Synthhead at Synthtopia looks at a run of recent announcements that let musicians replace or extend the software running on their hardware. The starting point is the M-Vave FM-1, a low-cost FM synthesizer that drew independent developers writing their own synths, sequencers, and effects for it. M-Vave answered with an official development platform: source code, an SDK, and a browser-based workbench for projects, samples, voices, and firmware. The application code is GPL, but the FM-1 sound engine library stays a binary blob.

Other companies are moving the same way. Akai has teased SampleKey, a 25-key sampler, and parent company inMusic says it will offer community hardware access, some open-sourced software, and an SDK. Behringer published a large repository for its KICK sampler before the product shipped.…