As we enter a third month of violence in Israel-Palestine with no end in sight, sound spaces are providing the discourse, debate, musical expression, and solace for pain that other spaces deny. They also bring us the voices of the people closest to the catastrophe – including some of the artists, colleagues, and friends I’ve written about and who are suffering now. And sometimes, only music can express how we feel, when words are scrutinized, weaponized, fragmented, and fail.

Sinevibes has built a ground-up successor to its past Switch and Strobe step sequence gate effects. Everything from classic trance gates to precise polyrhythms is elegant and straightforward in this major update.

If you weren’t already in love with the free synthesis powerhouse that is Surge XT, here’s a big 1.3.0 release with a candy store of new features, from Open Sound Control to command line interface to visualizations in the tuning editor.

TouchDesigner 2023 Official has landed, in a massive upgrade for the essential media production tool and visual development environment. 2023 brings major new device and sensor support, timecode and other features that help it work in broadcast and production environments, and lots of new operators and integrations.

Today, Plogue is launching chipsynth C64, an AAX/AU/VST3/CLAP plug-in recreation of the Commodore 64/128 and its legendary 1982 SID chip (and successors). No one else could create an emulation this obsessive. After just a few minutes with it, it feels like encountering an entirely new instrument that fell straight out of a past decade. It’s likely to enchant both nostalgic C64 fans and those discovering chip music for the first time.

Ableton has announced that their Upgrade Kit for Push 3 is now available. With the launch, they’ve also released two videos, covering the upgrade process and their approach to making their hardware upgradeable.

Moog’s Mariana is here on desktop (macOS, Windows) and iOS and – it’s about as much Moog sound as you can imagine in software. Here’s what’s in that architecture, some hands-on first impressions, plus details of a significant update for the Moogerfooger software effect range that goes perfectly with the synth.

This is what many drum machine fans were waiting for: following their remade 909, D16 has its 808 plug-in reboot, and it looks and sounds gorgeous. Here’s what’s new.

Music consolidation continues – even beyond what we might have imagined. Hal Leonard is “joining” software maker Muse Group in a “partnership” (read: merger, but with separate operations, they say). Private equity giant Francisco Partners, the same company behind the NI – Plugin Alliance – iZotope conglomerate, is providing the investment.

The Synthstrom Audible Deluge, a grid-based synth/sequencer/sampler, has its first official open-source, community-developed firmware – “and it’s huge,” the makers say. There are new views, new effects, new modulation, and more.