peter KIRN

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The Bob Moog Foundation Archives just added 4489 items from inMusic - CDM Create Digital Music

500 schematics, 700 letters, vintage synths, publications, personal effects from Dr. Bob, prototype models, and more: thanks to a major gift from inMusic, the Bob Moog Foundation has massively expanded its collection. It makes the history that much more whole. Here are some images to give you a glimpse.

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NI after NI: which brand is where, and who owns whom - CDM Create Digital Music

Native Instruments, iZotope, Plugin Alliance, and Brainworx being part of inMusic? That was early May; now only NI remains at inMusic. 2026' mergers and acquisitions have come so fast, you practically need a reference to keep up. So... let's do just that. It's part of a larger pattern of ownership changes and layoffs across every part of the music instrument business.

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Vintage Max patches revived: free downloads, Leafcutter John and Suren - CDM Create Digital Music

Suren Seneviratne (My Panda Shall Fly) has been painstakingly cataloging lost software, oldschool patches, and retro musical practices, reviving old machines and software and breathing new life into them. But now, we get some classic Max patches, remade for the current era of Max patches. Download them for free, and listen in as Suren interviews Leafcutter John and John interviews Suren.

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Birds on guitars, in the zebra finch sound art of Céleste Boursier-Mougenot - CDM Create Digital Music

Sound artist Céleste Boursier-Mougenot's "from hear to ear" is on view in Lisbon, Portugal at the moment. So let's take a moment for zebra finches playing guitars and other sonic installations driven by elements from nature in the work of this artist from Nice, France (now in Sète).

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Septabee, an insane-looking free Linux/Windows DAW with pomegranates - CDM Create Digital Music

Suddenly, a bunch of the producers I follow are buzzing about the music-mangling possibilities of Septabee, a free DAW for Linux and Windows developed "in secret" over "20,000 hours." And it looks like insane fun: a bonkers dataflow interface and "violently unfinished" early-access software available through an intentionally broken website that autoplays music and makes you hunt for the click zone like it's 1994.

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The delicate, tiny sound machines in the world of Kuro Kasetto - CDM Create Digital Music

From Mexico, Kuro Kasetto produces music with solenoids and machines that quivers and rustles as if it's more flora than machine. It's a world of "tiny sounds" and a source of exquisite escape.

NLnet; Come Say Hello at Superbooth

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Impactor, Rupture 2 by Rawton Forge are perfect percussion synths for Live - CDM Create Digital Music

That's it. Rawton Forge has nailed it. With the new Rupture 2 on the kick and bass drum synthesis side, and Impactor handling general-purpose percussion synthesis for kicks/toms/tonal, you have an ideal floor-rattling, punchy, snappy synthesis duo for Ableton Live.

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DeafMan transforms Ableton Live with custom colors, interactive editor - CDM Create Digital Music

DeafMan's creations for Ableton Live have evolved from a selection of cool retro themes to a vast library of complete color makeovers -- a "visual system." And there's an insanely powerful new editor for managing themes, tweaking colors, creating customizations, and assigning color to tracks. It's more than just customization: it's a way of thinking about your workspace and music in hues and shades.*

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dadamachines tbd 16: a groovebox that's compact, capable, and open by design - CDM Create Digital Music

tbd 16 does everything the other standalone grooveboxes do, but in a handheld form factor, built as an open platform that you’re free to customize, mod, and hack. Choose the engines and apps you want to use. And get them all on a compact, standalone device that rivals big-name competitors in a fraction of the […]

AP News

Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot

A federal judge has approved a $1.5 billion copyright settlement involving AI company Anthropic. The company will pay thousands of authors about $3,000 per book for using pirated copies to train its Claude chatbot.

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Synth Days in Kyiv: inside the wartime Ukrainian modular scene - CDM Create Digital Music

The prolific Kaximia of Tembra Modular and the series "Let's explore modular synthesis" transports us to a Synth Days holiday weekend event in Kyiv. Let's welcome her CDM writing debut, as she gives us a window into a Ukrainian modular scene that's thriving, despite everything.

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Y'all want the new Boards of Canada so bad you crashed Warp's server - CDM Create Digital Music

May 29: that's the date Boards of Canada is back with Inferno. And you must be excited about it, because Bleep is down. But we have a dreamy faux-VHS tape to watch and hear, anyway.

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Zebra 3 is here, a sprawling semi-modular plug-in that runs deep - CDM Create Digital Music

What if an integrated plug-in instrument could rival even full-blown modulars? That’s the question posed by u-he’s Zebra 3, out now at long last for macOS, Windows, and Linux. It’s unlikely any other soft synth takes on just this much synthesis territory, or with this much depth. From spline-based morphing oscillators to physical modeling and […]

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Detroit legend John Jammin Collins has passed - CDM Create Digital Music

Few faces are as essential to Detroit music and Detroit techno as John "Jammin" Collins, an institution behind the decks, stalwart of Underground Resistance, and the literal tour guide at Submerge's techno museum Exhibit 3000. We learned this weekend that the soul of Detroit moved onto another plane.

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Free BEAST Repeat for Ableton Live is so good, you'll switch genres to IDM - CDM Create Digital Music

Dillon Bastan, prolific Max for Live patch stylist to the stars, is at it again. BEAST Repeat takes the fun glitchiness of Ableton's stock Beat Repeat and adds extensive new ways to re-pitch, fade, stretch, twist, gate, pan, filter, and generally mangle per-pattern and per-beat. And it's free?!

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Casio's SXC-1 handheld sampler is packed with fun, coming to Japan - CDM Create Digital Music

Memory may be vanishing, phones and laptops may be getting downgraded specs. But we're enjoying an unexpected renaissance of mobile samplers. And of all of these, Casio might pack the most fun into a single package. The SXC-1's Japanese preorder was announced and sold out this week, and with good reason: this looks like the most fun we've had with Casio since the 80s and 90s.

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Play together with Ableton Live: how Circle of Live sets up for improvisation - CDM Create Digital Music

"It's okay to not have a plan -- it's okay to just jump and see what happens": Circle of Live is an event that brings together artists for spontaneous improvised performance. Ableton filmed Clark, Rival Consoles, Sebastian Mullaert, and the organizers at a recent event. Here's what we can learn from how they work (plus some more Circle of Live selections).

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Owen Lake and the Tragic Loves have the cutest dinosaur music video - CDM Create Digital Music

Owen Lake is back -- the alias of Jeff Snyder, who in these parts is best known for Snyderphonics, MPE innovator and Manta creator (of Princeton University). Here, we get twee-and-western, electro-country tunes with Anica Mrose Rissi that charmingly stick in your head, played partly on instruments Jeff invented, Electrosteel and Electrobass. And there's a music video with dinos!

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Absynth 6.1: Audio modulator, LFO retrigger, sound content, more - CDM Create Digital Music

If you need an excuse to suit up for an extravehicular activity in the cosmos of sound, Absynth is back again. Native Instruments quietly dropped Absynth 6.1, with oft-requested LFO retrigger and undo/redo, plus a surprise: a new audio modulator.

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Devious Pocket: standalone, simple digital vinyl from any turntable - CDM Create Digital Music

Skip the laptops and loads of proprietary hardware with an ultra-simple, portable, affordable add-on that turns any turntable into a digital vinyl turntable. That's the pitch from NAP Works for crowdfunded, compact hardware built on open-source tech. It might do more than just impress digital vinyl DJs: this has the potential to win over even the CDJ crowd.

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VDMX 6.3 adds expressions, plugin templates to beloved Mac visual tool - CDM Create Digital Music

Here's another live visual icon with some welcome updates. Vidvox promised lots of quality-of-life refinements with VDMX6 as a platform, and VDMX6.3 adds just that. So it's a good excuse to mention VDMX again, in case you'd tuned out for a bit.

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You can now get eight of UA's best plug-ins free, plus the free LUNA DAW - CDM Create Digital Music

UAD Explore is a surprise. This is no "intro" or limited pack; eight stand-out Universal Audio plug-ins are available for free. That's on top of the company's free Luna DAW — though the plug-ins will also work in your DAW of choice, no special hardware required. For skill sharing or anyone lacking a budget now, that means access to some great tools.

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Bastl's new Déjà vu is the 4HP module for when you need to fader stuff - CDM Create Digital Music

This looks like a good case of what happens when a simple idea does a ton of stuff -- the opposite of a unitasker. Two faders, but there's attenuator, attenuverter, crossfader, preamp, line level booster, panner, mixer, and and and...

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Lebanon's musicians are a model for action - they deserve support now - CDM Create Digital Music

Again and again, music communities in Lebanon have embraced mutual aid and spoken out through activism and in their art. That's been true from experimental music labels to the Beirut Synthesizer Center initiative. They're getting results. It's time for the international music scene and press to do more.

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MSteppySnap for Ableton Live makes modulation playable, maleable - CDM Create Digital Music

In a way, it's funny how complicated we make modulation. We wind up creating layers of envelopes and free-running oscillations just to get what we want. Tomavatars' MSteppySnap, once you grok its approach, is nothing like that. This is steppy snappy whooshy glorgy modulation you can play, capture, and trigger intuitively.

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Rafael Anton Irisarri on the architecture of loneliness and the physics of sound - CDM Create Digital Music

For over two decades, Rafael Anton Irisarri has been carving out a space that exists somewhere between the tectonic weight of modern classical and the vaporous drift of ambient music. Whether recording under his own name or as The Sight Below, Irisarri’s work is characterized by a physical sense of scale – soundscapes that feel like they have weather systems and geological history.

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ImagePlot, "vintage" 2010s tool for image visualization, is back, free - CDM Create Digital Music

"Gramps, tell us the story again!" Well, young'n, before LLMs and generative AI, we were really excited about making big clouds of dots using statistical techniques for visualization. And actually, it's still cool -- and runs free, locally, in your browser. Lev Manovich and team have brought back ImagePlot, and in a moment, it transforms any folder of images into a visualization.

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Liquid and hypnotic, Sinevibes' Duality is a different breed of vibrato - CDM Create Digital Music

By separating frequency spectrum emphasis from phase modulation, the "hybrid vibrato" Duality can create unique, clean, stereo-spinning pitch modulation. It's one of Sinevibes' most nuanced -- but also most compelling -- effects.

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Sonify data in Ableton Live with a free MIDI Tool; weather data walkthrough - CDM Create Digital Music

Now, raw data can be a musical source in Ableton Live 12 Clips -- for free. Manifest Audio's Datafree shows the potential of Live's Generators, transforming any pasted numbers into music and sound. There's a deeper rabbit hole to go down, but here's a great way to start. Let's try it with freely accessible climate data and make some weather-based melodies.

NGINX IP Blocking, CAPTCHA & WAF with CrowdSec | CrowdSec

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Let's enjoy some Square Enix game soundtracks in acoustic covers - CDM Create Digital Music

The Square Enix Music Channel remains a gift to the Internet. So in this dire summer for the gaming industry (layoffs, the end of physical media, console price hikes), let's keep the faith and listen to NieR played on hammered dulcimer. This, too, shall pass.

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Turn up Jaymie Silk's 2-volume Reclaim the Music and Transform Ur Mind - CDM Create Digital Music

Jaymie Silk just dropped volume 2 of Reclaim the Music, his spontaneous summer all-hardware bangers. It's hard-hitting oldschool techno, it's got that 90s sound (especially thanks to a vintage compressor), and it also has explosions of percussion that are true to African roots. "909, 808, percussions, groove." You should check his calls to activism, too.