Get ready for some tablet patching. A developer has revealed a port of popular open source modular environment VCV Rack to the iPad.

Vember Audio’s Surge synth could be an ideal choice for an older machine or a tight budget – with deep modulation and loads of wavetables, now free and open source.

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

What if you could remake Ableton Move to do anything, using Max — the audio engine, I/O, every pad, button, encoder, and even the display? That’s RNBO support on Move. It’s labeled “experimental alpha,” but I’ve been testing RNBO Takeover Mode on Move, and it’s already really usable. There’s even a lot you can do without patching at all, like running Robert Henke’s now-iconic Granulator III. Here’s a first look.

Pikimov 5.1.0 is now available as an offline app, bringing all the browser-powered video editing and motion graphics powers of this tool to a standalone tool — no internet connection required. The browser version is free forever; for offline capabilities, you need to pay $6 a month (no commitment). Pikimov is not free as in […]

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 […]