Max 9.1 is here, and it’s surprisingly packed with improvements, including building on the new goodies in Ableton abl.* objects and Jitter eye candy. Here’s what’s new.

Tired of Big Tech scanning your online data? Why not make your own deep scan of all the lost sound files on your own hard drive, producing an entirely local result? No sooner than Envion wowed us with its beautiful esoteric sonic landscapes, its developer Emiliano drops a killer second act.

Boo! Or… Bow! Paulee at Magical Synth Adventure has a lineup of picks for the 13 most haunted synths. I’ve gotten an advance look at this one, and the chapters reveal the selections (spoiler — don’t read past the video then). What’s great about this: these are not your average picks. This is definitely not giving you Necco wafers as a treat; it’s the real deal.

Open licensing for proprietary audio and plug-in standards could enable the entire industry to move forward on some critical work. So it’s great news that Steinberg this month announced not one but two big licensing announcements: first, a dual-licensing model for their ASIO audio driver protocol for Windows (including an OBS collaboration), and now a permissive MIT license for the mighty VST3 plug-in spec.

In case you hadn’t been watching KORG software releases lately, here’s a secret: they’re suddenly awesome. New models are coming far closer to the originals, featuring more and more perfect recreations of the best of KORG’s digital and analog back catalog. Today we get some bombshells: the flagship KORG grand piano engine, but most importantly, 1995’s Trinity and 1977’s PS-3300.

GForce’s MAP is all new — it’s not a recreation or a collaboration with other brands. But this synth has been to history class, studying modular designs by Serge Tcherepnin, Random*Source, and Buchla USA. Put that in a very modern interface, add MPE expression, and you get what feels like Massive X or Serum from an alternate universe where they’re all about West Coast synthesis.

Who says the internet is dead? Not Freesound, the massive, community-run, fully free and open library of sounds from birdsong to samples. This incredible repository turns 20 years old today, and they’re celebrating with talks and a listening session. That includes organizer discussions of how to cope with AI and keep users’ needs central, and […]

Reports have been circulating that The Juilliard School is collaborating with OpenAI. One source says OpenAI is working with Juilliard students to annotate music scores for use as training. There’s just one important fact to know: Juilliard, the institution, has no involvement.

Odiv, a young composer from Ahvaz, communes in Shelâl with deeply felt darkness. It’s haunted not as a fetish, not as the pastiche musical surplus equivalent of a costume shop, as piles up in so much “dark” music. But it’s a horror that’s movingly personal. Maybe it’s time for tea and conversation with all our demons and ghosts. Out now on Zabte Sote.

It all starts with the envelope, so that even a few milliseconds of sound can generate “thousands of sonic trajectories.” Built entirely in the free, open-source Pure Data, Envion is a deep compositional playground. You can think of it like an algorithmic drum machine. Emiliano Pennisi shares his creation with us.