The Music Technology Magazine
Livecoding, generative and visual music, audio-reactive visuals, synths, and the software behind live performance.
Joe Landers' gearmulator-md-mm fork emulates the Motorola DSP56303 chips inside Elektron's Machinedrum and Monomachine, running them as free, GPL-3.0 standalone apps and VST3 plugins. It's alpha (v0.1.0-alpha.11, Sept 11), CPU-hungry, and requires ROMs from your own hardware.
Valery Mironov's Sentient, released September 12 for $5.99, is an AUv3 and standalone synth for iOS and macOS whose wavetables aren't shipped with it. A neural network listens to everyday sound and builds them, and the interface exposes the learning itself — learning rate and neighbor influence are both drag gestures over a visible grid of neurons.
Released September 10 at $60, Dillon Bastan's Iota II is a standalone and plugin successor to his Max for Live device Iota — and, unofficially, to iZotope's discontinued Iris 2. You draw freeform 2D paths directly into spectrograms, run up to twelve of them at once across six samples, and switch between granular, spectral, and resynthesis playback.
Dirtywave shipped an official iOS version of the M8 tracker on September 9 for $29.99. It isn't a companion app or a remote: Wavsynth, Macrosynth, FMSynth, Hypersynth, and the sampler are all there, songs are byte-compatible with the Model:02 hardware, and everything lands in the Files app.
Suno's v6 release replaces v5.5 with three tiers — a precision-focused flagship, an experimental v6-wild, and a free v6-mini — while adding plain-language section edits, single-request mashups, and multi-modal generation from text, audio, image, or video. The release doubles as a public marker of Suno's shift from adversarial to collaborative with major labels.
Audacity 4 rewrites the free, open-source audio editor's interface in Qt and adds long-requested features — movable clips, gain envelopes, VST3/AU plugin support — while Tenacity, a community fork born from concerns over Muse Group's 2021 acquisition, offers a fully FLOSS alternative built from the same codebase.
Isla Electronics is spinning off ASICS, a from-scratch software emulation of the Alesis Andromeda A6's dual-oscillator, dual-filter voice architecture, into a standalone plugin — the first Andromeda emulation to exist in any form.
Synthmania's €29 User Oscillator pack drops 25 waveforms sampled from vintage and modern synths straight into the Korg microKORG2's DSP engine, using the custom-oscillator slot Korg opened with Firmware 2.0.
Rather than trust an M-Disk to outlive us, maker RobSmithDev built a physical player that reads Amiga MOD music files encoded onto ordinary printed paper — a dual-camera optical rig that turns a disc of hexadecimal text and a QR-style barcode into actual tracker music.
MiniMax Music 3.0 generates complete, structured songs — verses, choruses, bridges — up to five minutes long from lyrics and a text description, and ships open-weights rather than API-only.
The original Lifeforms SV-1 built a cult following as a tabletop semi-modular. Its successor keeps every bit of that patchable depth but adds something the SV-1 never had: a keyboard.
OktaDie throws out everything a normal synth interface assumes — no notes, no key, no grid to snap to. Just eight generators you touch, and whatever happens when they start talking to each other.
Most 'free' versions of paid synths cut the actual engine down. Pigments Play keeps Pigments' engine intact and simplifies the steering wheel instead.
The upgrade sheet reads like a wishlist for the original Blackbox's biggest limitations: more power, a real screen, and finally, a battery.
Most hybrid drum machines make you choose: shape it in analog, or manipulate it as a sample. drumDING's whole idea is that the same sound gets to be both, one button apart.
Most generative synths need you to set the rules. Synterra sets its own starting point by reading the room's actual magnetic field, then lets whatever's happening around it write the music.
East Coast versus West Coast synthesis has been a real design fork for decades. Vannes Devices' debut instrument just declines to choose.
The JD-800 gets all the nostalgia. Its rackmount sibling, the JD-990, quietly did more — and now it's getting the same free-simulator treatment from a developer with a real track record.
This isn't a stripped-down free tier. Altitude's full eight-generator hybrid engine, both filters, and its entire patch library are now free, with no version held back.
A real six-operator FM synth that can load actual DX7 patches, for about the price of a nice dinner out. The FM-1 is what happens when budget hardware stops apologizing for being budget.
Most 'free' plugins are demos with a paywall waiting at the interesting part. Sunset Circuits is genuinely free, open-source, and gives you six distinct synth engines instead of one.
GEMA's CEO called it "a verdict of global significance." A German court has decided that an AI music company training in the US still needs a European licence when the model lands in Europe — and Suno is appealing.
Prototype Minimoog Voyagers, Moogerfooler test units, and letters between Bob Moog and Wendy Carlos: inMusic's donation is less a product story than an archaeology of how electronic music actually got built.
Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie set out to synthesize the complexity of real instruments, couldn't do it, and did something stranger instead: recorded the real instruments and played them back from a keyboard. Everything since is downstream of that.
Chase Bliss's Mood turned a guitar signal into a self-sampling ambient machine. Bad Mood does the same thing badly on purpose — broken repeats, a shortwave-radio looper, and a saturation stage called Glue holding it together.
Reaktor lets you build instruments. Karst, from musician-developer Tim Exile, wants you to build a song. It runs in a browser, patches itself unless you tell it otherwise, and adds new machines every week.
The question hanging over every AI music tool — can you train on copyrighted songs without permission? — gets one of its first real answers July 31, when a Munich court rules in GEMA's case against Suno.
Full Bucket Music has quietly built a catalog of faithful vintage-synth emulations that cost nothing. Its next one, FB3, revives the Kawai K3 — a cult 1980s hybrid whose digital oscillators fed an analog filter.
Is that song made by a machine or a musician? The recording industry's answer is a two-tier label — 'AI-Generated' vs 'AI-Assisted' — stamped in a track's metadata. It's voluntary, but it's the first real attempt at a global standard.
Type a song title, and Wario Synth pulls its MIDI and plays it back as if a Game Boy were performing it — four-channel 8-bit chiptune, generated live in your browser. It's free, open source, and gleefully pointless in the best way.
The Yamaha CS-80 is a five-figure holy grail. Behringer is teasing a $99 mini that chases its analog voice — with a motion sequencer and 3-note paraphony. It's a concept for now, but a tantalizing one.
Tweakbench made quirky, beloved plugins in the early 2000s, then vanished. Now it's back, rebuilt for modern DAWs — and its new generative instrument Tendril turns a Euclidean sequencer into ethereal, self-varying melodies for $10.
Jean-Michel Jarre helped define what a synthesizer could be. Now boutique builder SynTesla has made him a one-of-a-kind instrument to his exact spec — with a consumer version reportedly under discussion for 2027–28.
Physical modeling — synthesizing the sound of real, plucked and struck materials rather than raw waveforms — is having a moment. reFX just teased Rippler, a commercial build of a beloved free synth that briefly vanished.
The Roland Jupiter-8 is a five-figure grail synth. Behringer's JT-2 puts a single voice of that sound in a small, Eurorack-friendly box you can actually afford — and it started shipping this month.
Most AI music tools want to keep you inside their own app. Suno Studio's most useful feature is designed to get you back out of it, with material you can keep working.
The biggest barrier to livecoding was never the idea, it was the setup. Strudel is the clearest attempt yet at removing that barrier entirely.