e-instruments releases FREE Desolate Guitars Fragment for Kontakt Player
e-instruments releases Desolate Guitars Fragment, a FREE vintage chime guitar instrument for Kontakt Player Desolate Guitars Fragment is the lite version of the premium Desolate Guitars library (€149), and it’s available to download for free. You’ll need Kontakt Player 7.6.1 or higher, which is also free. The primary difference between the two versions is that [...]
View post: e-instruments releases FREE Desolate Guitars Fragment for Kontakt Player

Dystopian Waves releases Drox, a FREE glitch effect for Ableton Live
Dystopian Waves has released Drox, a free Max for Live device for glitchy, real-time audio manipulation in Ableton Live. If you’re into creative sound mangling, this one’s worth checking out. I don’t personally use Ableton Live, so I haven’t tested Drox, but it looks like a really fun tool for anyone who enjoys glitch processing, [...]
View post: Dystopian Waves releases Drox, a FREE glitch effect for Ableton Live

Sonnox Oxford Inflator is just $19 but the offer ends TODAY!
Sonnox has slashed the price of Oxford Inflator to just $19 at Plugin Boutique, down from a whopping $200, but the offer ends today. If you’ve been curious about this well-loved loudness enhancer from Sonnox, now is the perfect time to check it out. I stumbled onto the Oxford Inflator many years ago while searching [...]
View post: Sonnox Oxford Inflator is just $19 but the offer ends TODAY!

The Crow Hill Company release Lo-Fi Strings The latest Vaults release delivers a selection of string sounds that are described as “unrefined, and fully adulterated through a knackered cassette tape with just a pinch of wobble”. 

Qubic community, Monero's 51% attacker, votes to target Dogecoin nextThe community for Qubic, an AI-focused blockchain project, voted to target the Dogecoin network over Zcash and Kaspa by a wide margin.

GPT-5 is supposed to be nicer nowOpenAI announced late Friday that it’s updating its latest model to be “warmer and friendlier.”

2025 One Hertz Challenge: A Flaming Oscillator and a New Take on the Candle Clock
Candle clocks were once an easy way to build a clock without using complex mechanical devices: just observe how quickly a thin candle burns down, mark an identical candle with periodic gradations, and you had a simple timer. These were the first candle-based timekeeping devices, but as [Tim]’s flicker-based oscillator demonstrates, they’re certainly not the only way to keep time with a flame.
Generally speaking, modern candles minimize flickering by using a wick that’s designed to balance the amount of wax and air drawn into the flame. However, when several candles are brought close together, their flames begin to interfere with each other, causing them to flicker in synchrony. The frequency of flickering is a function of gravity and flame diameter alone, so a bundle of three candles will flicker at a fairly constant frequency; in [Tim]’s case, it was about 9.9 Hz.
To sense this oscillation, [Tim] originally used a phototransistor to detect the flame’s light, but he wanted an even simpler solution. He positioned a wire just above the flame, so that as it flickered it would periodically contact the wire. A flame has a different dielectric constant than air does, so the capacitance between this and another wire wrapped around the bundle of candles fluctuates with the flame. To sense this, he used a CH32V003 microcontroller, which reads capacitance, performs some signal processing to get a clean signal, counts oscillations, and uses this time signal to blink an LED once a second. The final result is unusually mesmerizing for a blinking LED.
In something of the reverse of this project, we’ve also seen an oscillator used for an (artificial) candle. There’s also a surprising amount of science that can be learned by studying candles.

Dystopian Waves DroxDrox is a powerful, real-time audio manipulation device for Ableton Live, designed to bring unpredictability, movement, and rhythmic chaos to your tracks. It combines glitch, jump, and stutter effects into a single, intuitive interface, allowing producers and live performers to create everything from subtle tape-style imperfections to extreme, glitchy textures. With Drox, you can: Simulate tape dropouts and physical imperfections for a vintage, lo-fi character. Trigger CD-style skips and jumps that instantly add surprise and rhythmic variation. Generate stuttered repetitions that can evolve dynamically, with random pitch, filter, and playback variations for a lively, ever-changing soundscape. Control the balance and playback direction of the processed audio with a simple Master section, giving you fine control over wet/dry mix and forward/reverse playback. Whether you're adding subtle imperfections to a cinematic soundscape, creating aggressive glitch textures for electronic music, or experimenting with rhythmic chaos in live performance, Drox puts a wide palette of creative possibilities at your fingertips. https://youtu.be/k9xhkDXxrxQ Read More

Erica Synths introduce the Formant Erica Synths' latest DIY system offers ambitious builders the chance to recreate the Elektor Formant modular synth that was originally released by Elektor Magazine during the late 1970s.

Basel Bank capital rules create 'chokepoint' for crypto — Investment execThe current capital reserve requirements and rules make holding cryptocurrencies too costly for banks, limiting the sector's growth.

Judge says FTC investigation into Media Matters ‘should alarm all Americans’A federal judge has blocked the FTC's investigation into Media Matters research around advertising and antisemitic content on X.

2025 One Hertz Challenge: STM32 Blinks In Under 50 BytesMany of us have run a Blink program on a microcontroller before. It’s effectively the “Hello, World!” of the embedded space. However, few of us have ever thought about optimizing our Blink code to be as miniscule as possible. But that’s precisely what [Rudra Lad] did for this entry into the 2025 One Hertz Challenge!
This example of Blink, delay_blinky_13, is built specifically for the STM32F4 Discovery microcontroller development board. [Rudra] notes the code is “highly optimized” and compiles down to a binary size of under 50 bytes. The code doesn’t even use RAM, and it aims to get the blink as close to 1 Hz as possible. Many optimizations were used to crunch it down as small as possible. For example, the standard startup code isn’t used, with the entire program instead written in the Reset_Handler to save space. Bit-band is also used to write to peripheral registers to blink the LED, since this uses less instructions than the typical methods. Meanwhile, with many tweaks to the delay counting routine, [Rudra] was eventually able to get the blink frequency to 1.00019 Hz, as measured on a logic analyzer. That’s pretty darn close!
While it’s rare that you have only 50 bytes of binary space to blink an LED, work like this is a great way to flex your coding muscles. Code is on Github for the curious, and if you’ve worked up your own impressive tiny binaries, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Bunker Samples Intimate Violin Iremia - soft solo texturesIntimate Violin Iremia is a detailed exploration of the softest end of the dynamic range of a solo violin, featuring whisper quiet sustains, subtly evolving textures and organic swells. We believe that it is the tiny imperfections in a sound that makes it sound intimate and human, and the softer you play, the more these otherwise barely audible details come to the foreground, so in order to create the most intimate and human library we could, we chose to focus only on very, very quiet playing. To capture these soft details, we had to get close, which is why Intimate Violin was recorded with three close mic perspectives, the closest of which was a tiny condenser mic floated inside the body of the violin itself. The super close mic was placed about 30 cm above the bows contact point with the string and together with the more conventional close, mid and far perspectives it is easy to shape the sound to whatever you need. Iremia comes with 3 different sustains: without mute, with a standard mute and with a big rubber practice mute, a very delicate and fragile sound, and each of these sustains comes in 3 dynamic intensities from a whisper quiet ppp to a more robust but still soft single p. The textures in Iremia all comes in muted and non-muted versions, and with the crossfade patch you can even seamlessly move from muted into un-muted, something which is only possible on a virtual instrument. The textures are all improvised and great for chordal playing, as you have different notes subtly poking out of the texture at random times, adding interest to background parts. The organic swells come in 4,3,2 and 1 second lengths all in muted and non-muted versions, and gives you an instant Scandi Noir feel. All in all, Intimate Violin comes with 11 different types of sustains, 10 moving and evolving, episodic textures as well as 3 different types of natural swells in 4,3,2 and 1 second lengths. Also available in the Iremia series are the viola and cello, all featuring the exact same idea, articulations and microphone perspectives, so they fit together perfectly. This instrument contains 3415 samples, is 7.49 GB (installed size), it has 48 total articulations and 5 patches. It requires the full version Native Instruments Kontakt 6.7.1 or later. https://youtu.be/KMAe930diIA Read More

Indie Musician News Last Week: Distributors, GEO vs SEO & MoreIn indie musician news last week learn the risks of switching music distributors, understanding GEO vs SEO, how to use a new Instagram feature for music marketing, and more...
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Music Business News Last Week: AI Copyright, Concerts & MoreRead on for the top Music Business News Last Week from AI copyright laundering and a possible concert slowdown to Gen Alpha's disregard of Rock, top earning artists, and more.
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