Apple agrees to pay out $25M to settle lawsuit over Family SharingApple has agreed to pay out $25 million to settle a class action lawsuit over its Family Sharing feature, which lets users and up to five of their family members share access to apps, music, movies, TV shows and books that they purchase. The lawsuit, which was first filed in 2019, alleged that “Apple misrepresented […]
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Union Audio’s Elara.4 is a small window into Andy Rigby-Jones’ legendary career in DJ mixer designAndy Rigby Jones has been silently helping shape the modern DJ booth for almost 30 years. He’s not a household name for the casual DJ, nor likely known by many superstar DJs. But the artists who are deeply dedicated to their craft will be familiar with his vast catalogue of influential DJ mixers.
His expertise and passion led to a collaboration with techno titan Richie Hawtin on the PLAYDifferently Model 1 mixer in 2016, and to his key contributions to MasterSounds, a UK-based luxury rotary mixer brand. He’s also one of the people you can thank for conceptualising those filters on your favourite DJ mixers.
READ MORE: Union Audio’s Elara.4 is an analogue DJ mixer that’s “tiny but mighty” with “exemplary” build quality
But, much like fellow Cornishman Aphex Twin, Rigby-Jones tends to keep his head down and focus on creating what he loves. His latest wonder is the £1,800 Elara.4, released by his Union Audio brand. It’s a compact and understated DJ mixer with an emphasis on high-grade audio, supreme durability and straight-up fun. “I’ve based all of the Union Audio products on what someone else isn’t doing, rather than copying a trend,” he says from his Cornwall workshop. “We’ve always looked to innovate something; to find a niche that we can excel in.”
Union Audio Elara.4. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
As soon as we unbox the Elara.4, we realise we’re holding something special. It might not be perfect to all (some MusicTech readers bemoan the RCA record outputs instead of quarter-inch TRS outputs) but it is beautifully made. The faders are smooth but firm; the pots and dials are strong and responsive; the design is elegant and not overdone; just how Rigby-Jones wants it.
He wants users to “have the enjoyment of nice aesthetic, good sound quality, and have it fit within their lifestyle… it’s designed as more of a lifestyle product than it is a club installation product.” He teases that a club-grade mixer from Union Audio “might come later,” but we immediately understand why the Elara will work better in plush listening bars or treasured home setups. You’re not exactly going to want an IPA spilt over this during a set.
Union Audio Elara.4. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
As classy and coveted as the Elara.4 might be, we’re curious to learn how Rigby-Jones arrived at the design. With over 40 years of DJing under his belt and three decades in the mixer-making game, he clearly knows what to strive for in a new product. And it must be nice to be able to make equipment that’s almost custom-built to his needs – “It is a bit cheeky,” he laughs. But it turns out he’s been doing that since day one.
Rigby-Jones happened across DJing in 1970s Cornwall, around the same time the rest of the world became accustomed to headphone-wearing tastemakers commanding the music in clubs.
“I was a teenager in the 70s, when the disco explosion happened,” he explains. “We used to go to the local disco and everything else; I loved the music. DJing was suddenly starting to become a bit of a thing. For some reason, I decided I wanted to be a DJ. But equipment was so expensive back then – it was certainly out of the reach of a teenager. So I ended up building a lot of my own kit – amps, a mixer, speakers and stuff. That’s how I got both into DJing and really into electronics.
Andy Rigby-Jones. Image: Union Audio
“And it wasn’t really until… I mean I started DJing on a regular basis in the late 70s – I got a club residency in 1979 – and I DJ’d at least once a week, most weeks, until the year 2000,” he says with a bashful chuckle. “It was a 20-year career of DJing local gigs. So music has been an integral part of my life, as has electronics.”
Alongside his local DJing gig, Rigby-Jones found himself a job in mechanics, having trained as an engineer following his spurt of DIY mixer making. But he soon found himself in need of a new venture.
“I was suddenly out of work at the beginning of the 90s. And just by coincidence, Allen & Heath were advertising for staff. So I got a job with them and, at the time, I thought it was only going to be a temporary career. I hadn’t particularly thought about it. But the rest is history; I stayed there for an awfully long time – 20-odd years, anyway.”
Union Audio Elara.4. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Allen & Heath, at the time, was renowned for its live mixers, thanks to musical advocates such as Pink Floyd, The Who and Genesis. Rigby-Jones joined the brand as an assembler on the shop floor, but soon moved into the test department and rose into a junior R&D position in the mid-90s, continuing to work on the live sound equipment while keeping his DJ gig on the side.
“There’s the rub. I wanted a good DJ mixer because there wasn’t anything I liked,” he says. “So I persuaded the powers that be: ‘let me do a prototype DJ mixer!’ It wasn’t that I thought there was a huge commercial value in it, I just wanted to build a DJ mixer that I wanted to play with. And that’s how the original Xone:62 came about. That would’ve been the late-90s.
“We took that to the Frankfurt Musikmesse [a now-extinct music gear trade show], showed it on the stand, and got a lot of interest. And, yeah, then we developed that into a product and launched it in 2000, I think.”

By this point, Rigby-Jones found himself fascinated by frequency filters. He says he “wasn’t really supposed to be” playing with filter circuits, but was “blown away” by the sound.
“Of course, filtering was starting to come into music production at that time,” he continues. “A lot of house tracks had filters on. And I thought ‘wow, a DJ mixer with filters would be super cool.’ So that was the sort of hook with [Allen & Heath’s] Xone range at that time: it had filters.”
Filters were just the first step. Before he knew it, Rigby-Jones was helping design mixers to accompany laptops for digital DJs and was part of a revolution in DJing. “There was a lot of resistance to CDJs,” he says. “Slowly it became more acceptable. But then suddenly, computer laptop DJing came and everyone was like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s cool,’ and there wasn’t that resistance.
“We did the Xone:92, the whole Xone range and the accessories. We were the first company to get into professional DJ controllers – the brand was associated with analogue mixers, but Xone produced one of the first multichannel DJ controllers, the Xone: 3D, which was sort of ahead of the game.”
Union Audio Elara.4. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Developing such forward-thinking products was seldom intentional. Naturally, Rigby-Jones still enjoys the odd DJ mix or two – so would you if you’d been doing it since the 70s and found yourself surrounded by mixers all the time. While mixing, he finds moments where he’ll conceive a new feature or design quirk, and get a feel for what might work.
“With the PLAYDifferently Model 1, it’s got a fairly unique EQ system, which is nearly all filters – high-pass, low-pass, and then a swept-mid. And [that concept] came from just playing around.”
Union Audio’s Elara.4 is no different. He says that the compact mixer “came about from me playing around at home, mixing. And at the time, I was using a MasterSounds Two Valve, which is a lovely little mix. But it’s only two channels. But I had a tiny little place to DJ in and could barely get two decks and the Two Valve. And I thought, ‘Well, it’d be really nice to have four channels – 2CDJs and my two vinyl decks. But I haven’t got any room – I can’t be alone in having limited booth space.’
Union Audio Elara.4. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
“That’s how Elara came about. It’s a niche product, you know. A lot of people might say, ‘Not exactly for me.’ But some people will go, ‘Wow, that’s what I’ve been waiting for: a compact four-channel mixer that isn’t gonna take up my booth.’”
The mixer maestro doesn’t allude to why he left Allen & Heath, other than speaking of a stressful time around his departure. But, evidently, he’s found tremendous joy in the freedom of Union Audio, working with Hawtin on the PLAYDifferently series, and with MasterSounds head honcho Luke Shaw on rotary mixers. Shaw said as much in our MasterSounds cover feature earlier in 2023: “Andy is now an integral part of MasterSounds and I’m an integral part of what Andy does. We chat daily and it’s not just a partnership, it’s a friendship.”
But this is only Union Audio’s second product. Its inaugural mixer, the Orbit.6 rotary mixer, was released in 2022 and comes at an eye-watering price of £5,490 – definitely more for the purists and die-hard DJs.
Union Audio Elara.4. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Thankfully, such purists have sent tons of positive feedback to Union Audio, and MasterSounds’ reputation speaks for itself. With the Elara.4, Rigby-Jones says that the feedback has all been “fantastic”. On the note of RCA connectors for the record out, he notes that “most recorders are gonna use mini-jacks or RCA, so we went with the most common one. But everything else is XLR and quarter-inch jacks.”
For him, his favourite part of the Elara.4 is the aesthetics. “With all the products that we’ve built, we give them a slightly hi-fi look, with the machined aluminium panel front panels. So I love the aesthetics of it. It’s got a really nice EQ. The filter is nice and smooth, and the isolator is interesting. It’s a little bit different to most isolators – it’s got a narrower Q – but you can do some really cool things with it, especially texturing the bass.”
Union Audio Elara.4. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Rigby-Jones and his team at Union Audio are working on a plethora of new products, including a multi-effects unit, a bespoke headphone preamp, a new iteration of the Orbit.6, and more. We can’t help but wonder what his vision of a future DJ booth might be like.
“It’s been the question everyone’s been asking for the last 20 or 30 years. ‘What’s next?’ And it’s so hard to predict,” he laughs. “[Pioneer DJ’s] CDJs are so cool. Not just the CDJ, but the media player. I mean, hardly anyone ever uses CDs anymore – we just call them CDJs. But they are such a clever piece of kit, that you can see why everyone wants to use them. And, to be honest, do you really want to take a laptop around with you anymore? Unless you are Richie Hawtin and you’re doing live production work, with 20 channels in the mix. For most people, two or three for two DJs, and you’ve got an awesome set.”
We wonder whether more hefty mixers, such as the Pioneer V10, could allude to a bigger DJ cockpit.
“For most people, that’s probably overkill,” Rigby-Jones retorts. “I mean, when you think of where all the mixers in the world go, they aren’t all going into clubs. And it’s something that I find quite funny, really: lots of our customers, they’re not youngsters. They’re mature, professional people, who have had a successful career, but they still love dance music.
Union Audio Elara.4. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
“And when you think that house music came in nearly 40 years ago, people who were teenagers, or early 20s, they’re now mature people. But that music still is with them. “It’s almost come full circle… I can remember when house music came out and people were saying ‘It’ll be gone in a year.’ But it’s still here and hasn’t changed that much. Thank goodness.”
Many people’s lust for music equipment is the same – it hasn’t changed that much. Although we’ve got access to iPads, laptops, and other modern music gear, there’s just something all too attractive about a vintage-looking bit of gear. Whether it’s a rugged Fender Stratocaster, a reissue of the classic Minimoog, a fondness for a big vinyl collection, or a retro-style mixer like a MasterSounds Valve or Union Audio Elara.4.
Artists and DJs who have spent years honing their craft will often be curious about what lurks beyond the chunky, battered mixers in the venues they regularly play in. It might just be the Elara.4. Just, c’mon, keep that IPA away from the decks.
Check out the Elara.4 and more about Union Audio’s story. 
The post Union Audio’s Elara.4 is a small window into Andy Rigby-Jones’ legendary career in DJ mixer design appeared first on MusicTech.

From SoundCloud’s profitability to Universal’s $50bn+ public valuation… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-UpFive of the biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days
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Cradle Releases FREE State Machine BitFlip Virtual Instrument
Cradle’s new State Machine BitFlip plugin is a FREE retro-gaming-inspired instrument for macOS and Windows. If you miss the days of the 8-bit Sega Master System, the original Nintendo (NES), Atari 7800, or any other classic games console, Cradle has the perfect walk down memory lane for you. State Machine BitFlip is a free instrument [...]
View post: Cradle Releases FREE State Machine BitFlip Virtual Instrument

Taped Vibes: free HALion instrument from Steinberg Steinberg's latest HALion instrument offers a classic electric piano captured with a DI, vintage preamp and thorugh a Space Echo.

Denise Audio revamps its cult bass plugin into supersized Bass XXLDenise Audio has unveiled a supersized version of its cult Bass XL plugin, fittingly called Bass XXL.
The plugin is the first Denise Audio product to have been released since Baby Audio completed its acquisition of the company in September. The company claims that the plugin is the “be-all-end-all” bass enhancement tool and now offers a more effective way to get a thick and consistent low end.
Per a press release, Bass XXL uses a proprietary algorithm that generates additional harmonics which are actually
above the bass frequencies. This concept takes advantage of a psychoacoustic phenomenon where the brain interprets sub bass audio largely based on its harmonics more so than the lowest sounds being produced.
Consequently, even without there being any sub bass frequencies, our brains fill in the blanks and still perceive the low end as long as the proper harmonics are present. Furthermore, the plugin also does not introduce any of the phasing issues that can sometimes occur with these effects and promises to enhance bass in a way that modern earbuds and speakers are unable to do.
Denise claims Bass XXL is especially suited to “adding presence to anemic drum recordings, dynamically control inconsistent bass performances, or to elevate and refine the low end of an entire mix with surgical precision” via an “intuitive and clutter free interface”.

Users are able to dial in their target frequency manually by root note, or via MIDI control. The plugin also makes it possible to gain clinical insight into your track’s bass frequencies with a spectrogram zoomed in on just the low end frequencies.
Bass XXL also has a pre-delay feature to preserve the transient of the dry signal and a mono knob to give the flexibility of preserving a track’s stereo image. There are two other knobs too – a slope knob to shape the harmonic signal by setting the curve at which Bass XXL’s frequencies roll off, and a range knob to set how many octaves Bass XXL’s harmonics will be generated over.
Denise Audio have stressed that Bass XXL is not a sub-synth, the main difference being it derives the harmonics from the original track. It gives a more natural bass enhancement that the company says feels more like “adding extra magic” than adding another instrument.
Bass XXL is available at an introductory price of $39 and will rise to $69 when the introductory sale is over.
For more information, head to Denise Audio.
The post Denise Audio revamps its cult bass plugin into supersized Bass XXL appeared first on MusicTech.

Andrew Huang shows off his (music) junk in new videoAndrew Huang took EarthQuaker Devices inside his studio in Toronto in the latest instalment of their acclaimed YouTube series Show Us Your Junk!
The musician and content creator showed off a huge, eclectic range of gear during the video including numerous EarthQuaker devices such as Avalanche Run, Hoof Reaper, Data Corrupter, Pyramids, Astral Destiny and Acapulco Gold.

READ MORE: Baby Audio Transit breathes life into your transitions, courtesy of Andrew Huang

Huang also discusses his journey from being a musician to a popular YouTuber, which reached a point where YouTube “became bigger than a lot of what I was doing musically”.
“I was always interested in different types of music. I was working on a lot of different stuff, and wanted to break this idea that you need to have this defined sound and brand,” he explains in the video.
“I found, when I wrapped up my whole sense of exploring in the YouTube vlog format, people could latch onto that; they could see me, get to know me, even if they weren’t into everything I was creating, they’d be into my philosophy or the techniques I was sharing. So in a way the YouTube channel is the brand part of it, and whatever I happen to be doing on it, if it’s funny, artistic, noisy, pretty, it can all fit in that world.”
Check out the video below:

The popularity of Huang’s channel has meant that he has been able to work extensively with various brands to launch different gear. For example, earlier this year, he teamed up with Baby Audio to create Transit, a multi-effects plugin that claimed to give users’ mix “transitions super powers”.
He was also involved in launching the new Ableton Push 3, posting a video showcasing the power of the pad’s MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) capabilities, live recording workflows via the built-in interface, and he also demonstrates how to integrate external synths.
The post Andrew Huang shows off his (music) junk in new video appeared first on MusicTech.

Fred Again.. has produced a track on Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign’s VULTURES albumFred Again.. has been confirmed to have a producer credit on a track from Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign’s hotly anticipated collaborative album VULTURES. 
The album’s page on Genius credits the Grammy-nominated producer on the track Slide. Fred Again.. had been playing the track during a run of shows in Los Angeles last month, though sometimes he played a shortened version. He had confirmed that he had worked with Ty Dolla $ign on the song a few months prior.

READ MORE: How to recreate Fred again..’s “Jungle” bass sound

The project is apparently meant to be released today (December 15), with The Independent reporting that West was overheard saying in a club at the weekend what the album was called and that it would be out “this coming Friday”.
Last week, Ty confirmed the album’s tracklisting with a handwritten note posted on Instagram. It will supposedly come out under the name ¥$, and acts including Freddie Gibbs, Playboi Carti, Future, James Blake, Nicki Minaj and several others will be making guest appearances, as well as West’s own daughter North.

Fred Again played a longer version of this ¥$ snippet last night
He confirmed that he worked on this song few month ago with Ty Dolla Sign pic.twitter.com/CXJBOdvKPm
— Donda Times (@dondatimes) November 4, 2023

However, there is a potential obstacle that may impede the album from hitting streaming services today. Minaj has denied her verse on unreleased song New Body, despite West pleading with her to clear it.
Responding on Instagram Live, Minaj said: “Child, that train has left the station, OK? No disrespect in any way, I just put out a brand new album. Why would I put out a song that has been out for three years? Come on, guys.” New Body was originally set to be released on West’s unreleased album Yandhi, which was scrapped in 2018.
The album is West’s first release since 2021’s DONDA and his first since accusations of anti-Semitism were levelled against him in October 2022 after he posted on social media: “Going death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE … You guys have toyed with me and tried to black ball anyone whoever opposes your agenda.”
He later said: “Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler … [Nazis] did good things too.” He also posted an image of a swastika blended with a Star of David. VULTURES’ title track both addresses and stokes these accusations, with West rapping: “How I’m anti-Semitic? I just fucked a Jewish bitch.”
A listening party for the album was held in Miami earlier this week and West courted controversy once again by wearing a black Ku Klux Klan-style hood to the event.
VULTURES’ artwork, meanwhile, features a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, the Romantic-era German landscape painter who was later championed by the Nazis.
The post Fred Again.. has produced a track on Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign’s VULTURES album appeared first on MusicTech.

Bitwig and Orchestral Tools launch free sound package with “high-quality brass samples”Bitwig and Orchestral Tools have released a free sound package packed with “high-quality brass samples”.
With its diverse, dynamic palette of rich brass tones, timbres and articulation, the package is set to change the game in terms of digital brass digital sampling.

READ MORE: “There’s nothing I can do in Dolby Atmos to make the song ‘better’”: Music engineers weigh in on the Atmos boom

The broad range will include a wide range of solitary samples to dense ensemble sonics, as well as allowing users to freely combine the diverse selection of sounds; musicians will have the ability to toy with distinctive trumpet and horn sections, layer up trombone and tuba combos, or go all-out with the full force of the entire brass section.
Brass, Trumpet and Horn, and Trombone Ensemble and Tuba recordings will all offer sustained, staccato and marcato samples, with Brass also allowing for sustained soft, muted-sustained and muted-staccato options. The package comes with 18 presents, and eight remix presents for easy manipulation.
Every effort was made to replicate the true colour of each instrument, capturing each instrumental nuance, with natural volume balancing across all instruments to allow ultimate flexibility.
The Orchestral Brass package comes as the third release in the Orchestral Tools Collection specifically optimised for the Bitwig’s Sampler tool, following on from the Orchestral Strings and Orchestral Woodwinds packages respectively.
Orchestral Brass is available to download via the Packages tab within the DAW’s Dashboard, and is free for anyone with an active Bitwig Studio Upgrade plan. It requires 3.7GB of disk space.
For more information, head to Bitwig.
The post Bitwig and Orchestral Tools launch free sound package with “high-quality brass samples” appeared first on MusicTech.

“There’s nothing I can do in Dolby Atmos to make the song ‘better’”: Music engineers weigh in on the Atmos boomAudio engineers have opened up about how the push for Dolby Atmos-mixed music is altering the music landscape and in turn, their jobs.

READ MORE: This man releases a new album on Spotify every single day – here’s how much money he makes

As Dolby Laboratories Inc. revealed in their latest earnings report, “over 85% of the global Billboard top 100 artists of 2023 have one or more tracks available in Dolby Atmos.”
The growing ubiquity of the format, combined with the push from tech giants like Apple — who recently unveiled plans to offer additional financial incentives for record labels and artists to mix their music using the format — signals one thing: that the technology is here to stay.
Music engineers like James Auwarter, who took their chances with Atmos early on, also tell Bloomberg that their bet is paying off.
“Every other surround format for music has failed,” says Auwarter, who admits he was “sceptical” about Atmos initially. “But partially because Apple Music has pushed it so much and because it’s so accessible nowadays, I think it’s here to stay.”
For engineer Joseph Chudyk, whose collaborators include Crowder, Miranda Lambert and Kane Brown, “It’s a whole new job that has never existed before — Apple created a whole new job title.”
Nathaniel Reichman, who specialises in classical music and Atmos, also says he observed a surge in interest for the format when Tidal first started supporting it, with demand exploding following Apple Music’s endorsement.
Last year, the engineer mixed around 40 albums in Atmos, with the number increasing to 55 this year. Music mixing now accounts for the majority of his business, the most of which includes Atmos. Similarly, Al Lawson, who’s worked with Fred Again.., Tiesto and Swedish House Mafia, says 75 percent of his projects this year involved Atmos mixes.
That said, the technology still has some ways to go before it becomes a household staple. For one, Atmos only works if listeners own the right hardware — which already deters new users from trying it. And even so, not everyone will enjoy the way it makes their music sound, since “sounds are placed around or behind the listener rather than in front of them”.
As Lawson puts it, if a listener prefers sound in front of them, they likely won’t ever opt for Atmos.
He adds that “There’s nothing I can do in Atmos to make the song ‘better’.” Or perhaps more accurately, “There is no ‘better.’ I can only make it different.”
The post “There’s nothing I can do in Dolby Atmos to make the song ‘better’”: Music engineers weigh in on the Atmos boom appeared first on MusicTech.

Let 1,000 AI Startups Bloom: Why the Time to Disrupt the Music Industry Is Now [Kyle Bylin]Former Hypebot editor Kyle Bylin argues that artificial intelligence will soon revolutionize the music industry even more than past innovations like MP3s and streaming. AI tools will enable anyone to. Continue reading
The post Let 1,000 AI Startups Bloom: Why the Time to Disrupt the Music Industry Is Now [Kyle Bylin] appeared first on Hypebot.

2024 Music Industry Predictions from Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0We’re sharing 2024 Music Industry Predictions from our favorite thinkers and doers, and today, Bobby Owsinski takes the stage. Regular Hypebot readers know Bobby as a contributor via his Music. Continue reading
The post 2024 Music Industry Predictions from Bobby Owsinski of Music 3.0 appeared first on Hypebot.

There is more than one way to make a living as a musicianToday’s Hypebot Flashback Friday resurfaces one of our most popular posts of the year: “8 different ways to make money with music.” These strategies can help whether trying to earn. Continue reading
The post There is more than one way to make a living as a musician appeared first on Hypebot.

NetEase Cloud Music wants to be ‘the bridge’ between artists in the West and audiences in China. Here’s how.In this feature, we speak to Vivian Wei, Vice President of Copyrights at China-headquartered music streaming platform NetEase Cloud Music
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The Very Loud Indeed Co. reveal DOMUS The Very Loud Indeed Co.'s latest sample library contains a mixture of loops and single hits that are said to be particularly well-suited to action and crime drama scores.