MPE Insight

One DRIFT everywhere, and a tuning of your own

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

DRIFT in the window is now the plugin, lane for lane, and the instrument plays a tuning of your own

DRIFT in the window is now the plugin, lane for lane. Five lanes you point at Pitch, Pressure or any continuous CC, each with its own shape and phase relationship, free in Hz or locked to the transport, plus strum, ratchet, scale drift and 24 factory presets. The PB / Mod tile learns a third style, the Expression Pad, a stack of tilting rings played with the mouse that sends real channel pressure and CC74 to every sounding note. The Microtonal design plays a tuning of your own: just intonation, any number of equal steps, or a Scala .scl file you load, and the tuning leaves the app, so your synth follows. The Grand Staff lets you choose how it writes: note labels as names, degrees or sol-fa, chord labels as symbols, Roman numerals or figured bass, round noteheads or the seven shape notes, and a guitar or ukulele fingering above the chord. The Stream Log gains a fifth view, Tracker, and a loaded .mid file brings its time signature, key signature and lyrics with it.

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MPE Keys is out, and it shows what comes next

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

MPE Keys is available today for Windows and macOS. It brings the Keyboard, the two wheels and the Grand Staff from MPE Insight into a focused standalone app. Steam follows.

MPE Keys is built from the same foundation as MPE Insight. The keyboard work developed here will become part of the full workspace with MPE Insight 3.0, a major update that is coming soon.

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Two new pages: MPE Keys and MPE Drift

Fri, 04 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

MPE Insight has two sister tools now, and each one got its own page. They come out of the same source tree and share the same reading of a MIDI stream, so what you learn in one carries over to the others.

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Smoke, glass and a black hole

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:00:00 +0000

MPE Insight 2.7: three new AURA styles built on real physics, and a bend wheel that finally moves the whole picture

AURA gains three new styles, and Tunnel was rebuilt from the ground up. Smoke breathes a fine ribbon out of every note’s pitch column on a real fluid simulation rather than particles, and every held key turns its own vortex: press harder and it spins faster, open the timbre and it grows wider, let go and the room collapses back the way it was pushed out. Shatter is a sheet of glass with a memory, where every note is a knock, every knock opens one more stage of the break, and the cracks never heal. Black Hole hangs two discs of orbiting streams around a pure black horizon and lets a bend bow the inner streams around the body. And Tunnel is new work under an old name: a flight through a tiled tube of light with no end in sight, curving away mid frame and leaving through the edge. Away from AURA, the bend wheel finally moves everything, the app can leave its own frame, and DRIFT was rebuilt around five lanes.

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Take the picture apart, and fly through it

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000

MPE Insight 2.6: FORGE turns the picture into a cloud of points you can fly through and play

FORGE has always turned a picture into a scene you fly through. In 2.6 the picture itself comes apart. Point Cloud rebuilds it as a grid of points and pushes each one into real depth by the depth map, so the Virtual Camera flies between them instead of across a flat plane. And the cloud plays: strike a note and the points inside its disc come at you, pressure holds them out, slide opens the cone wider, pitch bend moves it sideways. Choose hard Dots, soft Splats, or Glyphs that stamp a character per point from a set you type in yourself, so the image comes back written in your own letters. Spin turns the whole cloud on a free axis, winding up while you play and settling back upright in silence. Cells takes the other road and leaves the frame whole, redrawing it cell by cell as ASCII, halftone or dither over any source. Both need WebGL2. And once you are done flying, 2.6 removes the last thing you needed in order to play at all: Typing Keys puts two manuals under your hands on the computer keyboard, so a laptop on a train is enough.

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MPE Insight is on the Mac now

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000

MPE Insight for macOS just went live on the Mac App Store. Same app, same 24 AURA styles, DRIFT, CASCADE, FORGE, running natively on Apple Silicon (macOS 12 and newer). It's its own purchase there; nothing about the Windows version changes.

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Three new AURA styles, and one of them remembers what you played

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 09:00:00 +0000

AURA has three new styles, and one of them finally remembers what you played. Hold a note in Filament and a glowing thread grows out of it, forks, and fuses with what it touches, so a phrase builds one lit net instead of springing back the way every other style does. That brings AURA to 24 styles.

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The app explains itself now, and MPE Insight lands on Steam

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

The app explains itself now. Start MPE Insight and a short guided tour walks you through the toolbar and all nine modules, one card at a time, with each module animating right next to it. I recorded that tour end to end, so you can see the whole app in two minutes before you touch anything.

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Harmony as shape, and your instrument read correctly

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

MPE Insight 2.2 is available now. A new way to read harmony, a new keyboard design, a new FORGE pass, and one quieter change that touches every module: the app now reads the pitch bend range your instrument actually reports.

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Two new modules, and a way to save your whole setup

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

This is a big one. MPE Insight v2.0.0 is available now — with two completely new modules, saveable snapshots, and a long list of fixes and layout improvements.

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MIDI Learn for snapshots, and Steam is coming

Mon, 13 Jul 2026 09:00:00 +0000

Quick update: MPE Insight v1.2.0 is available now, and a Steam release is coming soon.

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The complete walkthrough video

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 09:00:00 +0000

I put together a complete walkthrough video of MPE Insight. It covers every module in the app, played on the Osmose CE, what each one does, and how they work together to visualize expressive MIDI in real time.

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