What’s great? Roar. What’s the best part of Roar? Feedback. What could make it even better? The ability to play it with MIDI notes. Perfect.

Live 12.1 just hit public beta, bringing more than you might expect: major Push additions, new ways of working more quickly with keyboards (and screen readers), a new Drum Sampler and pitch tracking and correction device, and more. Oh, and they finally fixed (my) single most annoying omission in Live. Here’s what’s new in Live (I’ll cover Push separately).

A new Live release also means updates for Push, both in standalone and controller modes. At last, that includes macro mapping and macro variations, among other enhancements.

More then just a vocoder, Baby Audio’s latest effect packs all the hardcore vocal special effects into one. It’s hard tuning meets phase vocoding meets wavetables.

Right after the major Tracker+ release, Polyend has a big update for the little Mini: now with Synth Engines, PERC drum engine, USB mass storage, more MIDI tracks, and other enhancements. And there’s a big sale on now, this week only.

This is your banger early warning system. You know how it goes – you hear a track, and you just instantly know it’s going to become USB key fodder and will magically work on dancefloors. This is that, and the star is … a flip phone?

You’ve heard time stretching. You’ve heard extreme time stretching. Sloom, a new plug-in and standalone app, is extreme-extreme-extreme time stretching – like instant ambient, instant experimental sonic manipulation – complete with unique spectral shaping.

Rainbow Circuit continues to dream up fanciful new Max for Live creations with eye-catching interface inventions. In the latest, Rift, you get a uniquely configurable custom additive synth oscillator.

Everybody’s a DJ until you put four tape machines in front of them. Yeah, to vinyl purists, Kerri Chandler continues to tour his all tape DJ rig, and it never gets old.

Betty Apple’s Taiwan Bay Be is a full-length album exploring Taiwanese identity, time travel, sound, and the cosmic. Released this year on our Establishment, Betty is now in Berlin for a live presentation on Wednesday – and she has a lot to say, from unpacking the mermaid fairy tail to imagining science fiction futures and sound’s relationship to “God” and life after death.