Open source modular synth software lets you create 70s & 80s electronic music

So, the comparison on YouTube is between the VCV Rack and Mutable Instruments Elements, Rings, and Clouds. Mutable's offerings are presented in the Eurorack format, so they have much more 'immediacy' (physical knobs, etc.). But - they're all 'virtual' instruments! We're essentially just reading a comparison between two developers's DSP code.

There were no digital modulars in the 70s and 80s, and certainly nothing like the granular synthesis or physical modelling available today. A more meaningful comparison in that context would've been against something like a Roland System 100M or Moog Modular: instruments with real analog electronics.

It doesn't require making an account. You can download the main application and a lot of plug-ins (and sources for them) without logging in anywhere.

How does this compare to something like Pure Data?

Yeah, you can easily avoid having to make an account, if you just download and compile the plugins yourself. The account just makes it easier for those of us who don't want to fuss with all the compiling and copying-into-the-right-place of the plugins.

I do both - I have all the sources for all the public modules I can find (and there are usually about two more added, on average, every day by the community... WOW!) and I build VCV Rack from sources every week or so, just to see the development pace (and what a pace it is!), but I also just go through the web page, use an account, install the free plugins through the Plugin Manager feature, and so on.

It helps to compare the two while developing my own plugins.

And I have to say that this app is amazing! I've rekindled my love for modular synthesis (been into synths since the 70's) because of this app, and its all I'm taking to my bands jam sessions these days -replacing a suite of digital/DSP synths that I was previously relying on.

I concur! As someone who has spent, probably, close to a quarter of a million bucks on synth/audio hardware over the decades, I'm extremely keen on VCV Rack because it lets me design my "perfect" Eurorack setup without any investment, other than the time to get it set up - and more to the point, it lets me experiment with my setup, refining it, without buying a single cable. So once I get my stack configured the way I like it, I'm quite likely to go ahead and switch over to reality and buy all the modules I've used, so I've got it in the real world too.

A truly amazing bit of software, and it has also been a very rewarding experience to be an early adopter of this suite, because the progress made so far by the developers is nothing short of astonishing - not to mention the uptake and adoption by a lot of the more cocktail/unique modular designers out there ... many of whom, seem to have taken VCV Rack as their new standard test-bench for working out ideas before hardware prototyping - meaning we have a huge plethora of modules to play with!

Anyone interested in synthesisers NEEDS to put a weekend or two worth of effort into learning VCV Rack and creating their own stacks. Its really a very, very valuable bit of software - and its free! And its open source! So, you interested-in-programming-synthesizer-algorithm folks can get started with very, very little fuss, already ..