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Music Tech

26 articles

Music Tech3 min read

Audio Codecs for Musicians: What Actually Happens to Your Music

How MP3, AAC, and Opus decide what to throw away, why cymbals suffer most, and what your track sounds like after a platform re-encodes it.

Music Tech3 min read

Audio File Formats Explained: WAV, MP3, FLAC, AAC

Which format to use when — lossless versus lossy, bitrates that matter, what streaming platforms want, and the formats to avoid mid-project.

Music Tech3 min read

Browser Audio Latency, Explained

Why browser DAWs feel less immediate than desktop ones — where the milliseconds actually come from, what you can control, and when latency genuinely matters.

Music Tech3 min read

Buffer Size and Latency: The Setting That Fixes Most Audio Problems

Why your DAW crackles, what buffer size actually controls, and the two-setting workflow that solves both stuttering and unplayable delay.

Music Tech2 min read

Cloud Rendering for Audio: What Runs Where

Which parts of music production benefit from remote processing, which must stay local, and why latency draws the line.

Music Tech2 min read

CPU vs GPU for Audio: Why Your Graphics Card Doesn't Help

Why music production is CPU-bound, where GPUs genuinely matter for AI audio, and what to actually prioritise when buying a machine for music.

Music Tech3 min read

Diffusion vs Transformer Music Models, Explained

The two architectures behind AI music generation — how each works, what each is good at, and why the difference shows up in the output you hear.

Music Tech3 min read

How AI Detects Key and Tempo in Audio

The signal processing behind automatic key and BPM detection — onset detection, chroma features, and why detection fails on some tracks.

Music Tech3 min read

How AI Actually Generates Music

From training data to the audio file — tokenisation, neural codecs, conditioning on text prompts, and where the process introduces the artifacts you hear.

Music Tech3 min read

How DAWs Handle Time, Tempo, and Warping

Musical time versus clock time, tempo maps, and the time-stretching algorithms that let you change tempo without changing pitch.

Music Tech3 min read

How Stem Separation Actually Works

The technology behind splitting a mixed song into vocals, drums, bass, and other — spectrograms, masking, neural networks, and why some tracks separate badly.

Music Tech3 min read

LUFS and Loudness Explained: Why Louder Masters Stopped Working

How streaming normalisation ended the loudness war, what LUFS actually measures, and the targets that matter for Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.

Music Tech2 min read

MIDI 2.0, Explained for Musicians

What actually changed after 40 years — higher resolution, per-note control, bidirectional communication, and whether it matters for your setup.

Music Tech3 min read

Music Source Separation Models: Demucs, Spleeter, and What Came After

The models behind stem separation — how each works, how they compare, and which is behind the tool you're using.

Music Tech3 min read

Neural Audio Synthesis, Explained

How neural networks generate sound directly — from autoregressive waveform models to neural codecs and DDSP, and why each approach sounds the way it does.

Music Tech3 min read

Offline-First Music Apps: What Happens When the Connection Drops

How web-based DAWs handle losing connectivity — local storage, sync, and the honest limits of working offline in a browser.

Music Tech2 min read

On-Device vs Cloud AI for Music: The Real Tradeoffs

Where AI music processing runs, and what that means for speed, privacy, cost, and whether it works on a plane.

Music Tech2 min read

How Real-Time Music Collaboration Actually Works

The technology behind collaborative DAWs — operational transforms, conflict resolution, and why jamming live over the internet is a different, much harder problem.

Music Tech3 min read

Sample Rate and Bit Depth, Explained Simply

What 44.1kHz and 24-bit actually mean, why higher isn't always better, and the settings that genuinely matter for your projects.

Music Tech3 min read

Spatial Audio for Producers: What It Is and Whether You Need It

Dolby Atmos, binaural rendering, and immersive mixing — how it works, what platforms pay for it, and whether it's worth your time.

Music Tech3 min read

Timbre Transfer: How Humming Becomes a Guitar

The technology that converts one instrument's sound into another while keeping the performance — what it preserves, what it discards, and where it breaks.

Music Tech3 min read

Can VST and AU Plugins Run in a Browser?

Why your plugin collection doesn't load in a web page, the approaches that bridge the gap, and what browser DAWs offer instead.

Music Tech3 min read

The Web Audio API, Explained for Musicians

How browsers actually process audio — the audio graph, AudioWorklets, sample-accurate scheduling, and why browser DAWs became viable.

Music Tech3 min read

WebAssembly in Browser DAWs, Explained

Why browser music software suddenly got good — how compiled C++ audio code runs at near-native speed in a web page, and what it still can't do.

Music Tech3 min read

Agentic DAW Architecture: How an AI Producer Actually Works

What separates an agentic DAW from a generator with buttons — project state, planning, tool use, and verification loops.

Music Tech3 min read

What Is an Audio Engine? The Part of a DAW You Never See

How a DAW turns tracks, plugins, and automation into sound — the processing graph, the real-time thread, and why some DAWs perform better than others.