Early VST-era developer Tweakbench has reissued its entire 22-plugin catalog after a two-decade absence and added a new generative instrument called Tendril, according to Synth Anatomy.
Splice has acquired UK orchestral and cinematic sample-library specialist Spitfire Audio for a reported $50 million, a deal Music Business Worldwide says has just closed as Splice pushes deeper into AI-assisted music creation.
Behringer has opened pre-orders for the AKS Mini, a sub-100-pound analog synth built directly off the EMS Synthi AKS circuitry that Pink Floyd and Brian Eno used to define a sound.
Roughly 100 Native Instruments employees, including its whole customer support staff, have reportedly been laid off about ten weeks after inMusic completed its acquisition of the company, according to insider accounts first reported by Synth Anatomy.
Native Instruments has released Super*Saw, a $99/GBP89/EUR99 synth built entirely from producer A.G. Cook's own supersaw preset sessions, available now.
Jean-Michel Jarre commissioned French boutique builder Pierre Jean Tardiveau to hand-build a one-of-a-kind, four-voice hybrid synthesizer called the JARRE Lab One, with a possible consumer version still years away.
Minimal Audio's new Current Expansion Player plugin lets producers buy just EPROM's 60-patch Memory Rites sound set for $29, without owning the full Current synth.
Synido's new TempoKEY K32 Play is a 32-key, battery-powered MIDI controller with a built-in General MIDI sound module, Bluetooth, 8 knobs, 8 pads and an OLED screen, selling for $149.99 through Amazon.
FKFX Audio has released Opus 55, a synthesizer plugin built on a new "chorophonic synthesis" method that plays an ensemble of independent monophonic voices instead of one polyphonic engine, and for now it's only available to $25-tier Patreon supporters ahead of a September public release at $89.
Voidcontrol MIDI has released a macOS version of its OB-6 Unofficial Editor, ending roughly a month of Windows-only availability for the deep-editing, DAW-integrated plugin built for Sequential's OB-6 analog synth.
Sinevibes has made its full 20-plus-effect collection compatible across Korg's entire 'logue lineup, prologue, minilogue xd, NTS-1, NTS-1 mkII, NTS-3 and microKORG2, ending years of fragmented plugin support between the models.
Behringer's JT-2, a paraphonic Eurorack module built around a single Jupiter-8-style analog voice, is now shipping for $259 (£154 / €177), with Poly Chain letting multiple units link into a 16-voice synth.
Different Instruments has released PartialString, a free VST3/AU plugin that models plucked strings using finite-difference time-domain synthesis, the computationally demanding method usually reserved for pricey studio-grade instruments.
Synth reviewer Loopop released a free, browser-based app on July 18, 2026 that lets producers design and export custom 3D-printable stands and pedalboards fitted to their exact hardware.
ConvertWithMoss, the free open-source multi-sample converter, shipped version 19 on July 18, 2026, adding support for 11 more hardware sampler formats, including Polyend Tracker, Renoise XRNI, Elektron Tonverk and three separate Roland patch types.
Dirk Ulrich, the founder of Plugin Alliance and Brainworx, has reacquired both companies from inMusic effective July 15, 2026, folding them into his new RCKFRC Audio Group alongside Manley Labs and Apogee, per Sound on Sound.
reFX is releasing a commercial version of Tiagolr's free physical-modeling synth Rippler, months after the developer pulled the open-source repo to sign it to the plugin maker.
MODULA 26, a two-day synthesizer and electronic-music expo at Dynamo Zurich on July 17-18, 2026, is the city's first dedicated synth event since the Zurich Modular Festival folded around 2018-2019.
Morphoice has released EightyTen, a free public-beta plugin emulating the Roland JX-8P, Super JX-10 and MKS-70, for macOS, Windows and Linux.
Novation has topped off its Launchkey MK4 line with an 88-key, semi-weighted, full-size MIDI controller that has no built-in sound engine, completing a ten-model range across six sizes at $449.99.
Audio Damage's new Tessera plugin excites twelve tuned resonator voices from a single audio input, turning a drum hit into a full chord or a sustained tone into an evolving pad.
Native Instruments has released Super*Saw, a 99 euro plugin built over two years with PC Music founder A.G. Cook that reworks the classic supersaw with dual 16-oscillator banks and an X/Y morph between four patch states.
Korg's new NTS-4 is a $249 six-channel mixer kit with switchable attenuators and built-in effects that lets Eurorack modular gear plug straight into line-level DJ and production rigs.
Behringer has opened pre-orders for the AKS Mini, a $99/£99/€119 pocket synth reproducing the analog VCO and VCF circuitry of the EMS Synthi AKS that Pink Floyd and Brian Eno used in the 1970s.
DJ TechTools' redesigned 2026 Chroma Drive replaces the losable USB cap with rotating metal covers built into the drive itself, across five colors and four storage sizes up to 1TB.
AlphaTheta's new CoBeat service lets clubbers scan a QR code and vote on which track a DJ plays next, reviving a decades-old fight over who should really control the set.
FL Studio's free 2026 update rebuilds FLEX for the first time since 2019, adds encrypted cloud project backup, and expands its Gopher AI assistant to edit projects directly while explicitly refusing to train on user data.
AlphaTheta's new XDJ-AN is an all-in-one DJ system built around a phone, not a jog wheel or a searchable pad grid, betting entry-level buyers will trade physical control for a device that fits in a jacket pocket.
Brazil's EMW has released the DX7000, a 16-voice desktop FM sound player that ships with 1,110 patches and imports classic Yamaha DX7 sounds, for 365 dollars.
Rides In The Storm, run by a former MFB engineer, has teased the Rhythm Rides, an eight-track fully analog drum machine that revives the cult German brand's cheap, dirty sound.
Harrison Audio's Mixbus 12, out 1 July, adds a DeNoiser and a DeEsser to every channel strip, cleanup tools from its motion-picture consoles, with the standard edition at 49.99 dollars.
Steinberg's SpectraLayers 13, out now, adds tools that isolate individual voices, pull short sounds out of ambient beds, and resynthesize the frequencies an unmix leaves behind.
MODULA 26, a new synthesizer and electronic-music expo, debuts at Dynamo Zürich on 17 and 18 July 2026, with Moog, Arturia, Waldorf and Teenage Engineering among the names behind its first edition.
VRAC is a free plugin from BEATSURFING that takes any sound you throw at it and reshapes it into a playable kit of kicks, snares, claps and hats.
UVI's new library samples 300 classic synthesizers into one instrument, adds 100 machines over version 4, and a new dual-layer engine, for 89 through 20 July.
After a debt-driven insolvency, Native Instruments has been sold to inMusic and iZotope carved out to Boris FX, splitting apart the plugins house and techno producers rely on.
Menura Audio's new MDFX Delay and Reverb are hands-on hardware effects that sit on a mixer's send and return, record the wet signal, and just launched on Kickstarter at 340 euros a unit.
AlphaTheta has cut the CDJ-3000X down to a compact, 1,599-dollar player with cloud libraries, Beatport and TIDAL streaming, and a new feature that lets the crowd request tracks from their phones.
Rhodes opened pre-orders on 30 June for the MK8/80AE, an 80th-anniversary electric piano limited to 80 handmade units, from around 12,995 pounds. It is a love letter to the instrument that shaped soulful and deep house, aimed squarely at collectors.
Apple's free Logic Pro 12.3 adds a granular Sync mode to Alchemy and Sample Alchemy, gives Beat Breaker per-slice filtering, panning and randomization, and reworks Chord ID.
PunchBox 2 adds a fifth engine mode, Wavetable, to d16 Group's kick synth, sitting next to Sample, 909, 808 and 606 inside a four-layer hybrid design, from an intro price of 79 euros.
M-VAVE's first desktop synth is a six-operator, DX7-style FM polysynth with 32 classic algorithms, a battery and a speaker, for roughly 60 US dollars.
False Memory, the new effect from All The Machines, drags any sound through cassette wobble, VHS errors and data-mosh glitches, with an Evolve mode that keeps eating the signal for up to 64 minutes. It lands at an intro 19 euros.
JenDie, from Italian developer Diego Capoccitti, is a faithful software model of the Jen SX-1000, the budget late-70s Italian mono synth used by LFO, Altern 8 and The Prodigy, now running on iPhone, iPad and Mac for 4.99 dollars.
ShinRonin, the dual-delay, dual-morphing-filter effect Audio Damage pulled from sale in 2009, is back as a modern free plugin with no iLok, no activation and no expiry. It runs on Mac, Windows and Linux, with an iPad build on the way.
Waveform 14, out 27 June, builds an LLM-driven assistant straight into the DAW that writes MIDI and answers manual questions, with no subscription: you connect your own model and pay only for what you generate.
The Razornator is a desktop stereo effects box whose entire engine is ten Karplus-Strong resonators, turning any sound into plucked, bowed and resonant textures. It ships in early July for 490 euros.
Morphoice's EightyEight recreates the Roland Jupiter-8 from measurements of a real machine, voice card by voice card, and it is out now as a pay-what-you-want public beta.
Behringer's BM-14M clones Moog's discontinued Moogerfooger MF-104M analog delay for 119 euros. It catches most of the magic and misses the chaos at the edges.
Built with French producer Bambounou, the RND throws out the screen, the knobs and the save button: press once, get a brand-new patch, and capture it or lose it. It starts shipping in late June.
Unusable Engineering released Partials & Discrepancies on 27 June 2026, an 8-voice additive software synth for macOS and Windows (VST3 and Audio Unit) priced at 79 EUR, built around a rotating circle of partial shapes that turns additive synthesis into something you can actually play.
Tweakbench, the freeware developer who vanished for nearly 20 years, has rebuilt his whole catalogue and keeps giving it away. His newest, a kick-and-bass synth called Bastion, sells for 10 dollars.
Anukari is a new $149 software synth that makes sound by simulating real 3D physics: you wire up masses and springs, hit a note, and the structure rings out on screen as you hear it.
Jun Murakami's Synth-80 claims to be the first full software emulation of the MKS-80 Rev.4, the rack Jupiter-8 whose hardware long ago priced most producers out. There is even a free browser demo.
Dreeemwave's Bassliner writes MIDI basslines from a research-based algorithm, not a model trained on other people's songs, and it is leaning hard on that distinction as the AI-music backlash peaks.
The Akai MPC One G2 and MPC Key 37 G2 land with four times the power and a new MPC 3.9 OS that finally builds a real synthesizer engine into the box, starting at $799.
D16 Group rebuilt its kick-drum synth from the ground up: five engines including a new wavetable mode, real-time pitch detection and a modular Patchbay, at an intro price of 79 euros.
GForce has released the first officially licensed software version of Sequential's 1978 Prophet-5, modelling all three hardware revisions and adding modern touches like full MPE and a dual-layer stack.
The MPC One G2 and MPC Key 37 G2 finally fix the standalone hardware's biggest bottleneck, then lock stem separation, time-stretch and Clip Matrix behind a paid Pro Pack.
Teenage Engineering's 2.5 firmware turns the cult sampler into a proper studio citizen: stereo USB in and out, sample reverse, and the arpeggiator owners have been begging for.
NTS Radio and Swedish audio firm Atonemo have built a 169-dollar hi-fi player that does one thing on purpose: pipe human-curated radio to good speakers, with no feed, no recommendations and nothing to scroll.
For its 22nd birthday, Cologne club Bootshaus turned its main floor into a permanent L-Acoustics system that splits a DJ's ordinary stereo mix into a moving, three-dimensional field, billed as a world first for the format.
The Drum Farm, the most-previewed module of Superbooth 2026, ships this month: 16 drum-synthesis models, a built-in sampler and 16 effects in one screen-free 24HP panel for 449 pounds.
Miltone has opened pre-orders for the 4EXP, an authentic hardware recreation of Oberheim's mid-70s polysynth built from the original circuits, starting at 9,990 euros.
Gulf Coast Synthesis has built a standalone tape DAW that models a 24-track reel-to-reel down to the wow, flutter and oxide age, a whole studio designed around tape's limitations instead of hiding them.
Acid Drip is a fully open-source DIY groovebox that pairs a 303-style acid bassline synth with a drum machine on one Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, and every file is free on GitHub.
RANDOM8 is an 8HP, 8-channel random voltage generator that arrived as a 275-euro Eurorack module and as an identical, free VCV Rack version the same week.
Daft Punk's legendary live sound came from flopped, second-hand Roland machines bought cheap in the 90s. Reverb's data shows the same boxes now sell for tens of thousands, and rebuilding the rig today runs deep into five figures.
Polyend has released tracker-lib, a free TypeScript library that reads, writes and builds files for the Tracker, Tracker Mini and Tracker+: the company's first step toward opening its groovebox ecosystem and letting the community build its own editors and tools.
A free, open-source Max tool from researcher Jasper Zheng turns the latent space of neural audio models like RAVE into a surface you steer by hand, in real time, entirely on your own machine.
Announced on 19 June, the LiveTrak L6 is a portable, battery-powered mixer and multitrack recorder that captures a whole hardware jam in 32-bit float with no laptop. Price: 299 dollars.
The Kaoss Pad V arrives with dual-touch XY control, a new Voice FX engine, and a Hi-Z instrument input, but USB-B and RCA connectors in 2026 remind you Korg still has some old habits.
Forty years before the AI music debate, Britain's Musicians' Union voted to outlaw the exact machines that were already building house music in Chicago.
Bitwig's public beta for Studio 6.1, out now for Upgrade Plan holders, rebuilds the Sampler from the ground up with five slicing methods, a new granular Fragments mode with up to 256 grains per voice, and an FFT-based Spectral mode for pristine time-stretching.
MPC 3.9 OS ships 10 oscillator engines to all existing standalone MPCs and Force units at no cost, while new MPC One G2 and MPC Key 37 G2 hardware arrives with four times the processing power.
The Extension SDK opened around 12 June 2026, so anyone with Live Suite can now script Live directly: strip silence, name clips, slice and stretch, all from a right-click menu, no Max needed.
Cherry Audio released an official software version of Ensoniq's 1986 ESQ-1 on June 16, 2026, rebuilt from the original waveforms and priced at $69 to mark the synth's 40th anniversary.
GForce Software and Sequential have released the first official Prophet-5 plugin, recreating the Rev1, Rev2 and Rev3 hardware with 460+ presets, dual layers and MPE.
Elektron's free OS 1.55 brings a Euclidean sequencer, a Control All mode and loopable pattern pages to the Analog Four and Analog Keys, the first substantial update since Bonnier Capital bought the Gothenburg synth maker in April.
Vladimir Kuzmin, who designed the Soviet Polivoks synthesizer in 1980 and gave the underground one of its most aggressive filters, died on 12 June 2026.
M-VAVE previewed the FM-1, a budget desktop FM polysynth with six operators, 32 DX7 algorithms and Yamaha DX7 SYSEX import, putting the sound that built late-80s house into a portable, battery box.
Akai's MPC Sample, a battery-powered pocket sampler that runs the classic MPC60 and MPC3000 workflow for $399, is finally in stock again at Thomann and Amazon.de after months of being near impossible to find.
Behringer opened pre-orders on 8 June 2026 for the D Mini, a 99 euro three-voice paraphonic synth built on the Minimoog Model D circuit, with a 16-step sequencer and 27 touch keys. Stock is expected around mid-August.
Battalion, one of the most powerful experimental software drum machines around, has landed in VCV Rack as five modules at $10 each or $30 for the bundle, which also means its drum engines now run on the 4ms Meta Module in hardware Eurorack.
Catalyst Audio and Electroserf have launched MIG, a full range of vacuum-tube Eurorack modules built around obsolete Cold War-era Soviet subminiature tubes that once flew in MiG fighter avionics, with only about 1,500 tubes in stock.
Australian maker Edgehog has opened a Kickstarter for the EH-01, a compact eight-voice sampler-synth with no screen, hands-on controls and 3D-printable parts, priced from $179.
AudioKit Pro has released PRO-A5, a Prophet-5-inspired analog synth for iPhone, iPad and AUv3 hosts, with ten voices, twin filters and a $4.99 launch price.
Developer Jonas Eriksson has turned the open-source physical-modeling engine behind Mutable Instruments' Rings into Annulus, a free polyphonic resonator and effects plugin for Mac and Windows.
The Barcelona modular maker's first non-Eurorack product is a CNC-milled three-band isolator and analogue filter built to sit on a DJ setup for hands-on frequency surgery, priced at 649 euros and up for pre-order.
Teenage Engineering's new APC-2, made with Vienna's Supersense, is a professional record-cutting lathe that carves one-off playback discs in real time. There is no official price, it is made to order, and it is aimed squarely at the studio.
A DrumFreak placeholder appeared on Arturia's own website and was then removed, pointing to a sample-based drum machine carrying the Freak line's hybrid DNA, with no official specs, price, or date confirmed.
Rumble is UVI's new bass-focused plugin that gives sub, mids and top end their own synth engines, out now at an intro price of $99 before it jumps to $199.
Sonic Charge has given Synplant 2 owners a free tool called PhenoType that builds a fully editable synth patch from a typed description, using a neural network that runs entirely offline inside the plugin.
Elektron released OS 1.55 for the Analog Four and Analog Keys on June 10, a free update that adds two Euclidean generators, page looping and the Digitakt-style 'Control All' to hardware that first shipped in 2012.
Behringer has opened EU pre-orders for the D Mini, a 99 euro portable take on Moog's Minimoog Model D, with three oscillators, three-voice paraphony, a built-in motion sequencer and per-knob MIDI.
Andrea Gill, who performs as The Tunegirl, made her Awakenings debut on 17 May 2026 at 63, playing fully improvised live techno on a self-built 188-module Eurorack system, with no laptop and no pre-recorded tracks.
Ableton's head of hardware Jesse Terry built the first Push out of Lego and chopped-up Novation gear so he could move buttons around for free, and Sydney's Powerhouse Museum has now acquired one of only two surviving prototypes.
Poland’s Polyend unveiled Drums, a $2,699 eight-track hybrid drum machine with four analog SSI voices, squaring up to Roland’s TR-1000, and the scene is already split on whether it can match Roland’s reliability.
Teenage Engineering’s EUR 189 EP-136 K.O. Sidekick is a battery-powered, expandable two-channel mixer, FX box and interface that turns a pair of EP-133s into a pocket DJ rig, and the reviews are landing high.
Arturia's Memory V is a 149 dollar software take on Moog's 1982 Memorymoog that doubles the polyphony to twelve voices, adds MPE and ships with over 300 presets.
Erica Synths and Richie Hawtin have shipped Bullfrog Drums, a 600-euro seven-voice sampling drum machine that pairs a deep XoX sequencer with a deliberately approachable layout aimed at people learning to program rhythm.
At InfoComm in June, L-Acoustics gives its CS1 cardioid sub and its machine-learning Source Intelligence platform their first hands-on showing, pitching tighter low end for noise-sensitive sites and selling the vocal tool as a recurring software licence.
Buchla's Ziggy is a 999-dollar desktop synth that takes the brand's famous complex oscillator and low-pass gate, makes them digitally controlled with over 100 saveable presets, and ditches the patch cables, the most accessible Buchla ever built.
Ableton has put a JavaScript and TypeScript SDK into public beta for Live 12 Suite, so producers can write their own context-menu tools instead of waiting for features to ship.
Elektron's Outbox 8 is a USB breakout box that splits any Overbridge instrument into eight DC-coupled balanced outs you assign per track, for a likely 249 to 299 euros this summer.
iZotope's Ozone 12 Advanced adds Stem EQ, which splits any finished stereo mix into vocals, drums, bass and the rest so you can re-EQ each one without ever opening the multitrack.
AlphaTheta cut its flagship V10 down to a 3-channel, 4-band mixer with no Beat FX and no crossfader, priced at 1,999 euros, aimed squarely at the layering tech-house and techno DJ who never touched those features anyway.
NAP Works built a standalone digital vinyl system on an open framework that runs from a USB stick with no laptop in the chain, priced at 249 euro and aimed straight at the closed CDJ economy.
