Recent updates for the visual programming environment plugdata (a wrapped for Pure Data) and the powerful object library cyclone are keeping the goodness going. Whether you're looking to do patching and development in a graphical tool or just enjoy

Trump's unprecedented tariffs are starting to hit reality following a Supreme Court defeat over the weekend. Music gear consumers shouldn't expect any immediate cost relief. But while the picture is complicated and the major problems remains th

If you haven't tried Ardour in a while -- or if you're new to the idea that a DAW could be free and open source -- you might be surprised. Major updates and a lot of listening to users means you don't have to sacrifice features like clip re

The freeware VCV Rack ports of Bastl's delicious PIZZA family now include the original Pizza oscillator, Crust drum/percussive voice, and Basil stereo delay. Endless patching pleasures await with these (and don't forget the free and open source

Do you love drones? I mean, like you're craving nothing more than aggressive drones coming right into your ears from violin and self-made reed instruments for 27 minutes, 28 seconds straight? The legendary Werner Durand and John Krausbauer have you

Move Everything is a hack for Move that lets you run custom synths, effects, and controllers alongside stock Move functions. But the truly momentous development is that its creator has added screen reader support, which makes Move the first truly stand

Minimal Audio's Poly Flanger is a "musical" stereo flanger -- with tuning options, scale quantization, three modes, and 1-8 voices, plus deep modulation and timbral options. "Flanger" is accurate, but almost unfair -- this is a

1986, meet 2026. Music Mouse from Laurie Spiegel is available now as a new Eventide application -- completely faithful to the original, ground-breaking compositional application, but fully modernized.

The post Laurie Spiegel’s Music Mouse is ava

Revenge of the Nerd: Look Mum No Computer, aka Sam Battle, will represent his country in Eurovision this year. And just like that, 100% of us are tuning into Eurovision and rooting for the UK. (Sorry, 'schland.)

The post Look Mum No Computer

Surprise! We get a second free Robert Henke device for Ableton Live Suite, built in Max for Live. And this one is inspired by 60s techniques of Andy Moorer and Manfred Schroeder, and eminently hackable if you're ready to dig into the patch. It'

Eventide has posted a fantastic archival video in advance of their remake of Music Mouse. In this 1987 episode of Midnight Muse, composer and programmer Laurie Spiegel explains the software and takes call-in questions. "Even if we're very good

Here's a surprise, an evidently spontaneous drop from Ableton co-founder Robert Henke in Max for Live. Filter Delays provides three filtered stereo delays with some very clever twists; it's a free download for Ableton Live Suite 12+ users.

Dive deep into these explosions of sound, light, and shape from Munich-based Perplex On, as the musical act pairs compact instruments with visuals made in Lottie and Imaginando’s VS – Visual Synthesizer. Dazzle at these eye-popping, brain-tickling audi

FFmpeg, the free multimedia toolkit, is so powerful that, honestly, it's entirely possible not to know all that it can do. For audio, the new FFAB offers a graphical front-end on Mac and Linux, with real-time preview, drag-and-drop filters, paralle

MetaSounds is a powerful platform for sound, synthesis, and procedural audio and music. And the price is right (free). But in the past, it had some gaps in out-of-the-box functionality. Epic has quietly released TechAudioTools Content, a bunch of free

Mario Nieto’s Novagrid opens up sequenced volume, pan, filter, and bitcrusher effects in plug-in form. And while that may sound a bit familiar, Novagrid has some tricks up its sleeve. If you like animating sound, you’ll definitely want to take a look.

Take a moment for the arresting stillness of "all dolls go to heaven." IOWA, the full-length opus by film composer Lia Ouyang Rusli ("OHYUNG"), hits you deep in the gut. The first 2026 release by must-follow label Trans Music Archiv

If you’ve got an Ableton Move, you can take advantage of its public beta today, too, just by connecting Move to your computer. And this is a huge release: in addition to other new functionality, Audio Tracks support warping clips and live-processing au

Ableton Live 12.4 enters public beta today. New features include continued refinement of Live’s audio effects and the ability to merge stems and separate stems for just a selected portion of time. And there’s one unexpected twist: Ableton Link can now

JeongHo Park, a self-described "algorithmic composer" and artist, is building a delightful instrument that turns images into scores with full drawing capability for making paths. Inspired by the likes of Xenakis' UPIC, the tool gives you

Here's a perfect way to treat your ears at the start of the week. Sound artist and percussionist Lorenzo Colombo recorded this ethereal, cosmic live set at Torso Electronics in Copenhagen. The dadamachines automat toolkit and its mechanical possibi

Massive sound, lots of unique tricks, hard-hitting personality, onboard basslines — more people should be talking about the Modor DR-2. And amidst the blizzard of news last month, you might have missed that it now does trig conditions. OS014 landed at

Pikimov, the community-supported free Web visual tool, keeps getting better. Pikimov 5 dropped today with a "classic" editor that makes it competitive with tools like CapCut -- or any time you need a quick video edit. That joins After Effects

You've got to feed yourself -- that goes for music just like everything else. So your ears don't just want this playlist from King Britt and Moog. They need this playlist. And you can bet, given King's incredible Blacktronika project, those

Who stood out at this year's NAMM show, that festivus of gear that brightens our winters from Anaheim? We've given you some idea with NAMM and LA's Buchla & Friends. Here, in images, are our favorites from NAMM, as captured by LA photog

Visualist workhorse Resolume continues its rapid update cadence. New in 7.24: 10-bit color output, performance optimizations, improved capture device support, new CRT effect, new Wire nodes, Wire usability improvements, and more. Plus, the Resolume cre

Through blackouts, bitter cold, Internet disruptions, and nightly attacks, Ukrainian DIY producers Tembra Modular persist. The two-person shop continues to run workshops and produce DIY kits and assembled modules. Blackouts can't stop them: their p

Gear-mas comes but once a year. But with swirling doom and gloom, just how is the world of making musical instruments? We sent Nadia Says, along with Burak Yerebakan, Portrait XO, Franck Martin, and Mehdi Hassine to find out, at the mighty NAMM show in

Italy’s Faselunare have done lots of great stuff over the years, and they’re entering the final hours of crowdfunding for Cosmolab, a powerful modular DSP kit powered by Electrosmith’s Daisy Seed. Let’s have a quick look. There are a number of these id

Native Instruments has posted an official statement from CEO Nick Williams, reassuring customers and partners that support for NI products will continue through the restructuring.

The post Native Instruments statement on continued support for cu

Apple has just made its release notes for MainStage 4 and Logic Pro 12 public, and we get some extra little details, from MIDI 2.0 in the Logic Step Sequencer to Ableton Link support in MainStage.

The post More Logic Pro 12 tweaks, MainStage 4 w

Logic Pro 12 is available now. Both iPad and Mac versions are included as part of Apple's new $13/mo Creators Studio, but this is also still a free upgrade for all existing Logic owners, and one-off purchases remain available. So let's talk abo

Plugin Alliance, with operations in the US and Langenfeld, Germany, says it is not part of Native Instruments' insolvency filing.

The post Plugin Alliance says it is “business as usual” appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

According to insolvency documents, Berlin-based Native Instruments GmbH (also parent to iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx) is in preliminary insolvency proceedings. This is significant news for one of the biggest brands in music-making technology

GEM and LEM are the lost Italian legends you may not know, but should. Toto, Rick Wakeman, Keith Emerson, Italian icons -- all users. But the moniker was retired, and most of us assumed we'd never see it again. Surprise: Generalmusic (now Finnish-o

It's 1986. Laurie Spiegel creates something unlike any software available at the time -- an "intelligent," algorithmic composer you can play as an instrument, for Mac, Amiga, and Atari ST. You're at NAMM, and it's 2026. Surprising

Surprise! Casio has something unexpected -- Dimension Shifter, a spring-powered expressive wireless controller that attaches to your guitar strap. And it was the invention of one employee, inspired by his kid's school-lunch retracting chopstick and

The experimental electromechanical 8-voice instrument, after a long gestation period at KORG Berlin's skunkworks R&D, is now going public. That means this unique set of sequenced steel resonators is making its way off the laboratory table and i

Tough times and tight spaces call for deep algorithmic generative triggers. So now is a great time for Noise Engineering to reimagine their trigger module. Tap a tempo, patch a cord, and instantly spin up percussive patterns you can freely modulate --

It started with Kastle 2, Bastl Instruments' cute and clever handheld. It could be a multi-effect, a sample player, a synth. Then Citadel modules came along and did those things in Eurorack. Now, Bastl's got a surprise: you can buy these as DIY

As expected, LANDR is adding plug-ins, mastering, and distribution services to the Reason+ subscription. Here's the surprise: Reason Rack is available as a standalone, perpetual purchase for the first time ($199), with Reason perpetual licenses low

More vintage Roland gear is bound for official plug-in versions. Here's the surprise: the CR-78 gets the nicest, most detailed software rendition yet. We also round out those nice BOSS pedals. It could be just what you need for some extra classic R

It leaked, you saw it -- it’s real, it’s huge. In addition to its recent MPC Live III, Akai has a big mama standalone called the MPC XL with more dedicated controls and a big 10.1” display -- but mostly the same innards. Let’s explain.

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Oh yeah, somebody remembered to make stuff that's just fun. Stylophone (Dubreq) is adding to its Pocket Range with an AA battery-powered device that samples, sequences, and adds effects. That puts your sounds under the signature Stylophone stylus -

Sparkle! Slash! PowerUP! This deceptively simple, stupidly fun free browser tool/download generates sound effects in the style of 80s and 90s Japanese animation, all thanks to a clever signal chain. And you can export WAV files, so you could use it to

Prolific as always, Sebastian Tomczak (aka littlescale) just dropped this gem. What do you need nine times out of ten from an audio editor? Visualize, check levels, trim, gain, fade, reverse, normalize, export -- now you can do all of that with one han

More, granular -- less random. That's the pitch from Fractiv, a new sampling granular instrument and effect from Sync Audio. Just when you thought you couldn't squeeze more ideas out of granular sound, they've got some smart ideas, includin

Enter an organic sound machine that will take you to an imagined sound world somewhere between a temple garden and a half-awake dream. ENDOGEN is a dazzling tool, built in Max and SuperCollider, that explores notions of lowercase synthesis. There's

Step through the wormhole into the warped, transcendent sound world of Zoë Mc Pherson and the cosmic visualizations of collaborator Alessandra Leone. The folks at URSSS have captured a full live AV show, so it’s a chance to see even if you don’t have a

It's the crazy-good acid maker, but more than that: Sting is fun for spinning all kinds of melodic and rhythmic patterns. (I'm constantly putting it on percussion tracks.) Now Iftah's back with a Sting 2.1 update with new arpeggiator and pa