Sale-itis has made the full year a maddening deluge of discounts. (You know who you are, inbox plagues!) But here are some legitimately excellent deals on music software available now.

How far MadMapper has come. The tool, built as a collaboration between Swiss GarageCube and French studio 1024 architecture, helped define projection mapping for a generation of visualists. It has matured into a broadly versatile media tool, and v6 brings timelines, montage tracks, clips, audio features, and more to manage your project work, all wrapped into a new UI. Here’s the quick rundown.

Summer vacation? You can tell a USA-born project because it doesn’t take one. Vidvox has a nice update to their VJ/live visual app VDMX that captures inter-app audio. And for absolutely any Mac user, there’s an awesome music visualizer that’s totally free — bringing you back to the fun you had with visualizers back in the day. Milkdrop is back on the Mac!

“Chaos and resiliance” – the words become cruel cliché when applied on repeat to Beirut’s music scene. But the three latest releases from the Ruptured label tell a sonic story that’s not from some periphery, but the center of our world. They do so in collage — like film fragments (one from a filmmaker). That include’s today’s debut of Ripe from Postcards and in the recent sound narratives of Nour Sokhon, Stefan Christoff, and Camille Cabbabe.

To aid in your professional merriment, here’s a complete round-up of Severance stuff, from behind-the-scenes discussion of the show’s sound design and score to an eight-hour mix of “music to refine to.”|

London’s Music Hackspace has kicked off a series of free TouchDesigner meetups – and anyone can join from anywhere online. Today’s episode is on at 5 pm London time (check that world clock!), featuring kinetic installations.

Nothing about this year was normal; next year promises the same. But that’s what music is for – to reframe moments in time.

How did the Minimoog take shape – and set the course of synthesizer and musical instrument history? Among many revelations in JoE Silva’s The Minimoog Book for BJOOKS, we learn how the synth’s early prototypes evolved into the instrument we know today. Read the excerpt here.

Fall discounts have gotten hard to track, with most makers offering some discounts around now. But here is a select running list of some of the most exceptional deals.

Isadora, the node-based, open-ended live performance and media tool especially loved by theater and dance, gets a major update this summer. There’s a lot in there, but the biggest is something called IzzyCast, a remote functionality that lets you run any video, audio, and data in full resolution around the world. Here’s what’s new in Izzy 4.