Ami Sampler Is A Free 8-bit Sampler Inspired By The Commodore Amiga
Astriid released the Ami Sampler, a free 8-bit sampler inspired by the sound of the Commodore Amiga personal computer from 1985. The sampler is available on the Astriiddev GitHub, and it’s a Windows, macOS, and Linux release for VST3, AU, and LV2.                 The retro interface for the Ami [...]
View post: Ami Sampler Is A Free 8-bit Sampler Inspired By The Commodore Amiga

beyerdynamic launch DT 770 PRO X Limited Edition In celebration of their 100th anniversary, beyerdynamic have updated one of their most popular headphone designs. 

Michael Bibi on playing Coachella with “mixed emotions” following cancer treatment: “It actually gives you a sense of purpose again”Michael Bibi has opened up about playing his first show at Coachella since undergoing cancer treatment and the “mixed emotions” the experience evoked.
Bibi’s set at the Indio, California event last weekend (13 April) marks his first performance of the year. The London DJ was diagnosed with CNS Lymphoma, a rare form of brain cancer last Summer, and was forced to cancel all of his gigs while receiving treatment.

READ MORE: Michael Bibi surprises Ibiza partygoers with DJ set amid cancer treatment

Prior to the show, Bibi posted on X: “One year ago I was given a 30% chance of survival, today I’m packing to perform at Coachella… Never give up on your hopes or dreams.”

One year ago I was given a 30% chance of survival, today I’m packing to perform at @coachella ….never give up on your hopes or dreams
— Michael Bibi (@MichaelBibi1) April 8, 2024

Speaking to BBC Newsbeat after the event, Bibi said: “It was emotional, it was intense – there was happiness, there was some sadness. And there was just a huge range of emotions coming through.”
The musician added that the Coachella gig marked the longest distance he’s travelled since treatment, stating: “That was a big step in itself, just getting on a plane and coming to the US. And then adding on top of that, doing my first show and coming to a festival, it was a lot.”
“But it actually gives you a sense of purpose again, moving and coming back out into reality and seeing people. Because I’ve been kind of sheltering a lot, because of the treatments, I’ve had to kind of isolate myself. So getting back out into the world and connecting with human beings is a good feeling.”
Bibi also shared that while he’s currently “physically well”, he’s still dealing with what he’s been through “day by day”.
“It’s just a kind of a mental processing,” he said. “Just kind of mentally catching up on everything that I’ve been through. Because I think when you get into a really intense situation, you kind of go into fight or flight mode.
“And you just have to get through that moment and period of time and you’re not really processing everything that’s happening to you.”
Elsewhere, Bibi also commented on Grimes’ DJing fluke at Coachella, saying: “Everyone’s been in bad situations when they’re DJing. I’ve been in situations where everything stops working or the left deck doesn’t work and the right deck just doesn’t do what you want to do.”
“You just have to try and adapt and do the best you can with a bad situation, which is horrible when it does happen.”
The post Michael Bibi on playing Coachella with “mixed emotions” following cancer treatment: “It actually gives you a sense of purpose again” appeared first on MusicTech.

New earbuds by Teenage Engineering-founded firm Nothing feature ChatGPT integrationNothing has officially announced the Nothing Ear and Nothing Ear (a), the brand’s latest flagship earbuds featuring a cool new feature: ChatGPT integration.
Users can choose between the $149 Nothing Ear, which is “built for audiophiles seeking the best sound quality” and the $99 Nothing Ear (a), that’s catered to those looking for the “ultimate daily audio companion.”

READ MORE: Imogen Heap uses her AI voice model, ai.mogen, to create a remix for the first time

As explained by the Teenage Engineering-founded firm at launch, Nothing will “enhance its overall user experience with industry-first ChatGPT integrations in its audio and smartphone products.”
Through the new integration, users with the latest Nothing OS and ChatGPT installed on their Nothing phones will be able to pinch their Nothing earbuds to speak and ask questions to the world’s hottest AI tool. For now, the feature only works with the higher-end Nothing Phone (2); Full integration will be available for all Nothing and CMF products in June.
“By integrating ChatGPT with Nothing earbuds, including the new Nothing Ear and Ear (a), and with Nothing OS, we’ve taken our first steps towards change, and there’s more to come,” says Carl Pei, CEO and Co-Founder of Nothing.
Image: Nothing
Besides ChatGPT integrations, the Nothing Ear and Ear (a) also feature a bunch of hardware and software upgrades from their predecessors.
The Ear, for one, boasts Nothing’s “most advanced driver system to date” with a custom 11mm ceramic dynamic driver for extra richness and crispier highs. Nothing has also improved the dual chamber design from that of Ear (2) with two additional vents to improve airflow, delivering a clearer sound.
New personalisation options are offered as well — including a feature that lets you create a personal sound profile for each genre of music, as well as a bass enhancing feature. In terms of battery life, the Ear is said to last a cool 25 percent longer than Ear (2), offering up to 40.5 hours of playback (without ANC) after a full charge with the charging case or 8.5 hours of non-stop playback.
The Nothing Ear (a), meanwhile, is billed as a more compact and cheaper sibling to the Nothing Ear. Both earbuds do however share the same Active Noise Cancellation feature — Nothing’s most effective and intelligent yet, muffling up to 45dB of noise, twice that of the Ear 2. Both models are IP54 dust and water-resistant as well, though the Ear’s case edges out the Ear (a) a little with an IP55 rating compared to the latter’s IPX2 rating.
The cheaper Ear (a) also comes without the wireless charging feature found on the Nothing Ear, though fast charging is still available.
And for those looking to add a splash of colour to their Nothing setup, the Ear (a) arrives in an eye-catching yellow finish (remember a certain Playdate video game console?), in addition to the usual black and white finishes.
Learn more at Nothing.
The post New earbuds by Teenage Engineering-founded firm Nothing feature ChatGPT integration appeared first on MusicTech.

Keeping Alive The Future Of Cars, 1980s StyleHere at Hackaday we’re a varied bunch of writers, some of whom have careers away from this organ, and others whose work also appears on the pages of other publications in different fields. One such is our colleague [Lewin Day], and he’s written a cracking piece for The Autopian about the effort to keep an obscure piece of American automotive electronic history alive. We think of big-screen control panels in cars as a new phenomenon, but General Motors was fitting tiny Sony Trinitron CRTs to some models back in the late 1980s. If you own one of these cars the chances are the CRT is inoperable if you’ve not encountered [Jon Morlan] and his work repairing and restoring them.
Lewin’s piece goes into enough technical detail that we won’t simply rehash it here, but it’s interesting to contrast the approach of painstaking repair with that of replacement or emulation. It would be a relatively straightforward project to replace the CRT with a modern LCD displaying the same video, and even to use a modern single board computer to emulate much of a dead system. But we understand completely that to many motor enthusiasts that’s not the point, indeed it’s the very fact it has a frickin’ CRT in the dash that makes the car.We’ll probably never drive a 1989 Oldsmobile Toronado. But we sure want to if it’s got that particular version of the future fitted.
Lewin’s automotive writing is worth watching out for. He once brought us to a motorcycle chariot.

Tesla layoffs, Cybertruck recalls and Serve Robotics goes publicWelcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Tesla is back in the news cycle and our crystal ball says it’s one of those long-term affairs. The […]
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Manual Supports for 3D Printing[MakerSpace] wanted to 3D print an RFID card holder. On one side is a slot for a card and on the other side has recesses for the RFID antenna. They used these to control access to machines and were milling them out using a CNC machine. Since there were no flat surfaces, he had to turn on supports in the slicer, right? No. He does use supports, but not in the way you might imagine.
Inspired by creating cast iron using sand casting, he decided to first 3D print a reusable “core” using PETG. This core will support future prints that use PLA. When printing the actual item, the printer lays down the first few layers and pauses. This allows you to stick the core in and resume the print. After the print completes, you can remove the core, and the results look great, as you can see in the video below.

While the PLA doesn’t stick well to the PETG, it can stick a little, but using a glue coating as a release agent solved that problem. This is one of those ideas that once you see it, it seems obvious, but it probably isn’t something you’ve thought about doing until you see it at least once.
There are a few other tricks in the video. For example, the core is a little larger than necessary, so there is a tab that sticks out. This makes it easy to tape down to the bed and also helps when you try to remove it from the PLA print. The results are great, and it makes us want to revisit our abandoned badge holder project from years ago.
Some people never print flat. Others do very specific support structures at key points. It seems there’s always multiple ways to print the seemingly unprintable.

After $1.5bn takeover proposal, Hipgnosis Songs Fund’s board tells Blackstone: We’re listening…Bring on a firm offer, HSF's board tells private investment giant
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This camera trades pictures for AI poetryThe Poetry Camera takes the concept of photography to new heights by generating poetry based on the visuals it encounters.
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Relatively Universal ROM Programmer Makes Retro Tech Hacking AccessibleThere’s treasures hidden in old technology, and you deserve to be able to revive it. Whether it’s old personal computer platforms, vending machines, robot arms, or educational kits based on retro platforms, you will need to work with parallel EEPROM chips at some point. [Anders Nielsen] was about to do just that, when he found out that a TL866, a commonly used programmer kit for such ROMs, would cost entire $70 – significantly raising the budget of any parallel ROM-involving hacking. After months of work, he is happy to bring us a project – the Relatively Universal ROM Programmer, an open-source parallel ROM programmer board that you can easily assemble or buy.
Designed in the Arduino shield format, there’s a lot of care and love put into making this board as universal as reasonably possible, so that it fits any of the old flash chips you might want to flash – whether it’s an old UV-erasable ROM that wants a voltage up to 30 V to be written, or the newer 5 V-friendly chips. You can use ICs with pin count from 24 to 32 pins, it’s straightforward to use a ZIF socket with this board, there’s LED indication and silkscreen markings so that you can see and tweak the programming process, and it’s masterfully optimized for automated assembly.
You can breadboard this programmer platform as we’ve previously covered, you can assemble our own boards using the open-source files, and if you don’t want to do either, you can buy the assembled boards from [Anders Nielsen] too! The software is currently work in progress, since that’s part of the secret sauce that makes the $70 programmers tick. You do need to adjust the programming voltage manually, but that can be later improved with a small hardware fix. In total, if you just want to program a few ROM chips, this board saves you a fair bit of money.

Green Day Pop Up at the EchoplexPhotos by Greg Schneider

Since the release of their third album, Dookie, in 1994, Green Day have arguably been the most popular punk band on the planet. So if you didn't catch them during the 924 Gilman Street days, the opportunities to see Green Day in venues that aren't enormous have been extremely rare.

As a result, it's been tough for many to view Green Day as a punk band at all, so much as an arena rock outfit. A really fucking good one, armed with a ton of rapid-fire, catchy tunes. But a festival-headlining arena rock outfit all the same. So this Hella Tiny Tour of smaller venues, which already saw them play the House of Blues in Anaheim in March, is priceless because we get to see Green Day in an environment where, to be completely honest, they thrive. It's like they're still in the Kerplunk era, fighting for their lives. The youthful energy is there in mountains -- snotty, joyful and very punk!

These guys connect with their crowd like few others. Peers such as the Offspring are full of on-stage banter, but Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt and Tré Cool make it their business to make every single person in the Echoplex feel like they're a bonafide part of the show. Green Day does that even when they're playing an enormodome, as they will this summer when they play the SoFi Stadium with the Smashing Pumpkins, Rancid, and the Linda Lindas. But it hits so much more intensely in a relatively intimate room.

All of these shows -- the Hella Tiny ones and the big gigs that will follow -- are a three-part celebration. Dookie is 30 years old, the American Idiot album is 20 years old, and they have a new album too -- Saviors was released in January.

So at the Echoplex we got both Dookie and American Idiot played in their entirety, plus a handful from Saviors. Each and every song sounded glorious in this environment. Dookie classics including (but not limited to) "Longview" and "Basket Case" allow us to imagine for a moment that we're catching this superb band in the moments before they explode onto the global stages.

The likes of "American Idiot" and "Jesus of Suburbia" prove that, even when the band had achieved insane levels of success, they were at their peak when it came to socially conscious, intelligent and politically aware songwriting.

And the new songs, particularly "The American Dream is Killing Me," are clear evidence that this timeless, apparently ageless band are still filled with fire, energy, and tunes.

"We can't wait to see you this summer," Armstrong says as the band leaves the stage. Ditto, fellas.

Let the Solder Scroll Take Care of Your Feed Needs[Victor]’s nifty tool the Solder Scroll is a handheld device that lets one feed solder out simply by turning something a little like a scroll wheel. It looks like an intuitive and comfortable design that can adapt to a wide variety of solder thicknesses, and is entirely 3D printed.
One part we particularly like is the feed system. One rolls a wheel which feeds solder out using a mechanism a lot like extrusion gears in many 3D printer hot ends. Both wheels have ridged surfaces that grip and feed the solder; their gears mesh with one another so that moving one moves both in unison.
Solder feed tools like this have seen all kinds of interesting designs, because while the problem is the same for everyone, there are all kinds of different ways to go about addressing it. We love this one, and we have seen many other takes that range from a powered, glove-mounted unit to an extremely simple tool with no moving parts. We’ve even seen a method of hacking a mechanical pencil into a new role as a solder feeder.

Strap in. Blackstone is ready to bid $1.5 billion for Hipgnosis Songs Fund.To paraphrase Pink Floyd, Will the sun (Concord Chorus) be eclipsed by the moon (Blackstone)?
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Getting It Done: Last Week in D.I.Y. & Indie MusicLast week, our tips and advice for the independent, do-it-yourselfers out there covered how to book better gigs, release new music, use TikTok as a tool, and much more.....
The post Getting It Done: Last Week in D.I.Y. & Indie Music appeared first on Hypebot.

REWIND: The new music industry’s week in reviewIt was a busy week by any definition, and the music industry was no exception. The DoJ eyed Live Nation and Ticketmaster, new National Recordings Registry inductees were announced, songwriters fought for expression in China, and more.....
The post REWIND: The new music industry’s week in review appeared first on Hypebot.