KORG’s analog flagship synth, introduced earlier this year, hinted at a tantalizing feature – open programmability. It seems we’re about to learn what that’s about.

From the extraordinary first digital breakthroughs of the 70s, when lightbulbs stood in for LEDs, to what may have been the first use of the word “plug-in,”* we the inventors of Eventide’s classics – who now have a Grammy nod of their own.

Envelop began life by opening a space for exploring 3D sound. But today, the nonprofit, directed by artist Christopher Willits, is also releasing a set of free spatial sound tools you can use in Ableton Live 10. We’ve got an exclusive first look.

It ran natively in MS-DOS, then died by the end of the 90s. But now it’s back: one of the greatest chip music trackers of all time has been cloned to run on modern machines.

Maybe it’s time for the idea of a “commons” to get a new boost. Whatever the reason, BBC’s 16,000 sound effects are available to download – but with strings attached.

The death of 28-year-old star producer/DJ Avicii comes as a shock to many. It’s also easy to reduce to another example of party world excess, or to say it’s just about big-money EDM and pop. But it should be a bigger wake up call than that.

The music world is overloaded with people who talk about music – how it works, what has happened, what is happening. Few people can really delve articulately into questions of why. Susan Rogers is one of those few.

In the late 1970s in China, one inventor created a futuristic take on traditional instruments – and it easily still inspires today.

There’s a big push among software makers to deliver integrated solutions – and that’s great. But if you’re a big user of both, say, MASCHINE MK3 and Ableton Live, here’s some good news.

The growing power of gaming architectures for visuals has a side benefit: it can produce elaborate visuals without touching the CPU, which is busy on musicians’ machines dealing with sound.