An update to macOS Mojave yesterday promises to “improve reliability” of USB audio on recent Apple hardware, addressing a serious issue many users had flagged.

Saturation, distortion, warmth, fuzz – it’s what keeps a lot of us coming back to machines. SPICE is a modular distortion on Kickstarter, suitable for Eurorack or desktop use alike – and it’s getting reader attention partly because it isn’t over the funding line quite yet.

Instagram-trending techno can’t find its way out of the corner of a warehouse with some manic depressive crows. (Oh no – Derelicte turned real!) So let’s go to an alien undersea imaginarium with Jonáš Gruska instead.

The new doppler board promises to meld the power of FPGA brains with microcontrollers and the accessibility of environments like Arduino. And the founder is so confident that could lead to new stuff, he’s making a “label” to help share your ideas.

Moogfest is inbound, and that means some new, limited quantity creation of the engineers at Moog. This year it’s a fascinating looking spectral shift module.

At about $400 street, with tons of hands-on control and simple samples, the Elektron Model:Samples has more in common with classic Japanese grooveboxes than the company’s flagships. So what’s it like to use? Here’s our review.

Few studio consoles are coveted quite like the Solid State Logic. But SSL have had the clever idea of cutting this down to a compact, still pricey, but luxe desktop mixer. And SiX is a good indication the console is back.

Twisted Electrons move on from acid and chip synths to drum machines. And the deton8, for around three hundred bucks, packs a ton of personality and sound possibility in a cute, playable package.

It’s not so much that anyone expected MySpace to be alive at this point, let alone a safe place for music uploads. The demise of years of MySpace music is more like a sad reminder of the direction of the Internet.

Trade shows can be a strenuous onslaught of noise, cost, and crowds – but then it’s often the weirdest stuff that makes it worth it. And no one finds strange quite like Barry Wood and his annual NAMM Oddities.