标签：#music

Hi, my name is Yaniv Morozovsky, and I have worked in the radio industry for more than three decades. Most of that on SAM Broadcaster and, lately, AzuraCast. On 13 July I did something I had wanted to try for a long time: I handed one of my internet stations to automation completely, with nobody in the studio, and did not touch it. It is still on air today: https://ystream.live Some honest notes for anyone who runs a station and has wondered about the same. Segues are the whole game. The thing that makes automation sound like a jukebox is the fade timer. Every song fading at the same point, every cold ending faded when it should stop dead. What fixed it was analysing every song once (intro end, vocal entry, outro, the real ending) and crossing on those points per song. Once that was in, listeners stopped noticing there was no one there. Making an automated station sound like a DJ is mostly making the crossfades right, and that was our biggest achievement from day one. The voice matters less than where it lands. I cloned my own voice for the breaks, and honestly the voice itself is not what people comment on. What they hear is whether the talk-up ends before the vocal. When it lands, it sounds like radio. I let the AI DJ open every hour, read the weather, and in the last week also read a short news segment when the hour begins. Scheduling by rules beats scheduling by clocks, most of the time. Key, tempo, energy, era, genre, artist separation, and a few written rules like "start every hour with an international song". The hour writes itself and I stopped building clocks. What I gave up was the twenty years of Clockwheel habits, and there were days I missed them. Some of the most annoying bugs of automation software, like repeating the same song over and over, or playing the same artist twice in the same hour, are all gone. The boring parts decide whether you can actually broadcast. Royalty reports, listener stats per song, loudness that holds across a 1975 master and

According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), CD sales exploded in the first half of 2026. A new report from the organization says 17.5 million CDs were sold in the first six months of the year, up from just 12 million during the same period in 2025. That's a jump of 45.7 percent, […]

Audacity 4 has been in the works for some time, and had its own mini controversy last year when an unfortunate redesigned logo started making the rounds. The final version of the new icon isn't nearly as bad as the early rendition that was circulating last October. But more importantly, all the promised improvements to […]

It's not quite the "push button; get song" of Suno, but Roland's new Melody Flip tool marks the company's foray into generative AI music. Available as a plug-in for your digital audio workstation (DAW), Melody Flip offers around 250 "Palettes," which are essentially themed collections of musical ideas sorted by genre. You can start from […]

The "frequency healing" corner of the internet runs on faith. Apps ship MP3s labeled "40Hz gamma" and ask you to believe it. I'm a life scientist who builds web tools, and I couldn't ship that. So I built SereneSynth, a browser-based binaural beat and noise generator — and then I built a live spectrum analyzer into the page so anyone can audit the output in their own browser. This is the engineering write-up: the Web Audio graph, the FFT gotcha that almost made me publish wrong numbers, and how I cross-verified everything in Audacity. The honesty constraint first A binaural beat is not a tone in the air. Play 200 Hz into the left ear and 240 Hz into the right, and the listener's superior olivary complex computes the 40 Hz difference. A microphone — or a mono spectrum analyzer — will never show a 40 Hz peak. So the only honest thing a generator can prove is its carriers and its spectral slope. That is exactly what we measure. The synthesis graph Two sine oscillators, hard-panned with StereoPannerNode, summed into a master GainNode, tapped by an AnalyserNode before the destination — the analyzer observes exactly what the headphones receive. Settings that matter: fftSize 16384, smoothingTimeConstant 0.8. The FFT gotcha that almost made me ship garbage My first version used fftSize 1024: one fat bump near 220 Hz instead of two peaks. Bin width = 44100 / 1024 ≈ 43 Hz, and my carriers are 40 Hz apart — same bin, merged. At fftSize 16384 the bin width drops to ≈ 2.7 Hz and the carriers resolve as razor-sharp spikes at 200.0 and 240.0 Hz. Lesson: FFT size is the magnifying glass. If a "frequency proof" doesn't state its FFT size, ask. The widget renders a log axis (20–1000 Hz) because a linear axis wastes 90% of the canvas, and peak detection labels the top bins in the 100–500 Hz range live. Bit-exact, downloadable verification The page also renders 10-second stereo WAVs via OfflineAudioContext (16-bit PCM, 44.1 kHz): same graph, offline render, RIFF encode. No lossy compre

Have you ever had a melody, lyric, or song idea stuck in your head but felt completely unqualified to...

Lawsuit: Anthropic’s torrenting totally screwed songwriters as AI songs top charts.

I recently dug out my CDs and started reripping them all. I've found a few forgotten gems in there, but few hit harder for me than the beautifully concise Professor Murder Rides the Subway EP. There was a period of time in the mid-aughts in NYC where it seemed like every indie band wanted you […]

As audio-focused generative tools and platforms have gotten more sophisticated, the internet has become increasingly filled with AI-generated music whose melodies and vocals are algorithmically derived from the work of human artists. While some of the people pumping out this kind of content immediately own up to using AI, others have denied using the technology […]

SoundCloud has launched a new beta feature that allows artists on the audio streaming platform to sell music directly from their profiles, instead of diverting fans to purchase from third-party services like Bandcamp and Beatport. The feature aims to give listeners a better way to support the musicians behind their favorite songs, because SoundCloud isn't […]

I remember having a Spirograph as a kid and being obsessed with it. Its geometric patterns are hypnotic and gorgeous. I also love generative music composition. So bringing those two things together in a browser tab, I'm hooked. Musical Spirograph is a relatively simple concept. A set of points dash around the screen according to […]

Is Amp Crash a guitar amp or a guitar pedal? Yes. Death By Audio's latest is, in fact, both. While it's in a guitar pedal enclosure, Amp Crash is actually a tiny 3-watt amp hooked up to a 2-inch speaker. You can even connect an external speaker if you want. This isn't a digital re-creation […]

The pianist sits before her instrument. She carefully extends a front paw, pressing gingerly on a key. She presses again, and again. She is composing some soul music, because something terrible has happened to her: The vacuum cleaner has come out of the closet. Yes, my cat is a tortured artist. When Jeeves is moved […]

If you have generated a pure tone in code and played it back, you may have noticed a small click at the start, the end, or both. The tone itself is clean, but the edges are not. That click is not a bug in your sine wave. It is a real and well understood artifact, and the fix is a technique you will reuse in every sound you ever synthesize: an envelope. This piece builds directly on generating a basic tone from scratch . We take a tone that clicks, look at the actual sample values to see why, and apply an envelope to smooth it. Everything is plain C++ with no libraries, and every number here is captured from a real run of the code. Where the click comes from A tone is a list of samples tracing a sine wave. A speaker turns those samples into sound by physically moving: the sample value sets the position of the speaker cone at each instant, where 0 is its resting position and larger values push it further forward or pull it back. Playing the tone moves the cone in and out 44,100 times a second to recreate the wave. When playback starts, the cone is at rest, at position 0. But the first sample of the tone is usually not 0. It is wherever the wave happens to be at that instant, and if that value is far from zero, the cone has to move from rest to that position in a single sample step, about 22 microseconds at this sample rate. That near instant movement is the click. A cone moving gradually pushes the air smoothly and produces a smooth sound. A cone forced to a distant position in one sample makes a sharp, abrupt movement of the air, which your ear hears as a click or pop. You can see it directly in the numbers. Here are the first six samples of a plain 440 Hz tone at half amplitude: n=0 raw=0 n=1 raw=1026 n=2 raw=2048 n=3 raw=3063 n=4 raw=4065 n=5 raw=5051 The wave leaves zero and climbs fast. Between the silence before playback and sample 1, the signal jumps by 1026 in one step. The same thing happens at the end: if the tone stops while the wave is partway through a cy

"Breakups are… tough." It's the opening lines of an interlude towards the end of DOOMED! Called "It Happens in Every Universe." It's also basically the thesis of the entire record. It's no grand revelation, but it's a well-trodden subject that Open Mike Eagle manages to mine for artistic gold. Eagle's subject matter is usually personal, […]

When I'm asked what to buy if you want to get into making electronic music, I often recommend Elektron's budget-minded Model:Samples and Model:Cycles grooveboxes. They don't grab headlines the way Teenage Engineering's gear or the Telepathic Instruments Orchid do, and even compared to the company's higher-end and more niche musical offerings like the Digitakt, Octatrack, […]

As if you needed more reason to love Carly Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" beyond its pop perfection, it is also, according to lore, the genesis for Switched on Pop, one of the best music podcasts out there. Cohosts Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding obsessively dissect pop songs, from the theory behind their musical choices […]

Suno is releasing Studio 2.0 with significant upgrades that push it closer to an actual digital audio workstation (DAW), rather than a bare-bones audio editor with generative AI features. The biggest addition is undoubtedly MIDI support. Suno says that MIDI was its most requested feature, and it's basically a prerequisite for any modern DAW. Unfortunately, […]

After weeks of controversy and speculation, music company D'Addario has admitted that AI, specifically Suno, was used as part of a recent promotional video. For nearly two weeks, the company has denied the allegations, even as evidence piled up against it. It offered various explanations, from low-quality exports, to combinations of plugins like Autotune introducing […]

Spotify will soon label AI artists and remove their music from your recommendations. The change, which will start rolling out in mid-September, means you'll see an "AI Persona" badge on an artist's profile across the app if they do "not represent a real person." The music streaming platform will allow artists to disclose that they're […]