It’s long past time to start talking about scenes in Egypt, Palestine, and elsewhere not just like some exotic foreign treat, but dead-center in the history of hip hop experimentation. ZULI casually drops his second Habibi Loops for free, and it utterly slaps. To quote one clip, “that’s sick, man — that’s dope.”

Data Knot is the best of AI and machine learning: low-latency, optimized, performance-friendly, responsive — a set of building blocks for gestures and sounds that you customize. Built on the Fluid Corpus Manipulation project (FluCoMa) by composer/artist and self-described “crazy person” Rodrigo Constanzo, it’s something else musicians and artists love, too: it’s free.

With deeper support for Linux and high-DPI rendering, NAP, the expressive, low-latency, efficient framework for control and visuals, can now awe audiences anywhere. Visualization, sound, running electronics, whatever it is you want to throw at NAP, now you can do it better on Windows and Linux, including embedded platforms. And did we mention it’s free and open source?

OneLibrary to rule them all? AlphaTheta hopes so, with a new library format that works across software and hardware without conversion, and with all your playlists, cue points, beatgrids, and so on intact. That may sound like a tall order, but it’s already launching with support for Pioneer hardware, Rekordbox, Traktor, and djay Pro.

Against the backdrop of AL.FESTIVAL, the Berlin festival centering music from the Arabic world and diasporic communities, we gathered an expert group to discuss liberating technology from some of its Western biases and exclusionary design. Now you can listen back (and read more), with artists ABADIR and Basel Naouri plus Ableton’s Dr. Laurel Pardue, as chatter ranged from critical views of futurism to ways software can mesh with Indonesian gamelan.

We know Android devices could use more music-making love. Polaris already proved itself an elegant Android-only solution. Developer Baptiste writes to let us know he’s added multiple patterns per track for chaining and variations, and other tweaks. The design work is beautifully simple — worth a look for design lovers and Android aficionados alike.

Videosync for macOS and Windows remains one of the easier ways to transform your Ableton Live set into a live VJ or audiovisual set or music video. Version 2.1 just landed with critical features like a video recorder and video monitor, plus new visual tricks like gradients. And if you’re new to the tool, here are some tips on where to get started learning.

Despite bombing, drone attacks, and sleepless nights, Kyiv continues to support a burgeoning experimentalism in sound, driven by an appetite for noise and engineering. And it’s bringing more people into that community. Here’s a look inside.

In part 1 of this guide, we learned how Ableton DSP can help you build custom Max for Live devices quickly, even for first-time patchers. Let’s take that further in part 2, mixing Ableton DSP with Max objects and producing some custom effects. It opens doors for building just what you need — and creating unique combinations of sound processing.

What if you could drop in a bunch of stems and let a plug-in mix and master for you, subtly or to extremes, with no “AI” involved? That’s the latest idea from Tim Exile, and it’s produces such quick, varied results that it can serve as a one-click way to hear your mix creatively from a different angle. Just when everyone had forgotten about Instagram filters, we finally see their equivalent in music. And it’s a delight.