Baby Audio Humanoid review: hard tuning, vocal transformer, wavetables

More then just a vocoder, Baby Audio’s latest effect packs all the hardcore vocal special effects into one. It’s hard tuning meets phase vocoding meets wavetables.

Polyend Tracker Mini 2.0: synth engines, PERC drum synth, more of everything

Right after the major Tracker+ release, Polyend has a big update for the little Mini: now with Synth Engines, PERC drum engine, USB mass storage, more MIDI tracks, and other enhancements. And there’s a big sale on now, this week only.

Peder Mannerfelt made a track where the lead is just a flip phone

This is your banger early warning system. You know how it goes – you hear a track, and you just instantly know it’s going to become USB key fodder and will magically work on dancefloors. This is that, and the star is … a flip phone?

Extreme time stretching, spectral shaping: Sloom and instant ambient

You’ve heard time stretching. You’ve heard extreme time stretching. Sloom, a new plug-in and standalone app, is extreme-extreme-extreme time stretching – like instant ambient, instant experimental sonic manipulation – complete with unique spectral shaping.

Rift offers playful additive synthesis exploration: Max for Live review

Rainbow Circuit continues to dream up fanciful new Max for Live creations with eye-catching interface inventions. In the latest, Rift, you get a uniquely configurable custom additive synth oscillator.

Throwback Thursday: Kerri Chandler DJing on reel-to-reel tape is a joy

Everybody’s a DJ until you put four tape machines in front of them. Yeah, to vinyl purists, Kerri Chandler continues to tour his all tape DJ rig, and it never gets old.

Betty Apple, sci-fi, mermaids, volcanoes, techno, time travel: album + interview

Betty Apple’s Taiwan Bay Be is a full-length album exploring Taiwanese identity, time travel, sound, and the cosmic. Released this year on our Establishment, Betty is now in Berlin for a live presentation on Wednesday – and she has a lot to say, from unpacking the mermaid fairy tail to imagining science fiction futures and sound’s relationship to “God” and life after death.

What AI can’t do – parody – and why not

I was pondering what it was that bothered me so much about the Suno and Udio case. My pride as a composer? Erm, no. Fear of AI? Copy-pasting Abba lyrics, uh, not really. No, it’s something else…

Generative AI is “generating” existing pop songs: industry lawsuit

This week, the RIAA is suing the generative AI music startups behind Suno and Udio, claiming they’ve illegally trained their models on copyrighted music. The lawsuit reveals that you can enter simple prompts and get near-perfect clones of existing songs, down to the melody, harmony, lyrics, and arrangements. And you can hear those results for yourself.

Logic Pro for Mac 11, Logic Pro for iPad 2, reviewed: more than just AI

Logic Pro for Mac 11 and Logic Pro for iPad 2 deliver new machine learning-powered features on Apple Silicon: new Session Players, the ChromaGlow saturation model, and an integrated Stem Splitter. But AI isn’t the whole story in these two updates. Let’s talk about everything new. (Spoiler: bounce in place for external gear.)