AudioKit Synth One has arrived. The first wholly open source synth app on the iOS platform is here and is of course free to download. You can find all the specs for the synth right here

Recent updates for the visual programming environment plugdata (a wrapped for Pure Data) and the powerful object library cyclone are keeping the goodness going. Whether you’re looking to do patching and development in a graphical tool or just enjoy the free stuff people are making with Pd, that’s great news.

Move Everything is a hack for Move that lets you run custom synths, effects, and controllers alongside stock Move functions. But the truly momentous development is that its creator has added screen reader support, which makes Move the first truly standalone groovebox open to blind and visually impaired users.

Prolific as always, Sebastian Tomczak (aka littlescale) just dropped this gem. What do you need nine times out of ten from an audio editor? Visualize, check levels, trim, gain, fade, reverse, normalize, export — now you can do all of that with one handy index.html file and any browser, free.

Enter an organic sound machine that will take you to an imagined sound world somewhere between a temple garden and a half-awake dream. ENDOGEN is a dazzling tool, built in Max and SuperCollider, that explores notions of lowercase synthesis. There’s a lot to cover as far as what it can do — but you should also feel empowered to play and get lost.

Digital preservation is the new challenge for synths, just as it is in areas like games. And the Roland JP-8000 got a big leg up with a free and open source release from The Usual Suspects available this month, the JE8086. It’s one of several recent emulations, so let’s talk about why the 1998 synth […]

In its bones, Eterna for monome norns returns to some of the original success of monome: doing imaginative, intuitive, musical things with slices. A single audio file transforms via 6-voice sampler/sequencer and 12-page interface into everything from delicate ambient textures to detailed grooves.

It’s the full SuperCollider synth, without the installation. You can add it to any site (self-hosted). It performs seamlessly via WebAssembly. But most importantly, it’s fun, colorful, and comes with examples and an OSC API so it can interface with live coding tools like Tidal (or your favorite). And you can mess around with it right now, for free.

OneLibrary to rule them all? AlphaTheta hopes so, with a new library format that works across software and hardware without conversion, and with all your playlists, cue points, beatgrids, and so on intact. That may sound like a tall order, but it’s already launching with support for Pioneer hardware, Rekordbox, Traktor, and djay Pro.

plugdata, the visual programming environment for sound and media based on Pure Data (Pd), is becoming its own scene. It’s a great place to start patching your own sonic experiments, and if you haven’t already done that, you should. But it’s also becoming a treasure trove of free and paid tools and toys for musicians even if you never touch the wires inside. v.0.9.2 makes that better for developers and users alike. And did I mention it’s free, on Mac, Windows, Linux, and iOS/iPad?