Let’s skip to the part you care about: Apple Creator Studio now adds Pixelmator Pro and puts every major Mac and iPad creative app under one subscription, and it’s not too expensive. But just as importantly, though, you can still buy the Mac versions of Logic, Final Cut, Pixelmator, and others as a one-time purchase — no subscription needed.

For a limited time, you can grab UA’s 610-A and 610-B models for free, emulating tube amps, transformers, and EQ circuitry in software form. That includes both the UAD Native version you can run anywhere, plus the DSP version that integrates with their Apollo hardware. Here are some details.

It’s a patcher inside a patcher. And that patcher has more patches that you can copy, randomize, and sequence. And in that patcher is a ton of glitchy goodness. PatchSeq, hot off the grill from Jeremy Wentworth and Voxglitch, is something special.

Out of Belgium, there’s a murky, forbidding free underground netlabel that has survived from another era. It’s aggressively anti-algorithmic, soul-chillingly dark in its aesthetics, and committed to free culture and commons like if social media and AI never happened. And it’s perfect for a frozen European night, wherever you might be.

Push-button telephone. Analog drum machine. Arduino Nano. DIY amplifier. Shashwath Sundar, aka simple_but_nerdy, makes the telephone-drum machine fusion seem like it was meant to be.

Tekno from Baby Audio was easily one of my favorite plug-ins of last year — it’s a rich, “bend”-able, brutal box with the feeling of hardware drum synthesis. And now it gets a step sequencer, plus a ton of tweaks you might have missed in the first release. And one more thing: iOS users, there’s a mobile version with AUv3 version.

No, MTV is not shutting down, though Paramount Skydance did shutter some all-music video channels in various markets. But never mind: the internet can best even vintage MTV. Tune into MTV REWIND and hit shuffle by decade.

It’s a Very Workshop System Jamuary. Music Thing’s patchable music lab-in-a-lunchbox has proved that small-batch personal hardware can attract a select, dedicated community sharing great stuff with one another. Let’s catch up with what’s been happening in that magical village of synth wonder in the past year. Don’t forget, the ideas and code here are all open — meaning this could inspire more.

We’ve had a deluge of superb VCV Rack modules, carrying straight over into the first days of the new year. But let’s skip to this one: Jeremy Wentworth’s free Grains is the granular sampler you’ve been waiting for, now available for VCV Rack and 4ms MetaModule. Bonus: my guide to other granular modules in Rack… and a surprise teaser.

LANDR, the AI-powered music platform, has acquired Reason Studios. That pairs Reason with the Montreal-based platform for mastering and distribution, and LANDR subsidiary SynchroArts (makers of VocAlign and Revoice Pro).