Video killed the radio star. Streaming killed downloads. Home taping is killing music. Is the cloud about to kill the mastering engineer?

We live in worlds of displacement. Some of those new geographies are chosen, are freeing. This is the age of cheap airfares, of migratory artists crossing oceans, of global communication and spontaneous international collaborations. Then, there’s the inescapable darker side: forced migration, refugees. There are flights of fancy, flights of exile. And as through the […]

In the heart of Brazil, baile funk is charting a new direction for bass music – soaking up influences from across the ocean in UK, mixing and evolving. And so we’re keen on the latest cut from Lisbon’s Enchufada label – that’s the label behind the likes of Buraka Som Sistema and Branko – a […]

What do you get when you cross a tiny patch bay with total mayhem? Well, the bitRanger, apparently – a limited-run collaboration of Bastl Instruments and Casper Electronics (Peter Edwards), and possibly the most interesting surprise to come out of Moogfest this week.

Is IDM cool again? Like even calling things IDM? We think so. Now, there’s probably lots we could say about Autechre, but that’d take precious time away from you listening to all the Autechre-y Autechre that just Autechred into your Autechre. So, let’s just cover the facts, ma’am, in quick order – and they’re all […]

There have been vocal effects before – your vocoder, your pitch shifter, what have you. But the folks at iZotope set a more ambitious goal: be all the classic vocal effects. Put them a single plug-in full of modules. Then combine them in a way that makes them accessible, whether you’re preset surfing or dialing […]

For all the changes in visual appearance, all the extra features and connections, what hasn’t changed much in headphones is how headphones work. That makes Nura, a product launching this week on Kickstarter, all the more interesting. Not only does it introduce a unique design for how the headphones physically deliver sound to your ears, […]

It’s been a few years since the original development and management team behind Sibelius found themselves unemployed at the company they started, following a restructuring by owner Avid. Since then, Sibelius has continued to progress, but in a way that’s best described as incremental. It’s now a subscription product with an emphasis on the cloud, […]

Facebook is all but happy to distract you. It can bombard you with instant messages, show you endless pictures of the babies your forgotten friends from high school have just popped out. Now it can do live video streams and spawn trending news. What it bizarrely doesn’t do much is play music. And if you […]

You are probably equipped with ears as sharp and precise as the world’s top sound professionals. What you lack, then, is training.