We know Android devices could use more music-making love. Polaris already proved itself an elegant Android-only solution. Developer Baptiste writes to let us know he’s added multiple patterns per track for chaining and variations, and other tweaks. The design work is beautifully simple — worth a look for design lovers and Android aficionados alike.

Videosync for macOS and Windows remains one of the easier ways to transform your Ableton Live set into a live VJ or audiovisual set or music video. Version 2.1 just landed with critical features like a video recorder and video monitor, plus new visual tricks like gradients. And if you’re new to the tool, here are some tips on where to get started learning.

Despite bombing, drone attacks, and sleepless nights, Kyiv continues to support a burgeoning experimentalism in sound, driven by an appetite for noise and engineering. And it’s bringing more people into that community. Here’s a look inside.

In part 1 of this guide, we learned how Ableton DSP can help you build custom Max for Live devices quickly, even for first-time patchers. Let’s take that further in part 2, mixing Ableton DSP with Max objects and producing some custom effects. It opens doors for building just what you need — and creating unique combinations of sound processing.

What if you could drop in a bunch of stems and let a plug-in mix and master for you, subtly or to extremes, with no “AI” involved? That’s the latest idea from Tim Exile, and it’s produces such quick, varied results that it can serve as a one-click way to hear your mix creatively from a different angle. Just when everyone had forgotten about Instagram filters, we finally see their equivalent in music. And it’s a delight.

This is truly haunting — the sound of a vintage machine’s lightbulbs hooked up to audio inputs, proving it can be more Boards of Canada than the actual Boards of Canada. Even the sound of loading up the punch cards and flipping the switches is oddly soothing. And more rabbit holes await.

Deep in the annals of software’s virtual guts, its wires and nodes, what defines patching on the computer is that it’s eminently human. Perhaps in this age of instant results, that’s drawing a new generation to the manual, personal labor of computer construction. So now is a perfect time for Max-patching musician Tom Hall — and no one better to interview him than our friend David Abravanel.

Ewan Bristow and CRQL have created pure, manic magic with this one. UZU mangles sounds through a wormhole, via what is technically a spectral Frequency Domain Filter. And yes, FL Studio fans may recognize some of the characteristics of the phaser in Image-Line’s wonderful Harmor synth.

Wake up! A new BBD just dropped. It’s an analog delay circuit, but a new-generation design — the first such genuinely new chip design in decades. And that means you could argue the biggest announcement of this year in music technology is the smallest. Meet the SSI2100 from Sound Semiconductor, coming soon to music gear new you.

The microKORG2 had the immediacy and cute factor of the microKORG, but even at its still-economical price, we needed more. And wow, did we get it. The logue SDK means this is an adorable synth that can load custom oscillators and effects — including Sinevibes creations. This could be the new “it” keyboard for the masses. It’s even got Achievements. (Really.)