How great is live coding on Hydra, for free? It’s great enough that you’ll do it when you’ve never used code before. It’s great enough that – now with this new build – you’ll lie in bed with your iPhone or iPad and make trippy hypnotic visuals. You’ll plug in audio and stop using cameras and just permanently replace your visage with weird analog-style color feedback. It’s that great.

The MicroFreak already offered a ton of sonic madness in a small package – like a little oscillation playground. The v4 firmware that just dropped is essential, both in kinky new features and some overdue smoothed-out kinks.

The two user-requested features missing from Roland’s official editor/librarian are available via third-party tools. That means you can get a plug-in editor/librarian to store settings with DAW projects, and now you can even get started with drag-and-drop sample loading.

The current generation TR drum machines have been nearly perfect – well, nearly. Now they have the editor/librarian they were missing – well, almost. It’s brilliant, and it’s a first step, but it’s missing some stuff. Why we need an editor It’s just the fact that the TR-6S/8S are so balanced that makes them appealing. […]

The folks at cables.gl have evidently been busy, as they’ve got eye-searing new demos to share. And if you wish that were your next music video, you’re in luck, as they posted some tutorials on advanced topics for beginners, too. Best of all, everything is free, and runs right in your browser.

Now your Windows PC can also enter the exciting world of sound synthesis of the 1950s. Here’s news on Berna3 for Windows, plus some tutorial content to get you up to speed.

How much percussion and rhythmic thought can fit in under four minutes? A lot, when it’s in the hands of Gary, Indiana’s own Jlin. It’s soon to be in some human percussionist hands, too.

Tehran has one of the world’s most futuristic, alive electronic scenes. It just sometimes exists in and out of Iran. It floats into other places, sometimes unexpectedly underground in the city, sometimes flung around the globe through connections between artists and the impressions they make on the rest of us.

20 years ago next month, Microsoft’s Xbox console debuted – and there’s a story behind how it got its unique boot sound sequence. Call it this century’s first chip music composition / sonic branding feat.

Final Cut Pro, Motion, Compressor, and Logic Pro all got major updates today, too, to go alongside those new Macs. Logic gets the Spatial Audio tools we’ve been waiting for (and they look fantastic). Just as notable, the pricing stays the same – free updates, buy once, no subscriptions.