Sample managers have spent twenty years finding your sounds by filename and folder. That is a polite way of saying they find nothing unless you named the file properly the day you recorded it. Iced Audio’s AudioCortex 2 Nova, now in public beta, bets that the library should do the listening instead. The pedigree is real: when we reviewed AudioFinder 5 back in 2010, it was already the Mac sample manager a lot of sound designers lived in.
Finding Sounds by How They Sound
AudioCortex 2 Nova analyses your whole library, then lets you search in plain language. Type “dusty warm pad in D minor” and it goes looking, or point at one sound and ask for more like it. Each file also gets six scopes: Waveform, Spectrogram, Chroma, Loudness, Stereo and Balance, so you can see why a sound matched instead of trusting a black box.
Searching your own files by sound isn’t new. Sononym has used machine learning to relate sounds to each other for years, on Mac, Windows and Linux. Sample is a Mac app that takes plain-English queries against local files, runs offline after activation, and costs $129. That is the closest rival to what Nova promises. Then there is the Loopcloud camp. As we covered in June, its Jamahook AI search leans on the cloud catalogue, while matching against your own library is the job of Jamahook’s separate Offline Agent. What Nova adds is the whole bundle in one app: natural-language search, the six scopes, then patching and playing what you found. Whether it searches better than the specialists is another matter. The catch is the first pass. Analysing a big archive takes time and disk activity, and Iced Audio hasn’t published figures for a library of, say, 400,000 files. I’d test on a real drive before believing anything.
Nodes, Instruments and a Synth Walker
Then it gets odd, in a good way. Nodes is a modular patching canvas with 36 rack-style cards: filters, a wavefolder, a resonator bank, Euclidean and Turing sequencing, and more. Process a sound you just found without leaving the app. The built-in instruments cover playing, and a Synthesizer Sampler walks every patch of a hardware synth so you can turn it into something playable. The current beta also adds SoundFont playback.
That is a lot of room for a program that started as a browser. Eleven rooms in one window is the kind of scope creep that can sink a sample manager, whose first job is to open fast and get out of the way. Whether Nova stays a library first and a toolbox second is what the beta needs to prove.
Oscilla and the AI Question
Oscilla is an optional assistant that can drive the app for you. Iced Audio is blunt about where the line sits: no AI makes the audio. Every sound comes from your recordings or the built-in synths and effects. For anyone wary of generative tools, that matters. The assistant is a remote control, not a ghostwriter.
It still deserves a sceptical look. Letting an assistant run your session sounds handy until it moves something you didn’t ask it to. It is optional, and for a beta, that is the right default.
Pricing and Availability
AudioCortex 2 Nova is in public beta at $99, rising to $149 at version 1.0. It is a buy-once licence with no subscription. Owners who bought AudioFinder in 2020 or later get it free, and there is a seven-day trial. The release requires macOS 15 or later and Apple Silicon, though the product page also mentions Intel support, so check before you download. New betas ship almost nightly. Details and the download are at icedaudio.com.
