Here comes the twist – in a year in which so much of the adventurous end of the electronic music scene was stalled, that dynamism was alive in Köln by way of Iranian diaspora. Timcheh was a window into where electronic musical inventors can go next, together.

IK Multimedia are giving away a nice British channel strip model in January. It’s part of a larger download, but you get some free metering and extra EQ in the deal even if you pay nothing at all.

It’s a simple pitch to Windows and Linux users: so long as you have a compatible RTX GPU to render, NVIDIA is going to throw an insane amount of stuff at you for free to create and collaborate. That landscape is growing – and it’s now out of beta.

Sometimes the way out of darkness is hitting play – to reach deeper feelings in a way only music can. The challenge can be just getting the track queued. All due respect to algorithms, half the joy of doing that is finding someone you trust.

The new generation of MacBook Pro isn’t cheap – but without a doubt, it marks the return of the great Apple flagship notebook. It’s long-haul in every sense of the phrase.

The anticipated VCV Rack 2 is here and out of beta. What will it support? What does the release mean for compatibility with modules? What will it cost if you opt for the ‘Pro’ version? All the details here – but yeah, you can finally run VCV Rack inside your DAW.

Sure, you might not want more samples of drum machines, vintage synths, modular, and guitars. But Spitfire Audio are betting you might want them through 56 guitar amps, 4 subs, 4 levels of rigging, and one of the world’s largest recording rooms. Aperture is too ridiculous not to notice – and it’s free if you buy enough stuff this week (plus there’s a free demo).

“Never have I ever…” mashed video game buttons in a fighter to win? Randomly tried a delay on a track with some arbitrary settings to try to make it better? Yeah, okay – take a drink. And take a free plug-in, BABY Audio’s new Magic Dice.

It’s not the bpm. It’s not the style. It’s the soul of the humans making the music that matters – and that might be what you’re missing. So grab this Indonesian-Chinese collaboration for an urgent cause, to heal a sick world, figuratively and literally.

It’s heard in drips, in flows of water. It’s counted in numbers, echoes in poetry, called into the air in plaintive cries, sighing instruments, and the decay of piano notes. When a crisis reaches us somewhere that even words fail, maybe we need sounds and music to tell the story alongside science.