Three pins, and nearly every signal in this business passes through them.

The magazine is named after the cable: the microphone in the booth, the line to the desk, the DMX run that fires the lights. Studio, stage and rig share the same cable. Most magazines pick one of the three. This one covers all of it, because the people we read do too — the engineer mixing a record on Tuesday is on front of house by Saturday.

More than three hundred sources, in sixteen languages: makers and their release notes, reviewers who put a hand on the thing, studios and touring crews, the producers and collectives surfacing this month and the scenes they came out of. Synths and modular, plugins and DAWs, guitars and drums, microphones, monitors, PA and lighting. What the trade is talking about is counted and plotted. The editor's letter has just started; it will find its rhythm.

For each story: a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link out. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the maker or the photographer. A German review appears in German and a Japanese one in Japanese, as the writer published it; the link goes to the original.

Nothing is sold on this site. When a link leads to a shop, it is the maker's shop, not ours.

← XLR MAG Archive

Scoring NotesDAW & plugins

Sight-reading the inbox: 16 music apps on our radar

11.03

New music apps reach my inbox nearly every day, far more than we can review. Here are 16 that have come to our attention, from notation editors and score readers to scanners, arrangers, and teaching…

News AI Android app

Read at Scoring Notes ↗

One letter a week, starting soon.

Latest

Sight-reading the inbox: 16 music apps on our radar

More from Scoring Notes on XLR MAG

DAW & pluginsGlisscore turns a PDF and a recording into a score video — free in your browser Scoring Notes

DAW & pluginsNotation Express for Sibelius 2026 released Scoring Notes

DAW & pluginsExposition, development, and recapitulation: A decade of movement in music notation software Scoring Notes

DAW & pluginsMaestro: Finale’s next generation? Scoring Notes

DAW & pluginsMaestro opens Finale files — without Finale Scoring Notes

DAW & pluginsGetting on the same page Scoring Notes