‘Tis the season to throw some wobbly retro tape qualities to your tracks on some holiday break time for all of us, hopefully. Arturia’s Tape MELLO-FI brings a full spectrum of distortion, lo-fi tape, and width and color options – for free through the end of the month.

Sinevibes continues all the lovely stuff they’re doing in DSP and effects, whether it’s for KORG gear or your computer. And now that includes a full range of Windows support, with even some tweaks and improvements on the macOS side in the deal.

In the interest of security and privacy, Apple on macOS Monterey has added a prominent orange dot to display outputs when audio capture is active. That renders their machines unusable for live visual performance, though, since it’s also shown on external displays. Dear macOS team – we urgently need a fix here.

Modeling what is surely the noblest of instruments, the developers at Klevgränd have taken their realistic shaker models and allowed you to shake your iPhone authentically and musically. And it’s all for free.

Overloud, makers of guitar/bass, reverb, and studio models and more, are giving away their Dimension-D emulation plug-in for Mac and Windows. And it’s worth grabbing even if you have another Dimension, thanks to a few twists.

Erica Synths is one of many makers to have hardware plans hit by supply chain chaos. But the good news is, that epic PĒRKONS drum machine is adapted and coming soon – and got some new features in the process.

Endlesss, the collaborative jamming and cloud-based looper led by artist/dev Tim Exile, is removing its paywall. But that “free” model comes with a whole lot of Web3 talk – manifestos and white papers and a new token and NFTs.

Kamil Manqus كَامِل مَنْقوص from Palestinian artist Muqata’a remains one of the essential albums of 2021 – so it’s a beautiful moment to revisit its tense microsampled timbres in combination with visual surfaces from Theresa Baumgartner.

Let’s not get sucked into any mention of the “metaverse” – from the standpoint of pure graphics power on mere-mortal PCs, Unreal is one of the tools that is now seriously accessible for artists, even on a budget. And that’s worth celebrating, given it previously required getting a rare gig in a Hollywood VFX company.

Here’s a tip: change your browser preferences to open this groovebox as a new tab / homepage, any time you need to escape doomscrolling, social media, and depressing news and get back in the groove.