December 2025 Book Update!

Dear WaveShapers,

I hope you're all doing well - the December 2025 book update is here!

Like Hollywood movies, if a music tech product is anywhere near successful, there’s a good chance that a company will follow it up with a sequel. The good news is that, unlike Hollywood, more often than not, music tech sequels are better than the instruments they follow, but unlike the movies, buyer's remorse is real if the "sequel" is announced shortly after the expiration of the return window for the product you just bought :/ Also, it seems like these days music tech is coming out with a few "plot holes" that need to be fixed in firmware updates, er, sorry, interviews with the press...

So, in light of that, I added two buyer-beware sections to the buyer’s guides (it’s relevant to all the guides, so rather than write the same thing four times, I just reference one) regarding firmware maturity at launch and overall product life cycles (Pages 550 and 551).

And since it has been a while since I wrote the buyer’s guides, I reviewed them all to see if I’d write them differently if I did so today. For the most part, I was pretty pleased with them, but I did add a few things based on recent experience reviewing various instruments.

Then since we’re increasingly seeing USB audio and project export on devices, let’s up the ante and ask manufacturers to make it USB multi-channel for multitimbral instruments and project export! (Page 564)

I also touched up a bit of paint here and there throughout the guides, if you've never read them, they've been refreshed (Pages 568, 584, 590, 594, 598)

Same goes for the “Your studio is lying to you chapter” - I read it again and made touch ups here and there in light of learnings from my recent review of iLoud Sub (Page 606, 610)

You can skip between the updates by searching for the string "DEC2025".

That's it for now, and for 2025! January's going to be quite busy (with at least two sequels...), and usual but never taken for granted, thanks to all of you for making it possible!

Happy New Year!

Ziv / Loopop