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.

VCV Rack, the free and open-source host, has added a new illustrated manual for all its free modules. (Free docs, free host, free modules – got it?) It’s a great intro or refresher — those pictures illustrate a lot of concepts that can elude even advanced synthesists. That makes this worth a look whether you’ve got a hardware Eurorack rig or are just getting started in software.

Arturia just refreshed their FX Collection to version 4. That adds all the newest stuff, including a few I’ve written up here – plus one surprise, the new _Rotary CLS-222 emulation of the Dynacord emulation of the Leslie speaker. Here’s what’s new.

Drift is a friendly, MPE-ready, hardware-inspired synth that’s now included in Live 11.3. Since anyone with Live 11 – even Live Lite users – will get it free, let’s go straight to the source to understand the instrument. We took the chance to talk to Marc Resibois, the instrument’s creator, about how Drift was developed – and get his tips on sound creation and some of the sound features you might otherwise miss.

Whirl, the delightful barber-pole phaser effect (and its seemingly endlessly swirling peaks) now has added two crucial features: syncable frequency, and bidirectional stereo width. That makes this already terrific and accessible effect tool even more useful.