’s record-breaking year saw 5.5 million units shifted, Forbes reports that the market surpassed $1 billion in 2025.
Vinyl boom aside, the shift from wireless back to wired headphones is heavily rooted in swapping out expensive tech for something affordable and reliable. One only needs to consult the price of Apple’s latest AirPods Pro 3 model, a pricy £219, and then compare it to £19 wired EarPods. Back in the day, those EarPods would have also been included as a free accessory along with the purchase of an iPhone up until 2020, as well as any iPod until 2022… just another monetary factor to have you longing for the old days.

Alongside the cost, wired headphones can also come with a level of security for people who tend to lose wireless headphones. Rather than a separate earphone charging case, the security of a wire means you can keep your earphones attached to your phone. And – as frustrating as a wire can be – it’s easy to find a long, winding wire loose in your bag.
In another sense, while wireless headphones removed the pain of tangling wires, it introduced a new struggle: remembering to charge your earphones. There’s nothing more mortifying than sitting down on a long-haul flight and discovering you forgot to charge up your earbuds (trust me), but wired headphones are always ready to just plug in and go.
There’s also the issue of making sure the Bluetooth connection even works. Again, plugging in wired headphones instantly locks you into your tunes – but working out how to pair a set of new headphones can be a palaver. It also must be said that there is something so uniquely infuriating about shifting the Bluetooth connection between devices…
Plenty of high-profile actors are also being vocal about their frustration with wireless headphones, which is undoubtedly having some impact on the cultural shift back to wires. In a 2025 SubwayTakes interview, actor Zoë Kravitz said: “Bluetooth does not work… [Bluetooth] is ruining important moments.”
However, there is also something quite chic about the nostalgic wire, if you ask Daniel Rodgers, British Vogue’s the fashion news editor. Speaking to The Guardian in December, he called wired earbuds a “real, stylable accessory” nowadays. “[It says] I’m very effortless, I’m very nonchalant…” he explained.
It also doubles as a badge of “opting out” of modern tech, visibly rebelling against the tech giants keen for you to splash hundreds on subtle, wireless earbuds. Rodgers notes that the visibility of wired headphone also helps people seem less rude: “They’re visible in a way that AirPods aren’t. There is a sense of ‘do not disturb.’”
It’s been reported that other concerns surrounding wireless headphones include safety – the possible negative effects of continuous Bluetooth use near the head – and reduced audio quality.
It’s unclear whether everyone will embrace the wires once again, it’s clearly a trend that’s here to stay. While music producers have always preferred the plug-in and play approach, it’s worth taking a punt and seeing if you prefer the wired life.
“This is not just a nostalgia trend,” says Sophie Rhone, founder of Cupid PR. When ‘wired headphones’ is getting 2.6 million searches in a month, and ‘wired earphones’ is seeing 712,000 searches with an 88% year-on-year rise, that tells us this is bigger than one product name or one viral moment. It suggests wired audio is moving back into consumer consideration as a wider category.”
Check out MusicTech’s list of best wired headphones under $500.
The post Searches for wired earphones are up 88% – what’s behind the resurgence? appeared first on MusicTech.

Dua Lipa sues Samsung for $15M over unauthorized use of her image on TV boxesElectronics giant is accused of using Dua Lipa's photo on TV packaging without her permission
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