Tag Archives: Music

The $399 MPC Sample Finally Makes Beatmaking Beautifully Portable

Posted on by

The MPC is one of those rare objects that carries cultural weight beyond its function. Since the MPC60 landed in 1988, that grid of rubber pads has been behind some of the most iconic beats ever made, from hip-hop to electronic music to whatever genre-bending thing your favorite producer is cooking up right now. So when Akai Pro quietly dropped the MPC Sample at $399, it felt like the kind of announcement worth paying attention to, even if you’ve never touched a drum pad in your life.

The MPC Sample is compact in a way that actually surprises you. At 23.6 × 19.4 × 5.0 cm and just under a kilogram, it fits comfortably in a backpack. It runs on a rechargeable lithium-ion battery that lasts up to five hours, has a built-in microphone and a 3-watt speaker, and connects via a single USB-C port for audio, MIDI, charging, and file transfer. That’s a lot of functionality packed into something that looks like it belongs on a desk alongside a cup of coffee and a sketchbook.

Designer: Akai Pro

The design is where things get really interesting. The MPC Sample draws direct visual inspiration from the MPC60, one of the most beloved pieces of music hardware ever made. The color palette is restrained and tasteful. The layout is clean. The 16 RGB velocity-sensitive pads sit front and center with that familiar grid arrangement, and the inclusion of a legacy parameter fader is a genuinely nice nod to the hardware that built the MPC name. The Verge called it a favorite portable beat maker, and you can see why the moment you look at it. It feels considered in a way that a lot of modern gear doesn’t.

Look at it a little longer and you start noticing the smaller decisions. The padded wrist rest. The way the button layout doesn’t fight for your attention. The muted color scheme that feels closer to a vintage synthesizer than a modern gadget. A lot of companies chasing the retro aesthetic tend to overcook it, leaning so hard into nostalgia that the product starts to feel like a costume. The MPC Sample avoids that entirely. It looks like something that was always going to exist, not something designed to remind you of something else. The proportions are right. The materials feel intentional. For a $399 device, the level of design restraint on display is genuinely impressive, and honestly a little rare.

That last point is worth dwelling on. Hardware design in the music world tends to fall into two camps: either overloaded and intimidating, or stripped down to the point of being frustrating. The MPC Sample sits in a much more interesting middle ground. The 2.4-inch full-color display is there when you need to visualize your waveform. The three real-time control knobs handle effects on the fly. The Instant Sample Chop mode, the real-time timestretch and repitch, the 60 effect types spread across four engines: it’s capable without being overwhelming. For someone new to sampling, that balance is almost everything.

It’s worth noting the price context here. The original MPC60 launched in 1988 at $4,999.95, which works out to roughly $13,800 in today’s money. The MPC Sample does things the MPC60 couldn’t dream of, for $399. That’s not just a deal; that’s a philosophical shift in who gets to make music with professional-grade tools. The fact that it ships loaded with over 100 factory kits, 2GB of RAM, and 8GB of internal storage, with room to expand via microSD, makes the entry point feel even more generous.

Nothing is without trade-offs, though. Five hours of battery life is solid for a focused session but won’t carry you through a full travel day. The built-in speaker works fine for quick monitoring, but you’ll want headphones for anything serious. And the MPC ecosystem, while powerful, has always carried a learning curve for newcomers. The MPC Sample softens that curve considerably, but it doesn’t disappear entirely.

What makes the MPC Sample feel culturally significant isn’t only its portability or its price point. It’s the way it takes something with nearly 40 years of creative history and makes it genuinely accessible without watering it down. The design respects the legacy. The features serve the workflow. The whole thing is small enough to go anywhere, which might actually be the most radical thing about it. Creativity has always been portable in theory. The MPC Sample is making it portable in practice. At $399, it’s the kind of object that quietly makes you reconsider where, and how, you make things.

The post The $399 MPC Sample Finally Makes Beatmaking Beautifully Portable first appeared on Yanko Design.

Daft Punk’s Get Lucky Gets a 298-Piece LEGO Tribute With That Iconic Gradient Sun

Posted on by

Summer 2013 belonged to Daft Punk. “Get Lucky” was everywhere, an inescapable groove machine that turned the French robots into genuine pop stars after years of underground credibility. The song marked a massive sonic pivot for the duo, trading their signature electro-crunch for live instrumentation, bringing in Nile Rodgers to lay down those disco guitar lines and Pharrell Williams to deliver one of the smoothest vocal performances of the decade. The music video leaned into a specific aesthetic: performers silhouetted against a radiant sunset, all warmth and golden light, capturing the analog soul of Random Access Memories in a single visual.

LEGO builder MINECRAFTBUILDHAX has bottled that exact vibe in a 298-piece display model. The build recreates the sunset performance scene with Daft Punk’s iconic helmeted duo front and center, flanked by a guitarist and backed by a stepped gradient sun that transitions from deep orange to warm brown. The stage sits on a sleek framed base with a printed plaque, designed to look right at home on a bookshelf or desk. Pharrell’s missing from the lineup due to licensing realities, but the essence of that moment is fully intact.

Designer: MINECRAFTBUILDHAX

Chrome silver for Thomas Bangalter, metallic gold for Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo. Getting those faceted helmet surfaces to read correctly at minifigure scale takes thoughtful part selection, and MINECRAFTBUILDHAX nailed it. Both figures stand on a raised black stage platform with their instruments properly positioned, Thomas with his bass guitar on the left, Guy-Manuel seated at a compact drum kit in the center. A guitarist holding an electric guitar fills the right side, channeling Nile Rodgers’ energy even if the man himself couldn’t make the licensing cut.

Behind them, layered warm-toned plates stack in a stepped pyramid formation, creating a gradient that flows from dark brown at the top through medium brown and into bright orange at the horizon line. It mimics the glowing warmth of the “Get Lucky” single cover art perfectly, where the setting sun bathes everything in golden-hour magic. Solid bricks do the work here rather than transparency or lighting elements, keeping things approachable while maintaining visual punch.

Guy-Manuel’s drum kit packs surprising detail for the compact scale. Cymbals, tom drums, and a kick drum all appear in dark grey and black, with enough space on the bass drum to imagine a Daft Punk logo (though the builder kept it clean). Standard LEGO instrument molds handle the guitars, simple but effective, letting those helmets and that massive sun backdrop command attention.

A black platform extends beyond the performance area, creating visual breathing room and giving the whole thing museum-quality presentation. Gold script along the front edge reads “DAFT PUNK / GET LUCKY” in a hand-drawn style, elevating this from diorama to display piece. It signals shelf-next-to-your-vinyl-collection placement, not shoved-in-a-bin-with-other-minifigures treatment.

Just days-old on the LEGO Ideas platform, this MOC (My Own Creation) faces a long climb to the 10,000-vote threshold needed for LEGO’s official review on the Ideas platform. At 298 pieces, it would land in the affordable impulse-buy range if it ever hit retail shelves, perfect for music fans who want a tactile reminder of one of the decade’s biggest songs without committing to a massive build. If you’re still riding the “Get Lucky” high after all these years (and honestly, who isn’t), head over to the LEGO Ideas website and cast your vote. This one deserves to exist on more shelves than just the builder’s.

The post Daft Punk’s Get Lucky Gets a 298-Piece LEGO Tribute With That Iconic Gradient Sun first appeared on Yanko Design.

Two Players, One Set: The DJ Concept Built for Connection

Posted on by

Most DJ setups are built for one person. One set of decks, one headphone jack, one vision for how the night should sound. That has always made DJing feel like a solo art form, even when it happens in a room full of people. Twin, a concept design by Eunjung Jang, myyung kyun seo, workplace 42, and kmuid graduate, challenges that assumption from the ground up, and it does so with one of the more elegant design ideas I’ve come across in this space.

The premise is simple but kind of radical: two DJs, one device. Twin is a modular controller system made up of two mirrored player decks and a shared mixer at the center. Each player gets their own jog wheel, multi keys, sub display, tempo control, cue, play/pause, and hot cue functions. The mixer module in the middle gives both players access to EQ knobs, channel faders, and a crossfader. When connected, the whole system clicks together into one clean unit. When you want to go your separate ways, the modular sections split apart. The physical design of the hardware itself communicates the whole concept: together or apart, the choice is always yours.

Designers: Eunjung Jang, myyung kyun seo, workplace 42, kmuid graduate

Design-wise, Twin is stunning in the way that restrained things often are. The palette is muted and deliberate, soft white surfaces with sage green accents on every button and control. It reads less like audio equipment and more like something you’d find at a thoughtful design boutique. That’s not a small thing. DJ gear has historically leaned toward the dark, chunky, and maximalist, which works for club installs but can feel genuinely intimidating on a bedroom shelf. Twin looks like it belongs in your living room, which I suspect is very much part of the point.

The companion app is where the concept gets more layered. It functions as a music discovery and preparation tool, letting users dig for tracks, organize mix sets, and explore music by genre or BPM. But the feature that really elevates the ecosystem is the host matching function. Once you’ve built your mix set, the app can connect you with another user whose taste overlaps with yours or even challenges it. You might find someone who plays in the same sonic neighborhood. You might find someone who pulls you somewhere you wouldn’t have gone alone. That’s a genuinely compelling proposition, because so much of what makes music culture feel alive is the exchange between people, not just the output.

The cultural observation sitting underneath all of this is sharp. The designers frame it as a shift from DJing as performance to DJing as personal culture, and that read is accurate. DJing has moved off the stage and into living rooms, rooftops, and small friend groups. It’s become a hobby the way cooking or photography is a hobby: creative, expressive, and something you naturally want to share with someone you like. Most existing hardware wasn’t designed with that in mind. The market is still dominated by solo setups built for beatmatching, not for conversation. Twin reframes the whole activity as something inherently collaborative, and the design backs that idea up at every level.

To be fair, this is still a concept. There’s no price, no release date, and no guarantee it ever makes it to production. The gap between a polished Behance presentation and a product you can actually hold in your hands is a wide one, and modular hardware with tight tolerances, seamless physical separation, and a fully realized app ecosystem is a genuinely hard engineering problem. But the idea itself is solid, and the execution at the concept stage is considered enough to take seriously. These are the kinds of concepts that tend to influence the industry even when they don’t ship.

Twin reads like a proposal for where DJ culture could go next. Not bigger, not more complicated, but more connective. Built around the belief that the best music moments happen between people, not just for them.

The post Two Players, One Set: The DJ Concept Built for Connection first appeared on Yanko Design.

How to use Apple’s Playlist Playground to make AI-generated mixes

Posted on by

With the release of iOS 26.4, Apple Music's Playlist Playground can now generate playlists with the help of AI. Best of all, you don't need an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone to take advantage of the new feature. As long as you're a US Apple Music subscriber with your language set to English, you can start using Playlist Playground right now. Here's how to get started. 

A pair of screenshots showing off Apple Music's new Playlist Playground feature.
A pair of screenshots showing off Apple Music's new Playlist Playground feature.
Igor Bonifacic for Engadget

For the time being, there are two ways to access Playlist Playground. For the time being, the company is highlighting the feature within the "Top Picks for You" section of Apple Music's Home tab. If you don't see a shortcut there, Apple integrated the feature into the app's existing playlist creation tool. Just tap the new icon found in the Library tab. If you're new to Apple Music, the flow looks like this: 

  1. Open Apple Music. 

  2. Navigate to the "Library" tab.

  3. Tap the playlist creation button.

  4. Write a prompt describing the mood or style of music you want to hear. 

To help people get started, Apple provides a selection of sample prompts. One pro tip: it's possible to use metadata in conjunction with Playlist Playground. For example, after Apple Music generates a playlist, you can tell Apple's model to edit it by removing any songs released before 2016. Of course, you're also free to add and remove songs manually as you please. 

Once you're happy with your new playlist, Apple Music treats all Playlist Playground mixes like it does any other playlist, meaning you can save it to your Library, download for offline playback, play it from your Apple Watch and share it with friends and invite them to add songs.   

As of the writing of this article, Playlist Playground is a beta release only available to Apple Music subscribers in the US with their preferred language set to English. An iPhone or iPad running iOS 26.4, or an Apple Vision headset running visionOS 26.4 is also required.     

As Apple releases the feature in more countries and languages, we'll update this article. 

Yes, if you use Apple Music on Android, Playlist Playground is available there too.  

When generating mixes, Playlist Playground pulls from both trending data and your personal listening history. Along with other AI-powered Apple Music features like AutoMix and Lyrics Translation, Playlist Playground runs as part of the Apple Music service. That’s one of the reasons Apple can offer it outside of Apple Intelligence-capable devices. 


This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/how-to-use-apples-playlist-playground-to-make-ai-generated-mixes-134500610.html?src=rss

Spotify is testing a tool to help real artists deal with AI slop on their profiles

Posted on by

Low-quality, mass-produced AI songs have been flooding music streaming platforms like Spotify for a couple of years now. This is annoying, but relatively easy for fans to avoid. However, it leads to real problems for artists. There's so much slop coming in that some gets falsely attributed to actual musicians on these platforms.

This messes with brand identity and audience retention, but Spotify is testing a new tool to help real artists exercise more control over their profiles. The platform's Artist Profile Protection feature lets musicians review releases before they go live and become associated with their profiles.

The tool in action.
Spotify

This should prevent AI slop from creeping in, as the actual artist will have final say when 100 new songs show up out of the blue that sort of sound like them but with all of that pesky soul removed. It's in beta right now and if an artist denies a track, it won't be associated with their profile, won't contribute to stats and won't show up in user recommendations. This looks to be a simple and potentially effective solution to an ongoing problem.

"Music has been landing on the wrong artist pages across streaming services, and the rise of easy-to-produce AI tracks has made the problem worse," Spotify wrote in a blog post. "We know how frustrating this can be for both artists and fans alike."

This comes just a week after Sony requested the removal of more than 135,000 AI-generated songs from Spotify after it was discovered the tracks were impersonating real artists. This even happens to bands that have opted out of Spotify entirely. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard left the platform last year, to protest CEO Daniel Ek's investment in a weapons manufacturing company, but a deepfake artist quickly filled the vacuum.

Some of this isn't malicious. It's a numbers game for the "creators" of these tracks. Statistics vary, but it's been estimated that around 50,000 AI-generated songs get uploaded to Spotify each and every day. The platform deleted 75 million of these tracks last year. With this many uploads, it's easy for tracks to accidentally end up on the wrong artist's profile. Bad actors looking to attach their slop to a known quantity compounds the issue.

In any event, it's good that Spotify is doing something about this. We don't know when the tool will exit the beta phase and become available for all artists on the platform. That day can't come soon enough. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/spotify-is-testing-a-tool-to-help-real-artists-deal-with-ai-slop-on-their-profiles-161013653.html?src=rss

Bandsintown integration for concerts is coming to Apple Music

Posted on by

The live music discovery platform Bandsintown’s partnership with Apple goes way back, but iOS 26.4 brings the deepest integration between the two companies to date. Concert listings from Bandsintown will now appear in Apple Music, allowing you to find out when either a band you already love, or one you’re discovering for the first time, is next playing live.

Artists who use Bandsintown to advertise their tour dates can promote upcoming shows in a number of ways through Apple’s app. A new Concerts tab will live within Search, allowing subscribers to search for shows by their genre, location and date, while participating artists can also connect their Bandsintown dashboard to their Apple Music artist page. By doing this, their tour dates will automatically appear in an "Upcoming Concerts" section within 48 hours of connecting the two services.

Apple Music users can tap listed events to see more details about a show and will be able to buy tickets through direct links to sellers. If you follow artists, you can also set up push notifications for their announced shows.

Bandsintown’s platform is already built into a number of other Apple apps and services, with the likes of Shazam, Apple Maps, Photos and Spotlight Search all able to pull through live event data. The new Apple Music features will be available on devices running iOS 26.4 when it leaves beta.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/entertainment/music/bandsintown-integration-for-concerts-is-coming-to-apple-music-170034229.html?src=rss

Spotify’s SongDNA can tell you all about the track you’re listening to

Posted on by

Spotify has started rolling out a feature called SongDNA that can show you the people behind your favorite tracks and give you an insight on how they were created. You can access it by opening the Now Playing view while listening to a specific song and then scrolling down to the SongDNA box.

Tracks that support the new feature will show you all the artists, writers, producers and collaborators behind them. It’s yet another way to make more music on the platform discoverable, since you’ll be able to tap on their icons to see their profiles and the other pieces they worked on. The box will also contain the samples and interpolations that helped form a track’s sound, as well as the covers it inspired. Spotify says it’s giving eligible artist and label teams the power to review and manage the components of the feature, so it’s bound to be supported by more and more tracks as time goes on.

“SongDNA is designed to make a song’s creative lineage more transparent so fans can easily explore the people and influences behind the music they love,” said Jacqueline Ankner, Spotify’s Head of Songwriter & Publisher Partnerships. “By bringing collaborators, samples, and covers together in one place, we’re making it easier for fans to discover new music and see how songs connect and come to life—while giving songwriters, producers, and rightsholders meaningful recognition for the role they play in creating it.”

SongDNA is making its way to paying iOS and Android users around the world, but it’s still in beta and might still go through revisions before it’s more widely available. It will roll out more broadly to Premium users throughout April.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/spotifys-songdna-can-tell-you-all-about-the-track-youre-listening-to-130000809.html?src=rss

Apple Gave AirPods Max a Brain Transplant After 5 Years (Same Design, New Chipset)

Posted on by

Apple just gave the AirPods Max a brain transplant, and after five years on H1 silicon that was already a generation behind when the AirPods Pro 2 launched in 2022, it was due. The H2 is the real story here, because everything else on this headphone is identical to what shipped in December 2020. Same aluminum frame, same stainless steel headband, same mesh knit ear cushions, same 385-gram weight, same $549 price. ANC is rated at 1.5x more effective than the previous gen, and the full H2 feature set, Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, Voice Isolation, and Live Translation, all land here for the first time. What changed is everything running underneath a design that was already doing its job.

Adaptive Audio is what AirPods Max owners have been watching from the sidelines since AirPods Pro 2 launched in 2022. The mode dynamically blends active noise cancellation and transparency based on your environment, dialing back the ANC when someone speaks nearby and re-engaging it when you’re back on a loud street. It sounds incremental until you’ve used it for a full commute, at which point going without it feels like a step backward. H2 also brings lossless audio at 24-bit, 48 kHz, though only over a wired USB-C connection, so wireless listening stays capped at AAC. That’s a real ceiling to live with at this price, but the original AirPods Max never offered lossless in any configuration, so it’s at least movement.

Designer: Apple

Five years, and Apple didn’t touch the design, which makes sense once you understand what the design is doing. The aluminum ear cups and stainless steel headband aren’t decorative choices, they’re structural, and they’re why this thing still looks and feels like a premium object after years of use, while equivalent plastic-and-fabric builds from Sony and Bose at lower prices tend to show wear sooner. The AirPods Max weighs 385 grams, heavier than anything in the over-ear category at this tier, and it still doesn’t fold flat for travel. Sony’s WH-1000XM6 and Bose’s QuietComfort Ultra are both lighter, foldable, and notably cheaper. Apple’s bet was that material quality carries the argument, and for desk or commute use, it mostly does. The Digital Crown for volume and track control is still here, and it remains one of the better physical inputs on any over-ear headphone.

The Smart Case is still a pouch, not a case in any conventional sense. It’s a silicone sleeve that covers the ear cups and nothing else, leaving the headband fully exposed to whatever else is in your bag. It doesn’t fold the headphones flat, it adds no meaningful drop protection, and it looks like a small clutch that wandered in from a different product category. For $549, the carry solution should be better than this, and the fact that it’s unchanged after five years suggests Apple either rationalized it or decided the complaint volume wasn’t loud enough to act on. It’s the one part of the AirPods Max story that feels genuinely unfinished, and at this price, that friction sticks out more than it should.

Battery life holds at 20 hours, which is fine but trails the Bose QuietComfort Ultra’s 24-hour rating and Sony’s 30-hour claim on the XM6. What AirPods Max 2 actually has now is alignment with the rest of Apple’s audio lineup, a chip-level catch-up that makes this headphone feel current for the first time since launch. The ANC improvement is real, the H2 feature parity with AirPods Pro 3 is real, and lossless audio over USB-C gives the product a use case it never had before. If you own the original and spent three years watching Adaptive Audio and Conversation Awareness roll out to cheaper AirPods, the upgrade argument is now solid. First-time buyers are getting the version of this headphone the original was always pointing toward.

The post Apple Gave AirPods Max a Brain Transplant After 5 Years (Same Design, New Chipset) first appeared on Yanko Design.

TikTok will let you stream full songs in its app if you’re an Apple Music subscriber

Posted on by

TikTok will soon let you stream full songs in its app via a new integration with Apple Music. The company's new Play Full Song feature makes it possible to link your Apple Music account toTikTok, and play any song that strikes your fancy directly in the app while you're scrolling.

Starting a song is as simple as tapping a button in the Sound Details page or your For You page. Assuming you pay for Apple Music, TikTok will then open up a streamlined version of Apple's music player, which you can use to listen to the song, save it for later or add it to a playlist.

TikTok says that Play Full Song is built using Apple's MusicKit APIs, which let developers surface elements of the Apple Music streaming service in their apps. TikTok has previously offered integration with multiple music streaming services through a feature it calls Add to Music App, which made it possible to save songs you heard on TikTok to your streaming library. What's particularly interesting about this new integration is that because it's using Apple's APIs, songs streamed with Play Full Song count as normal streams for the artists in Apple Music, so they don't lose out on any money.

Alongside the new feature, TikTok and Apple are also introducing a way for fans to listen to music live with their favorite artists. TikTok's Listening Party feature creates a live "shared environment" where people can listen to music and interact with artists directly, in what effectively sounds like an audio-only livestream. TikTok livestreams are a whole ecosystem in their own right, and Listening Party seems like a way to leverage some of the same technology for a more controlled, music promotion-focused end.

TikTok is already a popular tool for music discovery and launching the career of new artists, and the platform also briefly dabbled in offering a streaming service of its own in 2023. The company abandoned those plans in 2024, but under new owners, TikTok's ambitions could ultimately be bigger than just offering nice integrations with existing streaming services.

TikTok says Play Full Song and Listening Party are rolling out worldwide “in the weeks ahead,” so if you don’t see either feature now, you may soon.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/tiktok-will-let-you-stream-full-songs-in-its-app-if-youre-an-apple-music-subscriber-183333143.html?src=rss

You can now use ChatGPT to open Shazam instead of… just opening Shazam

Posted on by

Shazam is now available within ChatGPT, if you don’t want to launch the music discovery app on your phone for, well, reasons. You will have to link the Shazam app with the chatbot first from its Apps page, after which you can summon it in-chat to identify whatever song is playing. To summon Shazam in-chat, you can use prompts like “Shazam, what’s playing?” or “Shazam, what is this song?”

A box will pop up that you can tap on to launch the music discovery service, which will then listen to the tune playing. ChatGPT will display the song’s name, artist and artwork, along with the option to save the song to Shazam. Take note that the feature will work within ChatGPT even if you don’t have the music discovery app downloaded on your device, which does make it useful if you’re using a phone with full memory. The Shazam integration has started rolling out globally within ChatGPT on iOS, Android and the web.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/you-can-now-use-chatgpt-to-open-shazam-instead-of-just-opening-shazam-114000363.html?src=rss