In a year that is finally bringing tuning into music tech headlines, here’s a tool from ODDSound and Richard James that promises to help – and it’s free to get started. Let’s talk to the developers.

“In the year 5781 humanity is ever closer to becoming a singular consciousness…” Sci-fi Jewish mysticism, anime-style – David Abravanel is here in conversation with Meemo Comma.

At the meeting point of physics simulation, 3D visualization, and modular audio inside Unreal Engine, there’s Arthurs Audio BPs. And they just keep getting better – not just doing interesting visual stuff with sound, but making it low-latency.

With community radio and online features, the metaverse in cities like Chengdu and Shanghai continues to be a conduit for community. Efforts by independent community streamers could serve as an example to the rest of us figuring out our post-pandemic world.

Here’s another great underground DAW. The elegant, tape-inspired MultitrackStudio runs on desktop and iPad – and now not only does it to polyphonic expression, but it breaks ground in supporting MIDI 2.0, as well.

Miller Puckette, the original creator of Max and Pure Data, has been working on keeping connected remotely, too. In this video, he reveals how he plays with a percussionist using Pd and Ableton Live, then joins Cycling ’74’s David Zicarelli to talk about the future of collaboration in modular environments.

Resolve 17 quietly exited beta recently – then turned heads by releasing a speedy Apple Silicon M1 version, too. That release also runs faster on PC, while you’re at it, and this is kind of the tool that does everything on every platform and a lot of it for free. So it’s a video editor. […]

The age of YouTube channels about stomp pedals now has its own… well, not quite Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat so much as its own Red, White and Blaine. But it is historically accurate.

Bored by the Grammys? Try the Guthmans instead. The Guthman Musical Instrument Competition has selected its award winners, as musicians re-imagine acoustic, electroacoustic, electromagnetic, and digital all at once, with phenomenal results.

One tool gives you 8-bit retro digital sound effects (“bitcrush”/decimator) with loads of extras, for kind of every platform you can imagine – and it’s free.