Open licensing for proprietary audio and plug-in standards could enable the entire industry to move forward on some critical work. So it’s great news that Steinberg this month announced not one but two big licensing announcements: first, a dual-licensing model for their ASIO audio driver protocol for Windows (including an OBS collaboration), and now a permissive MIT license for the mighty VST3 plug-in spec.

Interactive Shader Format (ISF) code for working with Metal and rendering on macOS, plus an underlying Metal framework that powers live visual app VDMX6, are now free and open source. That’s great news even if you’re just toying around with shaders or working with visuals, as it opens up lots of possibilities to come.

The culmination of seven years of open-source development, GIMP has reached its milestone 3.0 release. GIMP was always powerful, but this feels more like the mature, usable release to take on the proprietary heavyweights.

Flow was the surprise of the Oscars: a true underground hit from Latvia’s writer/director Gints Zilbalodis. It’s beautiful, expressive, and intimate in a way that big-studio features are not. And it’s a triumph of making the tech operate on a human level, fully exploiting the free and open source Blender and its real-time render engine EEVEE.

Acidwerk puts the acid in acid. Yes, this is a generative bassline and drum synth. No, it does not make the vanilla acid you might be imagining. It’s a beautifully bizarre instrument perfect for creating some chaotic noise in a browser tab right after you’ve closed … the news.

cables.gl is a wonderful creative environment for everything the browser can do visually – interaction, motion, and 3D. And now it sports a full open source MIT license and a version you can download and use offline.

This live visual newcomer is off to a promising start: live DMX lighting, generative visuals (with video and photos), MIDI control, Ableton Link – and it’s free and open source. It’s coded in TypeScript, with downloads for macOS and Windows; Linux promised soon.

Synthstrom’s Deluge, a do-everything sequencer-sampler-synth instrument beneath a lit-up grid, is going open source. We’ve got the details from Synthstrom about how that will work.

Going on the grid is way more interesting when you compose the grid. Click Tracker, João Pais’ free and open-source click track generation for tons of platforms (even Max and Pd), keeps getting more functionality.

The Dart line of controllers is an Arduino-powered array of devices, either for DIYers in shield form and with open software and specs, or mutated into a cornucopia of peculiar-looking devices. DMX and MIDI support and full customizability. This is old news, but now feels like the right time to rediscover them. It’s impossible not […]