Oak View agreed to ‘cooperate fully’ with DoJ investigationsEarlier this week news broke that Oak View Group CEO Tim Leiweke was stepping down after being indicted by the US Department of Justice. To avoid charges Oak View agreed to pay a hefty fine and cooperate with the DoJ.
The post Oak View agreed to ‘cooperate fully’ with DoJ investigations appeared first on Hypebot.

API at GearFest UK API have announced that they will be exhibiting their renowned 1608 console at GearFest UK, as well as showing off a range of their outboard gear.

From Hipgnosis’ return to Suno’s new Chief Music Officer… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-UpThe five biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days
Source

Spotify Discover Weekly stats shared as playlist turns 5Five years ago Spotify launched Discover Weekly, a playlist that updates every Monday designed to spark music discovery. Spotify Discover Weekly stats show just how important the custom playlists have become for emerging artists.
The post Spotify Discover Weekly stats shared as playlist turns 5 appeared first on Hypebot.

Acon Digital release Verberate Immersive 2.3 Acon Digital have just announced the launch of a powerful update for their acclaimed spatial and immersive audio reverb plug-in. 

Chaos Tones releases Deviant Drums FREE Edition for Kontakt Player
Chaos Tones has released Deviant Drums FREE Edition, a free acoustic drum instrument for Kontakt Player. I already have more than twenty acoustic drum libraries in my collection, but every time a new freebie pops up, I just have to grab it. I’ve always dreamed of learning to play a real drum kit (apart from [...]
View post: Chaos Tones releases Deviant Drums FREE Edition for Kontakt Player

It’s Amazon Prime Day, but these music retailers are also hosting insane deals on keyboards, synths and pluginsPrime Day is, naturally, all about Amazon. But don’t forget that the other online music retailers are also hosting sales right now in a bid for your hard-earned cash.
We’ve clocked some sweet deals on music tech gear over at Sweetwater and Reverb – as well as software at Plugin Boutique – which you can take advantage of as the retailers battle it out for sales supremacy. Here’s what we’ve found:
Over at Reverb, you can make the most of 10% off this uber-portable Korg Volca FM synthesizer, now priced at £58.50 down from £65. Sure, it’s not a massive saving, but an addition to your synth collection for under £60 is never something to be sniffed at…
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Also at Reverb, if you’re looking for something with a little more firepower, this Roland Fantom-X8 88-key Workstation keyboard has had nearly £100 slashed off its price tag, meaning you’ll pay just £499.
The Roland Fantom-X8 comes with 1GB of memory and a powerful synth processor with 128-note polyphony, and users can add up to four SRX expansion boards for even more soundscape customisation. Take a look at the deal below.
[deals ids=”2wiZOMn7zPN9ITv9fGP2fp”]
Over at Sweetwater, we’ve spotted $20 off Behringer’s hugely popular Edge semi-modular synthesizer. With a 15×10 I/O Patch Matrix, two VCOs, two 8-step sequencers, a white/pink noise generator, oscillator sync and so much more, the Behringer Edge takes budget synthesis to the next level. Grab yours below:
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You can also save a cool $130 on Behringer’s Poly D Polyphonic Analog Synthesizer at Sweetwater, paying only $499 for a limited time. Specs include 37 full-size keys, four-voice paraphonic synthesizer, four VCOs, Classic Ladder Filter and more. Get yours now at a sweet discount.
[deals ids=”1OAva3VXLGGszOlPb23s0z”]
Over at Plugin Boutique, you can grab a cool 50% off the Bloom Bundle by Excite Audio, including all 11 individual Bloom plugins valued at £649 if bought separately. This includes KSHMR, a new virtual instrument which seamlessly blends Indian and South Asian musical heritage with modern production – no matter your genre. Get the whole bundle now for just £159.
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Find more music tech deals via our regularly updated deals page.
The post It’s Amazon Prime Day, but these music retailers are also hosting insane deals on keyboards, synths and plugins appeared first on MusicTech.

Humble Bundle launches Opus FX bundle starting at €2.56
Humble Bundle has launched Opus FX: Superior Plugins & Orchestral Elegance, a brand-new collection of music production tools starting at just €2.56. The Opus FX: Superior Plugins & Orchestral Elegance bundle includes a variety of mixing and sound design plugins, along with several orchestral sound packs, with contributions from W.A. Production, MeldaProduction, United Plugins, and [...]
View post: Humble Bundle launches Opus FX bundle starting at €2.56

How Drops by Colossal makes it easier than ever for producers to earn from their beatsAd feature with Colossal
Drops is a slick new tool by Colossal that promises to help producers get their beats directly into the hands of artists. By folding in licensing, payments and file transfer into a single shareable web link, they’ve managed to simplify selling your beats into a process that is “frictionless, beautiful and optimised to boost sales”, says founder Paul Anthony.
To test this, I jumped onto the Drops platform to see how long it would take to get started. With no need to sign up for a subscription, I was loading in my tracks right away and exploring the different release options, which include the choice of non-exclusive and exclusive licenses, setting my own price and adding some vibrant visuals. It’s an effortless experience, with everything distilled down into a one-page user-friendly design.
Hitting publish on a beat will generate a Drops link which is where the magic happens. The shareable link contains everything that someone else needs to buy your beat using PayPal, agree to the licensing terms, and download the high-quality audio file — no low-quality MP3 allowed here. Drop the link into a post, video description or DM. That’s it!
When someone is interested in buying your beat, just give them a Drops link, and the rest is up to them.
A single shareable link seems almost too obvious. Surely, this exists already? Yet the current alternative is a cobbled-together system that is unappealing to both the producer and artist.
Drops producer UI. Image: Press
A lot of the time, producers end up fielding responses to requests through DM’s, emails, or via messaging apps like WhatsApp. If all goes well, they can then send their track via a file transfer service like Dropbox or WeTransfer, and somewhere along the way, payment has to be arranged via a bank transfer or another payment app. This method makes it incredibly difficult to keep track of who is downloading your music and, in the case that they haven’t actually paid for the download, leaves you with very little you can do about it. These are issues that have long been solved when it comes to selling most digital goods and online services.
Cleaning up this ad-hoc system is what Colossal has set out to do. For this neat all-in-one stack of functions, producers pay a 15% commission only when they make a sale. Adding to the simplicity of using Drops, there is no subscription or payment plan in sight.
So, what else do you get for that fee?
A key feature of Drops is something that has little glamour or appeal, but is essential to every single producer hoping to share their work: licensing.
Image: Press
Cleaning up the murky waters of licensing was a critical mission for Colossal. Most of us hardly ever read licenses, even when we ultimately click ‘Agree’. This can be excused when it’s a software licence, but when you’re licensing your music, there is no room to be so careless. Colossal’s licenses were written with music lawyers and are locked from edits, so neither producers nor buyers can alter the fine print. This approach helps provide a level of consistency for anyone who uses Drops, with the understanding that once you read the license once, you’ll never have to worry that the terms have changed, even if you’re buying from a different producer.
Reading the license isn’t as daunting as we’ve all come to expect. To ensure these licenses are clear to everyone involved, a summary of core terms is displayed right next to the preview of the beat, keeping a fixed spotlight on the legal end of music. For the music industry, renowned for ownership disputes and misuse cases, having a solid licensing framework offers a lot of peace of mind.
Beyond the tedious legal legwork, it’s exciting to see that Colossal has included some innovative features in the service. With each release, you can set a limited number of downloads for your beat or create a limited time for when people can buy your Drop. This nice touch of exclusivity can help producers elevate their work to a more valuable category. With an abundance of music floating around online, and YouTube to MP3 software commonly being used, many producers will relish the chance to add a bit of scarcity back into the equation.
Image: Press
Rounding out Drops’ promotional tool kit is the ability to add your own image or video to each track and have these visuals automatically whipped up into a pleasing layout for your beat’s landing page. These pages are optimised for mobile devices, resulting in beautiful graphics, and a user-friendly interface, that is perfectly suited to how most people browse music.
Looking to the future, Drops by Colossal has a few exciting features in development, including the functionality to unlock a beat by subscribing to a YouTube channel, joining a Discord server, or hitting follow on Instagram or TikTok. Colossal is also looking to expand beyond beats and build a beat marketplace that also supports samples, loops and stems. Sitting alongside Drops is a companion search and discovery platform called Vibes, where you can speedily audition new beats by swiping in the fashion of TikTok, which is coming soon.
Nowadays, most of the work that goes into sharing beats, reaching audiences, and selling your music happens on social platforms. Colossal has formed Drops to fit perfectly into this ecosystem.
Whether you want to get your music out there for a bit of fun or hope to turn beat-making into your full-time gig, Drops will do the heavy lifting while you focus on making the music.
The post How Drops by Colossal makes it easier than ever for producers to earn from their beats appeared first on MusicTech.

Southside (808 Mafia) roasts beats from Discord
Southside sat down with us to rate and react to beats submitted by producers via Discord—and he's not holding back.

FL Studio 2025 first look: The new features I love and what needs refiningFL Studio 2025 has just dropped, and it’s got some cool new stuff going on. There are some things that you might have expected, and other features you probably didn’t see coming. Probably the world’s most-downloaded DAW, it’s a free update for existing owners from any earlier version, thanks to Image-Line’s policy — it even coexists on your computer alongside the 2024 version if you want to keep both for a while.
So what’s new, and what’s missing?
READ MORE: “FL Studio’s duty is to get more people to stick with music-making”: CEO Constantin Koehncke on FL Studio 2025 and beyond
There’s no radical overhaul, so upon the first boot-up, you won’t be disoriented if you’re already an FL Studio user. A big new feature that aims to inspire you is called Loop Starter. Accessed from the Channel Rack, it gives you the ability to generate and load a set of complementary loops in a range of styles from FL Cloud’s vast and ever-growing selection of samples. Crucially, it works with the free tier of FL Cloud, so even if you don’t pay extra to subscribe, you’ll still get it.
Choose from one of the available genres — techno, drum’n’bass, hip-hop, trap and more, and the sequencer is populated with a pattern of MIDI-triggered loops in that style. The loop length depends on the pattern; sometimes it’s eight bars, sometimes more. You can hit the dice icon to regenerate a different bunch of loops in the same style and tempo, either globally or for each track.
FL Studio 2025
Presumably, Loop Starter will never repeat itself since it’s using an algorithm combined with a vast online library of over a million royalty-free sounds. Press the Send To Playlist button, and the data is placed into your playlist, making it more editable and part of your project.
There are nine genres to choose from in Loop Starter, and each one generates three tracks — generally drums, bass and one other, depending on the style. We can likely expect more to be added with future updates, but I’d welcome additional tracks, too.
Loop Starter generates some excellent melodies and patterns from its first use. You can send a pattern to the Playlist, randomise a new one, then send that to the Playlist and keep going, making it easy to create variations and build a track. The idea is that you then add your own material on top, and I can see the feature being invaluable not just for people looking for somewhere to start but also more experienced producers wanting a quick way to generate extra inspiration.
The 2025 update brings Dynamic Mixer Tracks. Previously, FL Studio has been limited to 140 mixer tracks; you’re now able to have up to 500. Better still, you can enter a numerical value to add as many as you need up to this limit and conversely, tell the software to remove any unused tracks with a simple command to clean up unwieldy projects.
FL Studio 2025
For such a technically advanced DAW, the old track limit seemed anachronistic, and while it still doesn’t have the theoretically unlimited tracks of Cubase or Live’s top-end versions, 500 tracks is going to be more than sufficient for all but the most demanding movie composer, so that’s most people.
Here’s a very 2025 feature: an AI-powered chatbot running inside the DAW. It’s called Gopher, has been trained on the FLS manual and other sources and works in a wide range of languages. Integrated help isn’t a new concept, but here it’s supercharged and, unlike so many virtual website assistants, actually does help you.
FL Studio is a big application with a large and unwieldy manual. Text search functions are OK, but it can still take time to find specific information. Gopher lets you parse your own questions and returns accurate and helpful answers. In the case of technical questions — “how can I create an EDM drumbeat” or “how to automate volume” for example, it gives you step-by-step instructions specific to FLS.
FL Studio 2025
Gopher’s also able to answer wider production-based queries, which makes it exponentially more useful. So ask it “how to make drums sound bigger”, for example, and it comes back with a range of suggestions not only for processing but also tips for arrangements. The developers highlight Gopher as a way to use AI that is really beneficial (as opposed, presumably, to AI writing music for you and taking human creativity out of the equation), and we’re minded to agree. It’s seamless and incredibly useful, and we’d have to assume it will improve and expand over time as well. Don’t be surprised to see other DAW developers go down a similar route in future, it’s just that much better than conventional manuals.
There’s a grab bag of other smaller but very welcome changes as well. Audio clips can be stretched, pitched and reversed directly from Clip Properties — overdue compared to how long some competitors have been able to do this, but still. There’s a new Mobile Rack which brings the seven instruments and 29 effects from FL Studio Mobile directly into the desktop version, as well as a new FL Studio Remote app, replacing the IL Remote.
FL Studio 2025
Emphasis is a new multi-stage compression mastering plug-in for squeezing gain out of your tracks, though it’s exclusive to the All Plugins Edition, and there’s also a new VFX Script plugin for turning Patcher setups into complex audio applications. If you’re not a coder, you can download scripts from the FLS forums. You get a new melodic techno FLEX pack with 150 presets, the Chord Progression Tool now lets you generate basslines to go with your progressions, and several plugins (BassDrum, Sakura, Drumaxx)get updated vector UIs, making them scalable.
With this update, Image Line has chosen to make FL Studio better at what it does well rather than trying to push out into areas where it’s traditionally not as well-equipped as other DAWs — scoring, movie support, notation, deep audio editing — but that’s OK. The new Loop Starter and Gopher functions, plus greatly expanded track count support, will be genuinely useful for its users and, given their design, will almost certainly improve over time as well. We’re halfway through 2025, but we’re glad this finally arrived.
Find out what else is new in FL Studio 2025.
The post FL Studio 2025 first look: The new features I love and what needs refining appeared first on MusicTech.

ETH maxis scream for $3K, but data shows pro Ether traders cautiously positionedEther price is on the verge of breaking the $3,000 resistance but key components needed to hold the level are still missing.

Former Intel CEO launches a benchmark to measure AI alignmentAfter former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger capped off a 40+ year career at the semiconductor giant in December, many wondered where would Gelsinger go next. On Thursday, the former Intel CEO revealed one piece of his next chapter: trying to ensure AI models support a flourishing humanity. In partnership with a “faith tech” company he […]

Janet Jackson Brings Fans “Together Again” on Tour With Martin LightingAccording to a report on Tuesday, Lighting Designer Eric Wade has implemented a "versatile and adaptable rig featuring the Martin MAC One fixture, produced by PRG and Crossfade," for Janet Jackson’s Together Again tour, with "immersive and impactful visuals fir for pop royalty.""As one of the most successful artists of all time, Janet Jackson has sold over 100 million records in her multi-decade career and defined the MTV era with her impactful choreography and multifaceted sound," a statement reads. "Beginning in April 2023 through October 2024, the “Together Again” Tour marked Jackson’s first return to the road in four years and promised audiences across the world a prolific set featuring both decade-defining hits and fan favorites.""With a massive discography that pulls from a wide array of genres and influences, from new jack swing to hip-hop to pop, Jackson required a lighting rig that could adapt to and elevate the music’s eclectic nature," they continue. "Concurrently, Wade noted that the rig also needed to be flexible enough for the crew to quickly deploy and takedown at each tour stop. For the final US and European leg of the tour in mid-2024, production companies PRG and Crossfade opted for the recently released Martin MAC Ones. The result was the right balance between versatility and efficiency that delivered dazzling visuals for audiences while minimizing labor time for the crew."“The main goal of this job was to provide Janet with a very large system and an affordable rental, and the MAC One lights absolutely helped with that process,” said Wade. “We were going for something with a lot of sources and a small format to save truck space and time. The MAC One units are the primary fixture on the show; we utilized them in bars of 4 and mounted on custom pods that are on automation on top of video walls and on the floor. The outcome was nothing less than spectacular.”"A testament to the old adage “small but mighty,” the MAC One combines beam, wash, and eye-candy fixtures within a compact and tour-friendly design," they add. "Featuring a high-intensity beam of 375,000 cd, an eclectic Fresnel lens, and a custom-made 120W RGBL LED engine, the MAC One is capable of a wide variety of visuals and effects, from striking beams to all-encompassing washes and everything in between. Additionally, the MAC One’s lightweight yet durable design is also compatible with Martin’s VDO Grid Mount System and fourbar and matrix accessories for easier setup and implementation across any rig, which proved especially useful with reducing setup time for Jackson’s lighting crew."“We needed to reduce focus time daily so that the large number of fixtures didn’t take hours on end to focus,” explained Wade. “The solution was to mount the MAC Ones all on square stock clamps, and that resulted in hardly any focus time at all as the light is extremely accurate in holding its Pan and Tilt. It also has a great zoom for getting tight beams or washing out, and I was extremely impressed at the powerful punch this fixture makes for such a small fixture. We also really enjoyed the Eye Candy features for camera shots and overall effect.”"After initially ordering only 100 MAC One fixtures, the Crossfade team opted to increase the number to 138 MAC One fixtures during tour rehearsals due to their versatility and ease of use," they say. "The MAC Ones were so successful on the Together Again Tour, in fact, that Jackson’s current Las Vegas Residency at the Resorts World Theatre utilizes a sizable 224 MAC Ones in its lighting rig. Wade praised the fixtures as the “workhorse” of the tour and is eager to deploy them on future projects."“It has been a long time since I have put Martin fixtures on any of my tours or jobs, but that has changed now,” Wade said. “We are looking at what fixtures could benefit us in our inventory along with all these MAC One units we purchased. Martin worked with us in making this purchase as smooth as possible, and getting the fixtures delivered in a very fast manner. Now we are looking at what to add next!”Visit pro.harman.com for more info.The post Janet Jackson Brings Fans “Together Again” on Tour With Martin Lighting first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Embedded USB Debug for SnapdragonAccording to [Casey Connolly], Qualcomm’s release of how to interact with their embedded USB debugging (EUD) is a big deal. If you haven’t heard of it, nearly all Qualcomm SoCs made since 2018 have a built-in debugger that connects to the onboard USB port. The details vary by chip, but you write to some registers and start up the USB phy. This gives you an oddball USB interface that looks like a seven-port hub with a single device “EUD control interface.”
So what do you do with that? You send a few USB commands, and you’ll get a second device. This one connects to an SWD interface. Of course, we have plenty of tools to debug using SWD.

In particular, there’s a fork of OpenOCD that knows how to use EUD, although it required a library that wasn’t available to us mere mortals. But now it is, so smooth sailing, right?
Um, no. Unless you have a very specific build configuration, the code won’t compile. Luckily, the fixes are not that hard and are available. The OpenOCD fork is a bit out of date, too. But with perseverance, it all worked.
In addition to the SWD device, there appears to be a COM and trace peripheral available, although those may need more work to be usable. If you make progress on those, let us know.
SWD debugging can be very handy. While not everyone likes debuggers, we’ve been a fan of hardware-based debugging for a long time.