Zabte Sote is a wellspring of inspiration, not because of some fetishization of Iran or least of all its pain, but as a reservoir of adventurous curation and expressive sound design. It’s a label that consistently has something to say. This year Ate ‘Sote’ Ebtekar has already put out three more gems, and it’s worth visiting all three.

What would your splurge synth be? It’s tough to top the OB-X8 for that, now in desktop form with the full sound functionality of the OB-X, OB-Xa, and OB-8. Plus, when you invest your money in this thing, everyone still sees your face – like your actual face and eyes, so you totally won’t be wearing dystopian ski goggles.

Baby Audio’s remake of the Yamaha CS01 is a perfect fit for iOS, since the original was cheap, cheery, portable, and full of personality. It’s an ideal instrument for mucking about on your iPad or iPhone, and now it’s running natively on those devices.

Sing for joy on this one: BLEASS is a vocal transformer / harmonizer that’s easy to use like a synth, and runs on both your computer and your iPad or iPhone (so you can easily take it to go). It’s about time.

Sometimes all musical inspiration needs is a different view on things. So what better than to refresh your Ableton Live vibes than an injection of 90s-tinted color themes inspired by the Silicon Graphics workstation?

An inevitable effect of the renewed mixed reality and Apple hype is sure to be refueling interest in other devices. And that $3499 price also reframes the value of, well, nearly everything. Right on cue, what’s back? The hand tracking Leap Motion, now from the redubbed Ultraleap, at $139 – a device musicians and media artists had already exploited to great effect.

We talk about the Mac, but ultimately the Mac was a vehicle for GUIs – icons, mice, scrolling, toolboxes, painting. We talk about the iPhone, but the iPhone turned out to be about mobile photography and apps and touch. Get too hung up on the (very pricey) initial hardware, and you might miss some of the potential of what Apple is doing with what they call spatial computing. And you’ll also miss how some of these threads in interaction design started – as with those other examples – long before Apple.

Well, there’s the last part of the Apple Silicon picture from Apple. For anyone skeptical about whether there would be a high-end component to this picture, doubt no more: the top-of-range M2 Max is now in the $1999 Mac Studio and the pricey-but-expandable Mac Pro tower.

Composer-developer Giorgio Sancristoforo continues to deliver complete hardware sound laboratory experiences in standalone software form for your Mac or PC. The latest provides some 1000 oscillators, 200 filters, and 200 LFOs in a massively epic synthesis experience. (Or even 2000 oscillators.) Get ready for a wall of sound unlike any other.

Steinberg’s Dorico may be a flagship notation tool in the traditional mold, but frequent updates continue to argue for making this your scoring option of choice. That’s an easy case to be made with the high-end Pro edition if your budget allows – but it’s increasingly true of the Elements and iPad editions, too.