It’s what a lot of musicians wished for – especially judging by all the renders you were making. But the reality looks and works better than what you imagined: the OP-XY is a more mature OP-Z follow-up with a rich complement of sequencing features. And it’s all in gorgeous black and monochrome.

Every so often, you get something that’s clearly a labor of love. Apple has acquired the innovative digital reverb legacy of Quantec and its late founder Wolfgang “Wolf” Buchleitner and built it into Logic Pro for iPad and Mac. That joins some other welcome improvements to Logic’s Mixer and Bounce in Place in this release.

Unreal Engine 5.5 is a major release for artists of all kinds. On the audio side, the free-to-start platform has new tools for visualizing and debugging, powerful Audio Widgets for UI interactions, and a slew of MetaSounds improvements for workflow, quality of life, and targeting different platforms. Oh, and – finally, there’s reverb.

If what you crave is not so much a groovebox/sequencer as a synthesizer, behold the latest from Polyend. Simply dubbed Synth, it’s a 499 $/€ instrument packed with playable synth engines. And you could see it as the first dedicated synth instrument from the company since their original flagship Medusa.

Now is a time to listen more deeply. Sound artist Izabela Dłużyk, blind since birth, launched a crowdfunding campaign to “dream despite blindness” back in 2016 to travel to Peruvian rainforest. We can sonically travel with her in a full-length album of field recordings, The Amazon — Where the Moon Wept.

Palette Sequencer by the duo KOAN Sound uses color palettes to generate sequences for melodies and modulation. It’s gorgeously designed and available now for Ableton Live and Max for Live.

From full free and open-source software to proprietary favorites from other platforms, the plug-in options on Linux have quietly come into their own. linuxdaw.org has a visual, searchable catalog – and it’s a reminder of just how spoiled for choice you are even without Windows or macOS.

Le Guess Who?, a festival beginning this week in Utrecht, Netherlands, put together a model of inclusion and diversity. And then that vision ran straight into a visa system often designed to keep people out – when it worked at all. But this festival decided to do something differently: share their experience.

In whirling, abstract flights of noise and oscillations, composer Arash Azadi makes electronics that evolve as if in an electro-organic primordial ooze. And he has something to say about returning us all to a deeper state of existence.

The free modules for VCV Rack are coming fast and furious. The latest is Bastl’s awesomely versatile Crust drum voice. Just in case you need something to, you know, distract yourself today/tonight/the rest of this week.