Polyend recently announced a massive update to the entire Tracker family, adding some very welcome new features while also announcing that the Tracker firmware is now available for community development through Tracker Community Edition on GitHub.

Custom firmware has been one of the strangest music gear developments of 2026. Over the last couple of months, we’ve seen users add entirely new features to samplers and grooveboxes from Roland, Elektron and others, often without any involvement from the companies that originally made them. Now Akai appears to be taking a very different approach. With the recent news, it seems the company may be actively embracing it, and that includes opening up both its upcoming Sample Key

Behringer has revealed the KICK, a new sampling workstation designed around open-source software from the beginning. And with a reported target price of around $150, it raises some interesting questions about how music hardware could be developed and supported in the future.