NoiseAsh offers Backs EQ as a free download for a limited time
NoiseAsh offers Backs EQ as a limited-time free download for macOS and Windows. The EQ is normally priced at $90 but is currently available at no cost. Backs EQ combines Baxandall-style curves with a few modern twists. The main idea here, though, is that the workflow is straightforward enough that you could get around it [...]
View post: NoiseAsh offers Backs EQ as a free download for a limited time

Tame Impala isn’t worried about AI music: “I’m one of the people that doesn’t really give a s**t”Few conversations have dominated the music industry this year quite like artificial intelligence. Sure, the increasing prevalence of AI artists like the Velvet Sundown – powered by AI platforms like Suno – is a cause for concern, but should we really be that worried?
AI sceptics have voiced concerns over the increasing number of AI artists on streaming platforms like Spotify, and how they may be diminishing the reach of real human artists. There are also concerns over whether copyright laws are being bypassed by some of the biggest AI companies in order to train their models.
But not everyone is all that concerned. Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, for example, says he’s “not worried”.

READ MORE: Native Instruments’ Kontakt 8 marked its “biggest update in years” – and you can now get it for nearly half price

In its current state, AI is exceptionally good at creating music based on styles on which it is trained. But as Parker explains, raw, gritty, imperfect tracks are where humans will continue to excel.
“I do feel like the music that I hear is getting more and more perfect, and more pristine,” he tells The Hot Hits and Hit Network.
“Production’s getting better, computers are getting better. AI is the elephant in the room. So for me I just like making music that’s a bit dirty, a bit scungy. That’s kind of what I want to listen to. I’m not sure if it’s because of the looming possibility of this AI thing, I don’t know.” 
He concludes: “I’m one of the people who doesn’t really give a shit [about AI]. I’m not worried.”
It’s been a busy year for Kevin Parker, owing mostly to the hype surrounding Orchid, his brand Telepathic Instruments’ first synth. Following a sellout second drop in May, the synth eventually got its global release in September, and was the centrepiece of a popup store at this year’s ADE (Amsterdam Dance Event).
We were lucky enough to get our hands on Orchid in October, and not at all to our surprise, loved it so much we scored it a 9/10 in our review.
Learn more about Orchid at Telepathic Instruments.

The post Tame Impala isn’t worried about AI music: “I’m one of the people that doesn’t really give a s**t” appeared first on MusicTech.

Native Instruments’ Kontakt 8 marked its “biggest update in years” – and you can now get it for nearly half priceCyber Weekend may be over, but there are still plenty of great deals on offer over at Thomann in celebration of the festive period, including a generous saving on Native Instruments’ Kontakt 8.
This latest version of NI’s treasured sampling platform was described as its “biggest update in years” by us at MusicTech, and received an 8/10 in our review. We noted its updated interface and new additions such as Tools elevated Kontakt to an “idea generator”.
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Now over at Thomann, you can get 49 percent off Kontakt 8, knocking its price down to just £133. As part of its Tools collection, users can experiment with Chords and Phrases to craft harmonic foundations and riffs, or make intricate, evolving melodies with Patterns – an arpeggiator and polyphonic step sequencer hybrid that gives users control over each note, rhythm, and layer.
Kontakt 8 also introduced Leap, described as “an ultra-fast and playful way to play and manipulate loops”, and Conflux, “the first in a new breed of Kontakt instruments for experimental sound design” that lets you layer organic and synthetic samples. You can also add dynamic movement to static sounds in real time, with original PPG wavetables and techniques like FM, phase modulation, and ring modulation.

READ MORE: SLAB: the first hardware controller for Serato Studio has arrived – here’s everything you need to know

Overall, Kontakt 8 offers a comprehensive instrument collection including over 900 orchestral, acoustic, band, synth, and vintage sounds. Find out more in the video below:

As we approach the end of the year, you can find plenty of our top 2025 picks for the best plugins, DJ gifts, studio gear, and much more through our guides – curated by our team of reviewers and writers.
You can shop this deal now over at Thomann, or view more deals curated by MusicTech.
The post Native Instruments’ Kontakt 8 marked its “biggest update in years” – and you can now get it for nearly half price appeared first on MusicTech.

Small Venues in Small Cities: A Playbook for Building CommunityIn this post, we offer strategies for live music venues, promoters, and festivals in smaller markets around how to strengthen and develop the local community rather than focus on growth.
The post Small Venues in Small Cities: A Playbook for Building Community appeared first on Hypebot.

TonalMark releases Analog Glow, a FREE analog-style saturation plugin for macOS
We’ve got something here we don’t come across too often: a Mac-only plugin. Analog Glow is a new saturation plugin from TonalMark, available in AU and VST3 formats for macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon). You can download the .pkg installer directly from Gumroad. If you want to support the developer, you can enter any amount [...]
View post: TonalMark releases Analog Glow, a FREE analog-style saturation plugin for macOS

Your Morning Coffee Podcast: Congress’ Radio Loophole, Spotify Wrapped, & Suno/UdioEpisode 279 of Jay Gilbert and Mike Etchart's podcast Your Morning Coffee: Weekly News for the New Music Business is available now.
The post Your Morning Coffee Podcast: Congress’ Radio Loophole, Spotify Wrapped, & Suno/Udio appeared first on Hypebot.

Erica Synths reveal the Xenodrive Erica Synths’ latest collaboration with renowned DSP effects developer 112dB is said to be capable of everything from “nuanced harmonic enhancement to total sonic destruction”.

VirtualDJ 2026: new AI assistant for track organisation and a revamped FX engineAtomix Development has unveiled the latest version of its flagship DJ software, VirtualDJ 2026, bringing a number of new features and upgrades for users.
AI is front and centre in the new features for 2026, with a new AI prompt folder, essentially your very own AI assistant inside VirtualDJ which can, via user prompts, offer formatted lists of track recommendations, complete with an explanation for each track, all ready to be dragged to a deck and played.

READ MORE: SLAB: the first hardware controller for Serato Studio has arrived – here’s everything you need to know

Additionally, VirtualDJ 2026 is now able to automatically extract lyrics from any audio track and display them as part of the waveform, meaning navigating a waveform is easier than ever, leading to a wealth of new creative opportunities for DJs.
“For DJs who like to push the boundaries of their art, it brings wordplay mixing to another level,” Atomix says.
Elsewhere, there’s a revamped professional FX engine with more than 122 effects, including almost every effect from popular hardware mixers from Pioneer and Rane. There’s also a new video plugin available for lyrics visualisation – perfect for singing karaoke along to any audio track.
“True to its mission, VirtualDJ 2026 pushes again the boundaries of what it means to be a DJ in modern times, and is the first to introduce some new innovative features that are sure to  become the DJing norm of the future,” Atomix says.
VirtualDJ 2026 is available now on early access at virtualdj.com.
The post VirtualDJ 2026: new AI assistant for track organisation and a revamped FX engine appeared first on MusicTech.

Universal Audio’s LUNA 2.0 DAW, as reviewed by a Pro Tools userFree / $199, uaudio.com
Pro Tools was my first DAW. Unlike many of my friends who first dabbled with FL Studio or Logic Pro, I went straight to acoustic recording and then worked my way backwards to MIDI. I clicked with the workflow then, and I still do now – it’s powerful, fast, and, for me, incredibly familiar. It’s also painfully expensive, pushes you toward annoying subscription models, supports only AAX plugins, and has an unabashedly steep learning curve. It’s a love-hate relationship, to be sure.
So, like many Pro Tools veterans, my eye has been wandering – and what it found was Universal Audio’s LUNA. This fledgling DAW, first released in 2020, has been getting stronger every year, expanding its feature set, and user base, with every update. But can it actually end Pro Tools’ 34-year reign as the king of studio DAWs for me?
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LUNA is certainly a very attractive product compared to Pro Tools. It’s much cheaper, has a clear focus on acoustic recording and mixing workflows, offers seamless integration with UA’s world-class audio interfaces and plugin library, and, as of version 2.0, the Pro version now offers ARA support for third-party vocal editing tools, and hardware inserts – allowing you to route sound to your outboard gear with super-low latency.
Did I mention that Universal Audio has opted to mirror many of Pro Tools’ core keyboard shortcuts in LUNA? Oh yes, the young pup is definitely nipping at the old dog’s heels.
Boot up a session, and you’ll be greeted with easy-to-understand options for selecting external hardware, setting global session parameters, and adding and arming tracks for recording. In general, LUNA’s learning curve is refreshingly straightforward and, since I already know many of the hotkeys, I am navigating my project in no time. The user interface is polished with plenty of options to tweak the size of elements and the overall layout – good news for those with minimal screen real estate.
MIDI. Image: Press
Of course, you’d expect all of this from a modern DAW, but LUNA feels special because of how it embeds analogue modelling into your recording and mixing workflow. The Pro version comes with LUNA extensions, including API Vision Console Emulation, and this lets you take advantage of the tape emulation and mix console emulation slots that are built right into every channel strip, and the summing slot available on buses and the master output.
Naturally, LUNA is fully integrated with UA hardware, and, if you own an interface from the Apollo range, you can enjoy near-zero latency recording and monitoring through UAD plugins.
Then there’s the AI… because of course there is. But fear not! Rather than try to jam in some generative features to no real purpose, UA is instead focusing on more utilitarian applications of the tech.

READ MORE: Why Universal Audio’s CEO wants you to talk to your DAW

The most hype-worthy is obviously the Voice Control feature, which allows you to perform a few core DAW functions using nothing but words. It’s currently available only on M-processor Macs, only in English, and only offers nine voice commands – including essentials such as starting and stopping playback or recordings, moving the playhead to the previous or next marker, and toggling the metronome. So the feature is still very much in ‘early access’.
Nevertheless, it’s genuinely cool. As anyone who has attempted to run a solo acoustic recording session knows, the need to reach over a guitar or lean away from the piano to hit the keyboard can really disrupt the creative flow. In its current state, it’s far from a game changer but the potential here is obvious – once they add commands for undo, redo and to solo a track, I will personally rejoice.
Alongside that flagship feature, Luna has AI-assisted instrument detection that can name, colour code, and set appropriate time-stretching algorithms. There’s also some nifty tempo detection and extraction magic – my favourite being ‘Tempo Listen’, which automatically sets the click to match your performance.
Comping in LUNA 2.0. Image: Press
One thing that really should have been updated for 2.0 is LUNA’s cumbersome comping workflow.You can’t see all your different takes in one go – well, you can see a list of what’s been recorded but not the waveforms – and so you’ll need to sequentially click through or use key commands to bring up each version for audition, and then manually copy and paste desirable sections up to your comp track. The Key commands speed up this process, but I was still left non-plussed with the experience.
Compiling audio from multiple takes is bread and butter stuff – and, for a DAW focused on acoustic recording, to have a lacklustre comping workflow feels like an oversight.
By contrast, Pro Tools is the gold standard for audio comping – fast, fluid, and precise. And, despite conventional wisdom to the contrary, it now has a pretty well-featured MIDI environment, including the ability to host third-party MIDI plugins. LUNA’s MIDI tools actually feel closer to what Pro Tools was offering 15 years ago – rudimentary at best. You have core functions like quantisation and velocity editing, but little else.
Those shortcomings are somewhat easier to look past once you consider LUNA’s low price point. The free tier has everything a beginner or hobbyist might want, and at $199 for a perpetual licence, the Pro version is a steal – especially once you factor in the bundled UAD plugins, which include top-shelf items like the Pultec Passive EQ Collection and the Teletronix LA-2A Tube Compressor. Keep in mind that the price of LUNA Pro is less than the cost of a single year’s subscription to Pro Tools Studio.
AI voice activation in LUNA 2.0. Image: Press
Of course, that super-accessible pricing presupposes that many users will be tempted into buying additional software or hardware from Universal Audio, but considering what you get with the base price, I can easily forgive the upsell.
So has Luna dethroned the studio champion? No. Pro Tools remains Pro. Despite my numerous gripes with Avid, this is still the software I would want at my beck and call in a professional studio setting. Immersive mixing, Splice integration, cloud-based project sharing — really, there are so many pro-level features packed into recent versions that it would be impossible to list them all here. And for anyone who moves between popular music and other related roles, such as sound design, scoring for screen, or ADR, LUNA really offers no competition.
But for beginners, bedroom producers, and all the way up to small-scale professional studios, LUNA packs serious value. Generally solid workflows, innovative next-gen features, and gorgeous-sounding plugins bundled with purchase make this DAW easy to recommend.
Pro Tools still rules the studio, but LUNA might just end up being the future of home recording.

Key features

Available for Mac and PC
32 bundled plugins in Pro version
AI voice activation
AI instrument and temp detection
Supports hardware inserts
Hardware integration with UA audio interfaces
ARA Support enables integration of third-party vocal editing tools directly within the LUNA timeline

The post Universal Audio’s LUNA 2.0 DAW, as reviewed by a Pro Tools user appeared first on MusicTech.

AllMusic's Best of 2025Each year, the AllMusic editors look back through the albums that made the biggest impact, broke new ground, and caught our ear. Pop, rap, jazz, blues, classical and more. We begin with our overall best-of list, and will explore a different genre each weekday until the new year.

24 Wavell St retro mixing racklatency free retro styled mixing rack. features: frequency adjustable three band EQ with additional lowpass and highpass filters. gate with adjustable attack, release, and threshold. limiter with adjustable attack, release, and threshold. compressor with adjustable attack, release, threshold, and ratio. saturation with adjustable amount and wet / dry. reverb with adjustable wet, damping, width, and room size. overall gain. overall stereo width. all parameters automatable and mappable within DAW. Read More

USB Video Capture Devices: Wow! They’re All Bad!![VWestlife] purchased all kinds of USB video capture devices — many of them from the early 2000s — and put them through their paces in trying to digitize VHS classics like Instant Fireplace and Buying an Auxiliary Sailboat. The results were actually quite varied, but almost universally bad. They all worked, but they also brought unpleasant artifacts and side effects when it came to the final results. Sure, the analog source isn’t always the highest quality, but could it really be this hard to digitize a VHS tape?

The best results for digitizing VHS came from an old Sony device that was remarkably easy to use on a more modern machine.
It turns out there’s an exception to all the disappointment: the Sony Digital Video Media Converter (DVMC) is a piece of vintage hardware released in 1998 that completely outperformed the other devices [VWestlife] tested. There is a catch, but it’s a small one. More on that in a moment.
Unlike many other capture methods, the DVMC has a built-in time base corrector that stabilizes analog video signals by buffering them and correcting any timing errors that would cause problems like jitter or drift. This is a feature one wouldn’t normally find on budget capture devices, but [VWestlife] says the Sony DVMC can be found floating around on eBay for as low as 20 USD. It even has composite and S-Video inputs.
For an old device, [VWestlife] says using the DVMC was remarkably smooth. It needed no special drivers, defaults to analog input mode, and can be powered over USB. That last one may sound trivial, but it means there’s no worry about lacking some proprietary wall adapter with an oddball output voltage.
The catch? It isn’t really a USB device, and requires a FireWire (IEEE-1394) port in order to work. But if that’s not a deal-breaker, it does a fantastic job.
So if you’re looking to digitize older analog media, [VWestlife] says it might be worth heading to eBay and digging up a used Sony DVMC. But if one wants to get really serious about archiving analog media, capturing RF signals direct from the tape head is where it’s at.
Thanks to [Keith Olson] for the tip!

Netflix co-CEO reportedly discussed Warner Bros. deal with TrumpWill Netflix’s $82.7 billion deal to acquire Warner Bros. get approval from federal regulators? While Paramount was assumed to be the frontrunner to acquire the storied movie studio thanks to CEO David Ellison’s connections to the Trump administration, new reporting in Bloomberg and The Hollywood Reporter suggests that Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos met with President […]

Crypto’s other halving: Bittensor’s first 4-year cycle seen as ‘maturation’ milestoneBittensor’s first token halving is scheduled for Dec. 14, reducing TAO issuance by half as the AI-focused network adopts a Bitcoin-style fixed supply model.

GRAMMY Nominations 2025: Best Jazz Performance, Best Jazz Vocal AlbumThe 2025 GRAMMY nominations are here and we're going to help you to untangle it all right up until the big event, continuing with the Best Jazz Performance and Best Jazz Vocal Album categories.

Take a listen to the nominated performances and albums below--who do you think will win?

See the full list of nominees in every category here.

Best Jazz Performance

Noble RiseLakecia Benjamin Featuring Immanuel Wilkins & Mark Whitfield

Windows - LiveChick Corea, Christian McBride & Brian Blade

Peace Of Mind / Dreams Come TrueSamara Joy

FourMichael Mayo

All Stars Lead To You – LiveNicole Zuraitis, Dan Pugach, Tom Scott, Idan Morim, Keyon Harrold, Rachel Eckroth & Sam Weber

Best Jazz Vocal Album

ElementalDee Dee Bridgewater & Bill Charlap

We Insist 2025Terri Lyne Carrington & Christie Dashiell Featuring Weedie Braimah, Milena Casado, Morgan Guerin, Simon Moullier & Matthew Stevens

PortraitSamara Joy

FlyMichael Mayo

Live at Vic's Las VegasNicole Zuraitis, Dan Pugach, Tom Scott, Idan Morim, Keyon Harrold, Rachel Eckroth & Sam Weber

Samara Joy photo by David BazemoreThe post GRAMMY Nominations 2025: Best Jazz Performance, Best Jazz Vocal Album first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.