Okay Bitwig Studio fans: your hardware has arrived. Bitwig’s own Connect 4/12 is available now (and yes, that includes the beleaguered market of the USA). Plus Melbourne Instruments’ appetizing-looking Roto-Control with its motorized knobs now has Bitwig Studio support, following Ableton Live support – and they say the integration is even deeper this time.

Have you ever, half-asleep, felt a melody drift with ease through your brain, humming with electricity, only to lose it again? In The Vapornet, Claudia Khachan and Ziad Moukarzel mind-meld in a collaboration that makes that moment come alive.

SpaceBlender is technically a reverb, but don’t think of SpaceBlender as a reverb. Soundtoys’ new “imaginary space machine” uses a unique algorithm to produce rich new timbres and deep, cosmic, smeared wormholes of sound and texture. It’s a cross-breed of swarm synthesis and reverberation. I’ve been beta testing and talking to the developer; here’s the scoop – and act fast, as it’s free through May 22.

Nazar’s Demilitarize, out this month on Hyperdub, is essential listening – reimagined Angolan kuduro DNA woven into a sound world inspired by processing trauma and absorbing the ethos of anime classic Ghost in the Shell. It follows two releases that responded to the civil war with an imaginative, intimate coda.

Steinberg Dorico remains the commercial scoring tool to beat. Dorico 6 for macOS, Windows, and iPadOS adds a bunch of new features, but I’m particularly excited to see features like Lutosławski-style cutaways, system-attached items, and full OpenType glyph positioning and glyph substitution features. For advanced contemporary music, this is exactly the flexibility we were waiting for across the evolution of Sibelius and then Dorico – and it’ll be welcome news to those arriving from the now-discontinued Finale.

Baby Audio’s Smooth Operator Pro delivers powerful ways of dynamically sculpting sound and applying spectral processing. To round out the offering, here are some CDM-exclusive presets. You can try them out alongside the factory presets in their free trial.

Just when you think you’ve had enough granular effects, Imaginando’s GRFX does everything right. That includes fine-tuned harmonies (including microtuning), per-grain effects, and drag-and-drop modulation from four LFOs.

Unity offers a powerful alternative to Unreal Engine for artists, with some unique features and broader device support, including the Web. And while pricing caused some heated discussions a while back, the important thing to know is that students, personal users, and educators can all use Unity for free. So let’s check in with Unity, which has just branched into stable and latest-and-greatest branches with Unity 6.1. Here’s what’s new.

It’s just as dark, just as blistering and powerful, but with sharper details, nuanced rhythms. Arabic-speaking techno from mnjm in Berlin reinvigorates the genre by shedding some of its cookie-cutter repetition and making it come alive all over again.

Arturia’s latest refresh of their sprawling V Collection is here today. In addition to updates across the Augmented line and the inclusion of the latest instruments, there are two surprises: a layered “lo-fi” synth and an instrument of the Roland JP-8000. Yes, really, the JP-8000: sometimes you want the 90s and 2000s and not only, like, the 70s and 80s.