Ableton has announced Live 12 today, with new tools for creating sounds, exploring musical ideas, and playing with the software as an instrument.

LEDs, cathode ray tubes, blinky lights – move over. Once you’ve seen dancing animated black goo frolicking in space to sound, you never go back. Love Hultén has been plus-ing their custom instruments with ferrofluids, and the results are simply magical.

If you missed it earlier this fall, Tarik Barri has a great walkthrough of Videosync, the live visual software integrated with Ableton Live on the Mac. Bonus – from the same dev, Beam lets you perform live with lighting, and we can see that in action, too – plus there’s an early-bird edition just for Max.

Okay, visualists and AV folks: Resolume is now on something like a two-month release cadence. This time, there’s everything from vertical text alignment and expanded OSC/MIDI monitoring to vibrance, and – about those Decks…

Roland has updated the OS on their flagship FANTOM 6, 7, and 8 synths. It’s a major update, with everything from a shimmer reverb to Analog Circuit Behavior sounds, stage pianos to some classic synths. If you wanted just one keyboard to play everything Roland, the FANTOM is now that instrument.

From Dieter Doepfer, the fine fellow who coined “Eurorack,” the Basic System 3 looks like a true return to form. This is an open-ended analog system with some room to grow, revealed in a new teaser to start out our week.

In a big synchronized release, Logic Pro for Mac 10.8 and Logic Pro for 1.1 both dropped today. That’s a jam-packed iOS update, new features on both Mac and iPad, and a lot of the new iPad features migrating as expected to the Mac. The upshot: Mac users also benefit from some of the iPad action, even if you’re sticking with the desktop version.

Soundtoys is again giving away their superb Little Plate reverb plug-in – normally $99 – through December 1. It’s a model of the vintage EMT 140 but with extras like infinite Decay Time, a Mod switch, and an adjustable lowpass filter.

What do you do if you make one of the best modulation modules out there? Make it better. That’s the Batumi II and the optional Poti II expander, a complete redesign with more features in the same space.

Finally, here’s a MIDI utility that shows you just the information you need about MIDI activity, instead of dumping a massive list of messages on the screen. ShowMIDI is free and open source, with builds for macOS, Windows, and Linux, thanks to developer Geert Bevin.