Every so often, KORG throws a Japan exclusive at its home market. And so it is that you’ll only see these Sanrio-themed (Hello Kitty) combo tuner metronomes there. It’s time for a quick Japan update.

Iftah Gabbai has delivered his Maxess Max/MSP External Collection, a set of tools that interface patches with the native accessibility features of macOS and Windows. They’re a must if you’re making tools with Max and Max for Live – and worth examining for inspiration even if you focus on other platforms.

Ableton Live 12.2 is in public beta today, with some major welcome features. Bouncing is easier, Auto Filter gets its biggest update since it came out, and there are new generative harmonic features, Meld and Roar updates, Push enhancements, and more. Here’s your guide.

Naarm/Melbourne’s own Nitecaller is making dreamy sounds- and now has the home-built dreamy synth to match. Meet the T-16 semi-modular synth, recreating and expanding on the analog circuits of classic ARPs, built by Nitecaller and his brother.

No collection of DSP models for work, pleasure, and creative abuse would be complete without the Chowdbury DSP collection. You might know about the plug-in, but it’s also worth noting that these are available in VCV Rack and Cardinal, where you can patch them at will.

Befaco has some new and refreshed modules, elegantly covering some essential utilities and mixing. They’ve done a hands-on demo in Barcelona, and best of all, you can grab these as free and open source modules for the free VCV Rack environment. That means you could be playing with them in a matter of moments.

For all the ubiquity of Unreal Engine, a small handful of people are pushing the envelope of what Unreal can do as an audiovisual tool. With years of effects and animation production work under his belt, Zack Berwick is uniquely creative and inventive with the combo – and he’s sharing his approach, using Ableton Live, Max for Live, MIDI, OSC, and UE.

Flow was the surprise of the Oscars: a true underground hit from Latvia’s writer/director Gints Zilbalodis. It’s beautiful, expressive, and intimate in a way that big-studio features are not. And it’s a triumph of making the tech operate on a human level, fully exploiting the free and open source Blender and its real-time render engine EEVEE.

KORG’s analog-modeling, layered multi-poly was already compelling as hardware. Now, it’s available as a software plug-in, either as a companion to the keyboard version or as a rich plug-in in its own right. I’ve been working with a late build; here are some impressions.

Flufs is the loudness meter and analysis tool for Ableton Live (Max for Live) you’ve always wanted. But more than that, it’s designed to be accessible to blind, low vision, and sighted users alike. And if that’s interesting to you, there are more developer tools on the way.