Carbon Chemist

Tag: music

  • The Stan Accounts That Keep Posting Through Brazil’s Ban on X

    The Stan Accounts That Keep Posting Through Brazil’s Ban on X

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    For weeks, some 40 million Brazilian X users have been beholden to the whims of Elon Musk and the country’s government. Back in April, Supreme Court judge Alexandre de Moraes opened an inquiry into the social network after Musk snubbed a court order asking the company to block accounts that backed former right-wing president Jair Bolsonaro and allegedly spread hate speech and misinformation.

    On August 30, Brazil’s top court suspended X, giving internet service providers five days to comply and causing fan accounts to send up flares alerting their followers that they’d be going quiet.

    During the blackout, several fan accounts and other Brazilians on X tried to bring their followers over to platforms like Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky, the latter seeing a 2 million user jump in the days after the ban went into effect, bringing its total users to around 8 million. Tumblr, long a hub for fan activity, also saw a 350 percent increase in users, according to a report in TechCrunch. But many users found it hard to rebuild the followings they had on X.

    “It’s undeniable that, for many businesses, the suspension of X has affected the way they communicate with customers,” says Brazilian journalist Raphael Tsavkko Garcia. (His work has appeared in WIRED.) “The same goes for artists and influencers who have seen an important platform for promotion disappear overnight.”

    Those who couldn’t transfer all of their followers from X to other platforms still vowed to maintain the new accounts they migrated to. Izadora Vasconcelos, who is behind Miley Cyrus Brasil, an account with more than 93,000 followers, says that “while X is under a businessman who thinks he is bigger than the laws of a country,” she and the other admins on the account will “keep Bluesky and X, at least for a while. So we don’t have to start from scratch again.”

    While the platform has been down, fans also lost access to their archives and all the work they’d put into curating them, Driessen notes, memory-holing “valuable pieces of pop cultural history” in the process. Even the accounts that have been able to continue posting sporadically still aren’t available for fans within the country who want to scroll through their old posts.

    On September 18, when X briefly rerouted internet traffic to get around Brazil’s roadblocks, fans rejoiced. “I know it’s just a silly app, but it’s where I [feel] safe,” wrote Thaís Garcia, the person behind the Taylor Swift account @thalovestay. “I’m not in a good place mentally, and these past week was horrible without having here to distract myself.”

    The reprieve was short-lived, but on September 20 X’s lawyers told the Supreme Court they’d found a legal representative for Brazil, a step toward getting the platform turned back on in the country. The company is now reportedly complying with some of Brazil’s other requests in hopes that the X ban will be lifted, perhaps as early as next week.

    Once that happens, and it seems like it will, Brazilian stans and their international followers will be able to access the full breadth of the communities they built on Musk’s platform—even those who have already moved on.

    Amaral notes that because many of the fan accounts are linked to more progressive artists, some of them may be reluctant to return to X due to the lack of moderation. “We know that for many fandoms, being part of a minority (whether in terms of gender, race, etc.) is a key aspect of their identity,” she adds. There is a symbiotic relationship between politics and pop culture, and “after this sort of Ragnarok for Brazilian fan accounts/fan culture,” Amaral says, many of the folks behind the accounts will have to consider whether they want to return.

    Even before X’s suspension, Beyoncé Brasil’s administrators had been working on revising and building out their website. It’s been nice to have something that’s “100 percent ours,” Silveira says. “I would say [the X account is] like a photo album: It’s good to revisit it, but we won’t die if we don’t have it.”

    Gabriel Leão contributed reporting from São Paulo.

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  • The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself

    The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself

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    If you step into the headquarters of the Internet Archive on a Friday after lunch, when it offers public tours, chances are you’ll be greeted by its founder and merriest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle.

    You cannot miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some sort of Grecian-themed Las Vegas attraction and plopped down at random in San Francisco’s foggy, mellow Richmond district. Once you pass the entrance’s white Corinthian columns, Kahle will show you the vintage Prince of Persia arcade game and a gramophone that can play century-old phonograph cylinders on display in the foyer. He’ll lead you into the great room, filled with rows of wooden pews sloping toward a pulpit. Baroque ceiling moldings frame a grand stained glass dome. Before it was the Archive’s headquarters, the building housed a Christian Science church.

    I made this pilgrimage on a breezy afternoon last May. Along with around a dozen other visitors, I followed Kahle, 63, clad in a rumpled orange button-down and round wire-rimmed glasses, as he showed us his life’s work. When the afternoon light hits the great hall’s dome, it gives everyone a halo. Especially Kahle, whose silver curls catch the sun and who preaches his gospel with an amiable evangelism, speaking with his hands and laughing easily. “I think people are feeling run over by technology these days,” Kahle says. “We need to rehumanize it.”

    In the great room, where the tour ends, hundreds of colorful, handmade clay statues line the walls. They represent the Internet Archive’s employees, Kahle’s quirky way of immortalizing his circle. They are beautiful and weird, but they’re not the grand finale. Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there’s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle.

    Brewster Kahle Blazer Clothing Coat Jacket Adult Person Standing Accessories and Glasses

    Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive’s founder and biggest cheerleader.

    Photograph: Gabriela Hasbun

    It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that functions as an unparalleled record of the internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical-preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic regard the Internet Archive inspires is earned—without it, the world would lose its best public resource on internet history.

    Its employees are some of its most devoted congregants. “It is the best of the old internet, and it’s the best of old San Francisco, and neither one of those things really exist in large measures anymore,” says the Internet Archive’s director of library services, Chris Freeland, another longtime staffer, who loves cycling and favors black nail polish. “It’s a window into the late-’90s web ethos and late-’90s San Francisco culture—the crunchy side, before it got all tech bro. It’s utopian, it’s idealistic.”

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  • De-Fi Platform Studio Review: A Good Compact Recording Desk

    De-Fi Platform Studio Review: A Good Compact Recording Desk

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    Nine years ago I decided to get back to making music after a very long hiatus. In the beginning, my setup was extremely humble, featuring an aging ThinkPad and a cheap MIDI controller. I didn’t even have an audio interface for properly recording my guitar.

    Since then, well, things have gotten a bit out of hand. My synth collection grew from a couple toys (a Casio VL-1 and a Stylophone) to well over a dozen instruments. I have more MIDI controllers than any human could ever need. I picked up decent studio monitors, an audio interface, and even some ADAT expansions so I could keep more of my ever growing gear collection permanently connected.

    One thing that didn’t change, however, was my desk. Up until just a couple of weeks ago, I was still making do with the same cheap Ikea Lagkapten/Alex combo ($220). It was a large desk, but it didn’t give me a lot of flexibility for laying out my setup. Now that I’ve had an opportunity to check out the updated version of De-Fi’s Platform Studio Production Desk, which has dedicated mounting points for rack gear, space for speakers, and a pull-out keyboard tray, I don’t know that I can ever go back. If you’re in the market for an affordable studio desk for your music-making and are trying to decide between cheaper options and a dedicated desk like this one, read on.

    Getting Settled

    For all of its aesthetic angles and recording studio glamour, the Platform Desk, which was originally made by a brand called Output that has now rebranded to De-Fi, still goes together like Ikea furniture. It’s a piece of flatpack that you need to assemble with the aid of a screwdriver and an Allen wrench. It’s definitely more substantial than your average Malm piece (what with it being made out of plywood instead of particle board), but the basic concept is the same.

    Front view of beige wooden desk with minimal risers and pullout drawer holding a variety of music production equipment

    Photograph: Terrence O’Brien

    As hard as it is to believe, one area where Ikea does have a leg up on De-Fi is the quality of the instructions. There is a video walk-through of the assembly that is OK, but it could be more detailed. The “print” version, well, don’t bother printing it. For whatever reason, it’s formatted as a single-page PDF when it should clearly be five or six. When you try to print it out you end up with a narrow, illegible strip down the middle of a single piece of paper.

    The parts list also failed to mention that there was a power drill bit for the hex screws in one of the bags. I only discovered it halfway through assembly, after my hands were aching and I’d stripped a few screws with the Allen wrench.

    It’s also worth mentioning a couple of small quality-control issues I encountered during assembly. The shelf pin holes for the top level were missing on one side, and I had to drill them in myself. And some of the edges weren’t particularly neat. I even got a pretty nasty splinter from the lip of the desktop.

    Living in Tight Spaces

    There was one pretty obvious con once everything was fully assembled: the size of this desk. I live in NYC, so space is at a premium, and fitting the 60-inch-wide by 38-inch-deep desk was difficult. Folks with a lot of space won’t have the same issue, but it’s worth looking into the size before ordering. My home studio is also my office and my guest bedroom; it was a bit cramped to begin with. Previously there was enough room to walk between the unfolded pullout couch and my desk. Now even my chair won’t fit between the desk and the foot of the pullout. In order to make room for the desk, I had to ditch my monitor stands (the desk has elevated spaces for monitors to be placed).

    Another immediately obvious con is that the Platform Desk has no drawers. Granted, studio desks generally don’t, but it did mean I had to keep around the Alex drawer unit from my old desk for typical desk-y storage. The total floor space taken up by my revamped recording area had suddenly exploded.

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  • Your Dumb Memes Revived One of Butt Rock’s Biggest Bands

    Your Dumb Memes Revived One of Butt Rock’s Biggest Bands

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    Creed is having a moment. Actually, if we’re being precise, it’s having innumerable moments, over and over again, all across the internet.

    On Instagram, the band has been repurposed as a comedic device for dunking on President Joe Biden; on TikTok, shitposters imagined what it would be like to explain the butt rock legends to an alien race; and on X, Creed is an easy punchline for commenting on political theater. All the while, those memes are collectively accumulating millions of likes, views, and shares.

    It’s safe to say that if Charli XCX hadn’t already made 2024 a “brat summer,” then this—as far as memes are concerned—would be Scott Stapp season. And Stapp, for his part, seems to be fully aware of it. “I’ve seen so many [memes],” the Creed frontman says. “Some are hilarious and I find myself just laughing, and some are really heartwarming in terms of how much time and energy the fan has put into creating the video.”

    The wildest part of all isn’t that Creed is being memed to death—it’s that the band is seemingly being memed back to life. In 2024, Creed quietly clawed its way back from internet punchline to real, honest-to-god, record-selling rock band. By June, the band found itself back in the charts—the top 40 no less. Last month, the band’s Greatest Hits was climbing in sales.

    As a result of its unexpected resurgence, Creed is even back touring, playing sold-out shows with fellow postgrunge staples like 3 Doors Down. On top of that, they’re selling tickets for arena gigs for upwards of $100. For the super Creed-core, there’s the band’s second-annual Miami-to-Nassau “Creed cruise” in 2025, which lists top-tier tickets for an eye-watering $4,300. Those tickets, by the way, are sold out.

    Sure, old music finds new audiences all the time, often with a bump from the internet—but Creed isn’t other bands. Creed is a band that hasn’t released a new studio album in 15 years and has spent most of that decade and a half as the butt of internet jokes. By industry standards, Creed was, at least until recently, six feet under.

    “Back in 2020, Creed hadn’t toured since 2012, so we were kind of intrigued, I think would be the word, to see the interest and to see the songs having new life and resurgence and renaissance,” says Creed’s agent, Ken Fermaglich, who has been with the band for decades.

    All of that begs a couple obvious questions: Why here and why now?

    According to YouTuber Pat Finnerty, whose channel “What Makes This Song Stink” ritually roasts bands of Creed’s ilk, the equation for Creed’s comeback is a simple one: time + cringe = popularity.

    Creed, Finnerty says, are now past the 20-year mark after which most old bands can feel new again. “But then there’s the meme thing—you see all these memes of like ‘this band sucks,’ but now, to use the parlance of our time, ‘this band fucks,’” he adds. “They’re switching it from ‘this band sucks’ to ‘this band fucks’ and it’s actually funnier for them to get into it.”



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  • The Shade Room Founder Is Ready to Dial Down the Shade

    The Shade Room Founder Is Ready to Dial Down the Shade

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    Angie Nwandu launched The Shade Room in 2014 as a side hustle. Today, that side hustle—which grew from an Instagram-only celebrity tabloid into a media company with a 40-person staff—reaches 29 million social media obsessives by tapping into their wolfish appetite for drama.

    The Shade Room pioneered a unique, if somewhat innovative, brand of digital media, merging elements of fan culture around the machine of celebrity news (Shade Room regulars are called Roomies). More than your run-of-the-mill gossip rag or news aggregator, TSR evolved into an information hub for “the culture,” Nwandu says, “but also a reflection of it and voice for it. We’re known as a megaphone.”

    The primary focus of the platform is the fragile world of Black celebrity. Want to know who NFL quarterback Jalen Hurts got engaged to or why Naomi Campbell has beef with Rihanna? Maybe you are wondering why a Louisville woman claims Kanye West “telegraphically” told her to allegedly steal a vehicle with a child inside? TSR has you covered.

    I recently phoned Nwandu to chat about the controversial influence of The Shade Room and the legacy she wants to leave behind. The platform has slowly branched into different coverage areas—politics, investigative reporting, spirituality—and she says that’s all part of a larger plan to eventually move beyond celebrity gossip, which she describes as “tiring.”

    Nwandu hasn’t gotten there yet. The week we spoke, music mogul Diddy was arrested after a grand jury indicted him on charges including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy (he pleaded not guilty), so we also talked about that—and Nwandu was an open book.

    JASON PARHAM: The Shade Room was a pioneer of social media-centric celebrity news on Instagram. Today there are hundreds of accounts that do what you do. How does that feel?

    ANGIE NWANDU: Nobody ever gives this nod to The Shade Room but we served up a blueprint that was able to be replicated. I’m friends with Shawn McKenzie [founder of The Spiritual Word] and Jason Lee [founder of Hollywood Unlocked], and we’ve had conversations. I had talks with both of them where I shared tips and advice. I’m happy to see that our blueprint was able to inspire other Black media companies who are thriving in their own right. To see the success of all these platforms is amazing to me. I’m actually really proud of that because who doesn’t want to start something that creates a ripple effect?

    The Shade Room has never shied away from controversy but I imagine there are editorial guidelines that you follow. What won’t you post?

    If I say which stories, it would defeat the purpose now. I will say, what we don’t do is out people. A lot of people send us very salacious stories where they are outing people. That’s something that we stay away from. In the beginning we were kinda wild, but generally that is something we have avoided. I’ve seen the damage in what it does to people who are not ready to step out in that way. We have tried to move away from invasion of privacy in certain areas.

    But is it not called The Shade Room for a reason?

    We’re trying to change what we post and move towards positivity. We used to post clapbacks all day long and we have eased off of that. It’s been hard because our name is The Shade Room—like, if Diddy goes to jail, we have to get that up. But there’s a lot we won’t post. It’s been a dance, for sure.



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  • Lo-Fi Weather Channel Videos Are Soothing Climate Fears on YouTube

    Lo-Fi Weather Channel Videos Are Soothing Climate Fears on YouTube

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    The Vaporwave album Conditions at Hickory begins with static, as if you’re tuning in to a 1940s radio broadcast. First and second tracks “Foothills” and “Daily Commute” start out humdrum and benign enough. Then, the mood shifts. Sounds come like warnings, cautions of something sinister to come. Beeping sounds and tornado sirens start to interrupt the music. By the time you get to “Thunderheads” and “Squall,” you’re in the thick of it.

    Kana, aka Dreamweather, released the seven-track album on YouTube, where it soundtracks a frozen image: a bright-red severe weather warning for Hickory, North Carolina. It could be that Conditions is trying to warn you about an impending storm. It could be that the album, with its smooth, jazzy AM-radio tones, is trying to rock you to sleep in the midst of it.

    Kana is one of a number of artists who have taken transmissions from the weather reports of yesteryear and merged them with the lo-fi electronic music genre known as vaporwave. Emerging in the early 2010s, vaporwave has exploded on YouTube recently, soundtracking nostalgic video footage like family trips to Florida in the ’90s or Transformers cartoon clips. The effect is as unsettling as it is comforting—a visual reminder of a different, maybe better era that can’t be lived again.

    As the trend has evolved, many of the more popular vaporwave clips have been those that place ambient sounds over Weather Channel broadcasts from the ’80s and ’90s. Like Twisters, these sometimes eight-hour-long broadcasts evoke a time when TV and radio offered guidance in a storm—and a time before climate change made extreme weather events more frequent.

    Popular vaporwave artists play their music over weather forecasts from fearless stormchaser Jim Cantore. Others—sometimes practitioners of the subgenre known as weatherwave—soothe you with sound as longtime severe weather expert Steve Lyons waves his hands madly about an impending Indiana tornado.

    “As a child, I would often just sit and watch the Weather Channel for hours on end,” Kana says. “I vibed with the local forecasts, its music, and its programs a lot, so discovering that other people were interested in this extreme niche blew my mind.”

    Some of the most popular weatherwave clips use a VHS recording of a Weather Channel broadcast on a random cold ’90s night in the winter. One, a 41-minute video from YouTuber onceinalifetime, has nearly 900,000 views; another is an eight-hour megamood from chyllvester with nearly 650,000 views. Many comments below them speak in nostalgic terms: “I basically lived in hotels growing up (long story). The Weather Channel was the only real constant from place to place. It helped me greatly then. It’s still helping me today.”

    The Weather Channel was founded in Atlanta, Georgia, in May 1982. From the beginning it coupled its stalwart weather broadcasts with a steady stream of smooth jazz, a combo that came to define the 24/7/365 weather network. Whether you were tuning in for the tropical update segment or international weather, the sounds stayed constant and steady, even if the weather did not.

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  • The Best Audiophile Gear (2024): Headphones, Speakers, Amps, DACs

    The Best Audiophile Gear (2024): Headphones, Speakers, Amps, DACs

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    I’m a pretty lazy listener, which is why I love modern streaming amps. These amps have controls for Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and other streaming services built directly into easy-to-use interfaces. Streaming amps have gotten really great over the last few years. It used to be that anything with an internet connection sounded terrible, but that’s not the case with the latest models. My high-end favorites right now are the Cambridge Audio Evo 150 ($2,999) and the Naim Uniti Atom ($3,799), which both feature gorgeous color displays and some of the best fidelity (and most glorious knobs) I’ve ever experienced. Both work with every major streaming service imaginable, and you can connect to them over Bluetooth too.

    A good step-down option is Yamaha’s R-N1000A ($1,800) stereo network receiver. It’s loaded with high-end components like a SABRE ES9090Q DAC for high-resolution digital audio and enough A/B amplification for nearly any pair of speakers in your arsenal. Just as important, it provides rock-steady performance and loads of connection options, from tons of streaming services and internet radio stations to a turntable input and HDMI ARC for connecting to your TV. Its retro design, which skips a color screen for a slim digital display set below tactile knobs, stokes nostalgia while delivering excellent sound quality.

    If you don’t have that kind of money, I highly recommend checking out the Canadian brand NAD. Its amps, like the NAD C 316 V2 ($399) aren’t the flashiest, but they sound amazing for the money. Like the Yamaha above, the C 316 even comes with a phono channel on board so you can hook up a record player—a nice touch, seeing how NAD’s model doesn’t have built-in streaming. If you want to stream, you can find the proper dongle to connect your phone to it.

    ProJect's turntables are handsome and they offer toptier sound.

    Pro-Ject’s turntables are handsome, and they offer top-tier sound.

    Photograph: Pro-Ject Audio

    Vinyl is back! And turntables are more fun—and better-sounding—than ever. If you’re looking for a starter deck with audiophile-grade sound quality, I would check out options like the Pro-Ject T1 ($499) or Debut Carbon Evo ($599). On the higher end, we like the Rega Planar 2 ($775), which has a bit more open and dynamic sound, and U-Turn’s Orbit Theory ($999), which sounds fantastic thanks to extras like a custom-made magnesium tonearm, the part that sets the needle to the groove.

    project phono box s2

    Get a phono amp to hook up that turntable.

    Photograph: Pro-Ject Audio

    If you have a vintage stereo, it likely has a phono preamp built-in, meaning you can plug a turntable directly and get straight to listening. But if you have a modern stereo, you may need to buy a dedicated phono preamp to play your records through your headphones or speakers. Check both your turntable and your stereo, because setups differ, and some turntables come with phono amps inside them that you can activate by flipping a switch. Still, while some built-in options like the one inside the Orbit Theory above perform well, others may not sound as good as you’d like.

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  • The Music Industry’s ’90s Hard Drives Are Dying

    The Music Industry’s ’90s Hard Drives Are Dying

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    One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry’s vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: Roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

    Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone’s data stored on spinning disks.

    “In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know,” Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. “It may sound like a sales pitch, but it’s not; it’s a call for action.”

    Hard drives gained popularity over spooled magnetic tape as digital audio workstations, mixing and editing software, and the perceived downsides of tape, including deterioration from substrate separation and fire. But hard drives present their own archival problems. Standard hard drives were also not designed for long-term archival use. You can almost never decouple the magnetic disks from the reading hardware inside, so if either fails, the whole drive dies.

    There are also general computer storage issues, including the separation of samples and finished tracks, or proprietary file formats requiring archival versions of software. Still, Iron Mountain tells Mix that “if the disk platters spin and aren’t damaged,” it can access the content.

    But “if it spins” is becoming a big question mark. Musicians and studios now digging into their archives to remaster tracks often find that drives, even when stored at industry-standard temperature and humidity, have failed in some way, with no partial recovery option available.

    “It’s so sad to see a project come into the studio, a hard drive in a brand-new case with the wrapper and the tags from wherever they bought it still in there,” Koszela says. “Next to it is a case with the safety drive in it. Everything’s in order. And both of them are bricks.”

    Entropy Wins

    Mix’s passing along of Iron Mountain’s warning hit Hacker News earlier this week, which spurred other tales of faith in the wrong formats. The gist of it: You cannot trust any medium, so you copy important things over and over, into fresh storage. “Optical media rots, magnetic media rots and loses magnetic charge, bearings seize, flash storage loses charge, etc.,” writes user abracadaniel. “Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect.”

    There is discussion of how SSDs are not archival at all; how floppy disk quality varied greatly between the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s; how Linear Tape-Open, a format specifically designed for long-term tape storage, loses compatibility over successive generations; how the binder sleeves we put our CD-Rs and DVD-Rs in have allowed them to bend too much and stop being readable.

    Knowing that hard drives will eventually fail is nothing new. Ars wrote about the five stages of hard drive death, including denial, back in 2005. Last year, backup company Backblaze shared failure data on specific drives, showing that drives that fail tend to fail within three years, that no drive was totally exempt, and that time does, generally, wear down all drives. Google’s server drive data showed in 2007 that HDD failure was mostly unpredictable, and that temperatures were not really the deciding factor.

    So Iron Mountain’s admonition to music companies is yet another warning about something we’ve already heard. But it’s always good to get some new data about just how fragile a good archive really is.

    This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.

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  • Elektron Digitakt II Review: The Most Versatile Sampler and Sequencer

    Elektron Digitakt II Review: The Most Versatile Sampler and Sequencer

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    The original Digitakt sampler and sequencer, despite being seven years old, remains an incredibly capable device beloved by many in the music world. So how does the latest model, which looks nearly identical, hold up to the fan favorite?

    Under the hood, the Digitakt II is a significant upgrade in almost every way. Unfortunately, it also comes with a significant price increase to $999, from $799. With used Digitakts going for as little as $400, the choice between the two isn’t as clear cut as you’d expect.

    I spent a few weeks putting the latest Digitakt through its paces and comparing it to the older model, and ultimately realized the new version is probably not worth the upgrade for my (and many others’) purposes. That said, if you’re a power user who always wants to try the latest and greatest, it’s a fantastic piece of gear.

    Overhead view of black audio device with a small screen buttons knobs and 3 plugs coming out the back

    Photograph: Terrence O’Brien

    Endless Possibilities

    Physically, the differences between the first Elektron Digitakt and the new Digitakt II are extremely subtle. The monochrome screen is white instead of yellow. The instrument specific labels under the keys are gone, there are a couple of new buttons, and some labels have changed. Otherwise the two are nearly indistinguishable.

    I cannot possibly cover every feature of the original Digitakt. In fact, I’m going to have to gloss over even some of the changes to the newest model. It is an incredibly rich machine that would take tens of thousands of words to comprehensively explain. Instead I’ll be focusing on the most important features and changes.

    If there were two major strikes against the original Digitakt it was that it only handled mono samples, and storage was pretty paltry, even by 2017 standards. Personally, I didn’t find the 64 MB of RAM (equaling 14 minutes of mono samples) per project terribly restrictive, but the 1 GB of drive storage did lead to a lot more time wasted actively managing samples. By increasing the RAM to 400 MB (72 minutes of mono or 36 minutes of stereo samples) and the drive to 20 GB on the new model, the storage issue is largely solved.

    While having support for stereo samples is nice, I actually find the increased storage to be the main new feature I love. Part of that is down to how I primarily use the Digitakt II, which is as a drum machine. Stereo is just less of a necessity when you’re primarily working with percussion.

    The Digitakt II is more than capable of handling melodic parts, and it even comes preloaded with single cycle waveforms so you can play it like a synth. But because the 16 sequencer tracks are monophonic, playing chords requires either using multiple tracks and sequencing the notes individually, or just sampling chords. And even though there are five different “Machines” (Elektron’s term for how a sample is handled, e.g. one-shot, stretch, repitch, etc.) your results will vary greatly depending on the source material.

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  • Ticket Bots Leave Oasis Fans Enraged

    Ticket Bots Leave Oasis Fans Enraged

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    Oasis, the band everyone likes to sing after too many pints at karaoke, is going on tour. Well, not exactly on tour—it’s more like 17 dates in the UK and Ireland in summer 2025. Still, considering the band broke up in 2009 and has just reunited, this is what most people are calling a big deal. If nothing else, the band’s leaders, the notoriously ever-feuding brothers Noel and Liam Gallagher, might throttle each other on stage at any given moment, and fans would really hate to miss that, even if it costs them north of $1,000.

    As soon as the presale for the band’s upcoming gigs went online on Friday, tickets—which started at around $100 apiece—popped up on resale sites, with fans on X reporting that they were seeing prices in the $800 to $1,200 range, despite the fact that the band said it had put guardrails in place to prevent the cost of the tickets from getting out of hand. The BBC reported that some tickets were going for as much as $7,800.

    To be a part of the presale, fans had to submit a ballot correctly answering questions about the band. Some who did so received a link to presale tickets; others didn’t and were “devastated,” anticipating a “Ticketmaster bloodbath” during the general on-sale, despite the fact that Oasis themselves had warned that tickets sold for more than face value would be “canceled by the promoters.”

    On Saturday, things didn’t get much better. Fans trying to buy tickets through online ticketing sites found long waits, seemingly hard-to-swallow fees, error messages, bots, and reportedly error messages claiming that fans themselves were the bots.

    “Efforts like presale ballots can be helpful in curbing the immediate rush and chaos typically associated with ticket sales,” says Benjamin Fabre, cofounder of cyberfraud firm DataDome, “but they are not foolproof solutions against sophisticated bot attacks.”

    Not all of the inflated ticket prices were the result of bots, however. After waiting hours in the queue, some fans reached the front only to find the price of tickets had more than doubled. This was due to dynamic pricing, a model that means the prices of tickets can change if there’s high demand. As tickets started to sell out on Saturday, fans urged bands and artists to push back against the use of dynamic pricing. (Ticketmaster did not respond to an email over the weekend seeking comment for this story.)

    The UK culture secretary Lisa Nandy on Monday confirmed that the British government will look into dynamic pricing as part of a planned review of how event tickets are sold, which is scheduled for the autumn. The review will investigate “issues around the transparency and use of dynamic pricing, including the technology around queuing systems which incentivise it,” Nandy told the BBC. MP Jamie Stone, the culture spokesperson for UK’s Liberal Democrats, said in a statement to The Guardian over the weekend that it was “scandalous to see our country’s biggest cultural moments turned into obscene cash cows by greedy promoters and ticketing websites.”

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