IcedAudio
The AudioCortex 2 app icon: a white triangle with a dark eye, fanned over pink, orange, gold and teal on deep indigo Public beta · 2.5 Beta 39 · macOS 15+ · Apple Silicon & Intel

AudioCortex 2 Nova
Your sound library finally understands sound.

For twenty years, sample browsers have known your files by name. AudioCortex 2 knows them by ear. It listens, organizes, transforms — and its cybernetic assistant, Oscilla, lives inside it and can do all of that for you. A creative instrument that happens to have perfect memory.

↓ Download the beta — seven days free Buy · $99 intro

Open the disk image and drag AudioCortex into Applications. If macOS says it can’t verify AudioCortex: open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.

$99 during the beta, $149 at 1.0 · free for AudioFinder owners who bought in 2020 or later · seven-day trial · no subscription, ever.

▶ Watch the 60-second tour on YouTube · Read the help (PDF)

The AudioCortex 2 Library: a folder of pads, every sound analyzed, with what each one sounds like, its tempo, key and level
The Library: every sound listened to, and found by what it sounds like.
New in 2.5 Beta 29 to 39

The Tracks room grows up.

Return lanes for shared reverbs and group lanes with ⌘G, nested as deep as you like. Bring in an Ableton Live set or an 0RKESTRACKER song and get lanes, strips, tempo and sections; export carries your return lanes back to Live. Live’s view keys work too: Z zooms to the selection, F follows the playhead, a drag over empty ground selects across lanes.

  • The MIDI Library plays from the keyboard: Space plays and stops the selected file, Up and Down step to the next file and play it, and the Play button shows Play at rest and a lit Stop while a file plays.
  • Play the Sounds room from a MIDI keyboard: your keyboard plays the sound selected in the browser, with chords and velocity, and a drum kit plays on the standard drum notes. Up and Down step through the list, even from the search field, so you can type a word and walk through what it finds.
  • The drums light up when you hear them: the drum machine lights each step as its sound reaches your speakers, allowing for your output device's delay, and the Arranger's drum lane shows the pattern you're hearing at every section change.
  • Space plays and stops everywhere: the drum machine, the Arranger and the Library now answer the space bar like Tracks, even while a search filters the list, and it still types a space in any field you're writing in. The Arranger's Stop, Record and Play match the Tracks transport.
  • Sort the MIDI library by name, tempo, meter, key, feel, density or parts with a click on the column title, and FM sounds from imported banks get readable names.
  • Drum kits with their full punch: the eight kits that come with the app are made again with the whole hit in every sample, so kicks, snares and toms keep their attack and the closed hi-hats and claves ring out. Your own kits are untouched.
  • Text size: Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Text size makes the words and numbers in every room Larger or Largest at once, and remembers your choice.
  • The DJ deck, the standard way: PLAY, a temporary CUE that sets, holds and returns, and SYNC that stays lit with OFF beside it. BPM over the original BPM, elapsed and remaining time, a band round the platter that flashes for the last twenty seconds, a TEMPO slider at ±8 %, a VOLUME upfader and HI, MID, LOW and FILTER.
  • An Audio Unit for your DAW: “Iced Audio: AudioCortex” works in Live, Logic, GarageBand, Reaper and any other host. Its Card control picks what it is: Ember EQ, Equalizer, Tilt, Filter, Gate, Comb, Whisper or Mix Narrowcaster, the same cards as the Nodes canvas, running live, so a setting dialed in the app sounds the same on a lane in your DAW. Open AudioCortex once from Applications and your host finds it under Iced Audio.
  • Audio settings in plain words: Output Device, Input Device and Buffer Size each say what they do and when a change takes effect, and the buffer shows how many milliseconds it adds. The first time sound goes out over Bluetooth, a sheet tells you that what you hear runs a little behind the beat, and what to use for playing and recording.
  • Ember EQ: a character equalizer on every lane, the master, the bounce and as a Nodes card, with the classic low-end scoop, broad bells that narrow as you push them, and a drive stage. Its curves were fitted to measurements of the hardware it is modelled on, band by band.
  • Save as Song: turn a loose set into a song that keeps its bounces as numbered versions, its patch, knobs, Song Map, moments and the history of every change, inside itself. Your own sound files stay where they are.
  • Round trips with Live 12: the Ableton export opens in Live 12 with your return tracks and Audio Unit plug-ins, settings included.
  • Make a song map by hand: in the Map panel, start from your set, split at the cursor, drag boundaries, rename, merge and draw the energy curve. It’s the same map Oscilla writes, so you and the agent work on one map, and it follows Tracks as the set plays.
  • Play answers the first click, trackpad taps included, and playback stays clean while an agent analyzes your sound.
  • The biggest libraries load light: a scan set of millions of sounds loads in a fraction of the memory it used to, and faster.
  • Clips never overlap: a clip moved or trimmed over another cuts away what is under it, so what you see is what plays. Clip gain now goes to +24 dB.
  • Steadier instruments: the synth and drum engines never wait or allocate while they play, and FM notes land on their exact frame.
  • Also new: chord pads choose their sound; Report a Bug lists every report this Mac filed, with its status; updates leave the Finder’s choice of player for audio files alone.
Hear it

Halloween Pulse

Rainawave · made with AudioCortex 2

▶ Watch on YouTube
Watch

Above the Clouds

Rainawave · music made with AudioCortex 2 · only the visuals are made with AI

More from AudioCortex artists →

Eleven rooms. One window.

The sidebar is the order of the work: find material, play, build, watch. A green dot says where the sound is coming from.

Find material · Library

A library that knows what things sound like.

Browse, audition and tag hundreds of thousands of sounds; see any one as a waveform or spectrogram and edit it in place. Type ? and describe a sound — "something dark and metallic" — and it finds what sounds like that, whatever the file is called. Select a sound and ask for more like it.

The AudioCortex 2 Library: a folder of sounds with the selected one shown as a waveform, categories and ratings in the list
Cybernetic assistance · Oscilla

Cybernetic assistance that actually operates the app.

Oscilla lives in every room. Ask it to find a lush guitar, stretch it into a cathedral, lay it on a track and bounce it — and it does the work, tool by tool, in front of you. Use a Claude, Gemini or OpenAI key you already have (billed by them, never by us), your own model server (LM Studio, Ollama and more), Apple’s on-device model, or Oscilla Local: Iced Audio’s own model, downloaded once, running entirely on your Mac with no key and no account.

Oscilla’s pane beside the Arranger: asked for a deep house groove in D minor at 121, it starts the song and lists its chords, sounds, arc and seed
Play · Arranger

Ask for a song. Hear it played, live.

Pick a style, key, tempo and length — or describe it — and the Arranger writes sections, parts and chords and plays them on the built-in synths, bar by bar, with the drums on their kit. Mute or solo a lane, swap its sound, shift its octave, change the style while it plays. Record a take and it lands in Tracks as stems, ready to mix.

Play · Instruments

A drum machine and a synth, built in.

A 16-step drum machine with kits made from real drums, and a synth with wavetable, analog and FM voices — oscillators, filter, envelope, a hexagonal keyboard. Drop your own samples into a kit folder and they are a kit. You are never starting from an empty library.

Play · DJ

Two decks that know the tempo and the key.

Load any two tracks: tempo and key are read, beatgrids drawn, and Sync locks one deck to the other. A crossfader, a level and a speed fader per deck, cues, crates. The waveforms scroll as the music plays — and Oscilla can pull the next track for you.

Build · Tracks

Lanes, a mixer, and your plug-ins.

Layer what you make and what you find. Every lane has a channel strip — gain, pan, sends, inserts with the built-in effects or any AudioUnit, in its own window with its own presets — and a master with a limiter. Bounces add up as you build a song a part at a time. A project keeps the whole take: sounds, lanes, stems and mix in one package.

The Tracks room with an Acid House project: four lanes, each with a mixer strip, and the master, reverb and delay at the right
Build · Nodes

Wire sounds through engines like a modular rig.

A patchable canvas: a source file through Veil, into a reverb, out to a file. Every texture engine and effect is a node. Save patches, load them again — or ask Oscilla to wire it for you.

The Nodes canvas: a source through XXL Stretch, Veil, a low pass moved by an oscillator, and a reverb to the output
Watch · Spiral

Harmony you can watch.

The pitch spiral listens to everything the app plays. Chords bloom as constellations, drones burn as a single spoke, detuning smears off-axis.

Watch · Phylo

Your whole library, laid out by likeness.

The Phylogenetic Explorer classifies your sounds and arranges them as a hex map — kicks beside kicks, pads beside pads, the words on the hexes saying what lives there. Click to dive in, play what you find, record what you play.

The Phylogenetic Explorer: a library of 101 sounds as a honeycomb of hexes (Percussion, Keyboards, Sound Effects, One Shots, Atmospheres, Mallets, Synthesizer), each with its count
Find material · MIDI

MIDI, read like audio.

A MIDI library that reads every file for tempo, meter, key, feel and parts, and spells out its first chords. Search for bass lines in F# around 160 BPM; open any file as a piano roll; play it on a sound of your choice, or hand it to a song.

The MIDI Library: 1,915 files listed by tempo, meter, key, feel, density and parts
Find material · Sounds

Every preset, every kit, auditioned.

Wavetables, analog and FM presets, drum kits — browse them, play them from the keyboard, favourite them, and send one to the song with a click.

The Sounds room listing analog presets with the selected one playable from the keyboard below

A furnace of texture engines.

This is where AudioCortex 2 stops being a browser and becomes an instrument. Every engine is a tool Oscilla can use, a node you can patch, and a command you can run on a selection.

XXL Stretch

Time-stretch 2× to 200×. Transients dissolve; a guitar strum becomes a twenty-minute glacier. The engine behind the Monolith and Aquaphoria pieces.

Lush Stretch

The layered stretch measured from the records we love — a few seconds of guitar becomes a slow, wide cloud that keeps its chords.

Mosaic

Rebuild any sound out of grains of another sound. Paint a melody in whale song.

Convolution — where the hall is anything

The impulse response can be a bell, a choir, a mosaic — so your material rings inside other material. The library becomes the room.

Spectral suite

Crossing, Freeze, Morph, Veil, Sediment, Wavesets, Ascension, Widen, Resonate. Clean-room spectral processing from the electroacoustic canon, rebuilt in fast native Swift.

Reinforce

Point it at a stem pack or a finished track: it reads the tempo map, the pattern and the chords, and plays reinforcement under it on the built-in instruments.

Our promise: AudioCortex is not an AI music generator.

Many AI music generators are trained on other artists’ songs without permission and make variations of their music. AudioCortex doesn’t do that, and never will. No AI makes the audio: every sound comes from your recordings or from the synthesizers and effects you control.

— Iced Audio · Read our full policy: cybernetic assistance controls and automates, never generates →

Pricing

AudioCortex 2 · beta & early buyers
$99intro · $149 at 1.0
  • One licence, up to three of your Macs
  • Every beta and the 1.0, included
  • Code by email within a minute of paying
  • No subscription, no account
Buy AudioCortex 2 →
AudioFinder owners · 2020 or later
Free
  • Paste your AudioFinder code into AudioCortex 2
  • It becomes an AudioCortex 2 licence on the spot
  • Lost it? Re-send it to yourself
↓ Download and upgrade

Open the disk image and drag AudioCortex into Applications. If macOS says it can’t verify AudioCortex: open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.

AudioFinder Classic
Still here
  • No longer sold — AudioCortex 2 is its successor
  • Still available to download; your code keeps working
  • Owners from before 2020: the intro price is yours too
AudioFinder Classic →

Want to say thanks? This isn’t a purchase and it doesn’t unlock anything: your licence is already everything. AudioCortex gets far more care than its price covers, with a new beta most weeks, fixes the same week you report them, and features added because someone asked. If that has meant something to you, you can send a little extra, any amount, as a thank-you. ♥ Send a thank-you

Questions

What does “beta” mean here?
AudioCortex 2 is ready to use and still being built in the open. New builds arrive constantly, with fixes and new features, and now and then something breaks along the way. That’s the deal: you get each new idea as soon as it’s made, and your reports shape what comes next. If something goes wrong, Help ▸ Report a Bug… sends it straight to us with what we need to fix it. If you’d rather wait until everything is settled, the full release is coming. The beta is for people who like being early.
Is the beta free to try?
For seven days. Download it and everything is yours for a week — every room, every engine, Oscilla; the app tells you the day it ends. After that it opens only to Activate until a code is in. A licence code registers it on up to three of your Macs.
What does it need?
macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later. Apple Silicon is where it is fastest; Intel Macs are supported. Oscilla Local, the built-in cybernetic assistance, is a separate 2.5 GB download and is best on Apple Silicon.
The beat sounds late on my AirPods or Bluetooth speaker.
That’s Bluetooth, not the beat. Bluetooth delays sound by about a fifth to a third of a second, so playback sounds fine, but drums you play, keys you tap and the lit step on the drum grid will feel late. For playing, recording and anything to do with timing, use wired headphones, your Mac’s speakers or an audio interface. Settings ▸ Audio tells you when your output is Bluetooth.
macOS says it can’t verify the app.
AudioCortex 2 is signed and notarized by Apple, but macOS can still be cautious the first time you open it. Open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway, then open AudioCortex again. You only do this once.
Does AudioCortex use generative AI?
No. Nothing in AudioCortex generates audio. What it has is cybernetic assistance: Oscilla steers the app for you, finding sounds and running the same tools you would, under your direction. That is a different thing from AI that makes music, so we call it by a different name; every sound comes from your recordings or from the built-in synthesizers and effects.
Does Oscilla need an account?
No. Your choice: Oscilla Local, which needs no key and runs entirely on your Mac; a Claude key or sign-in; a Gemini key; an OpenAI key; your own model server (LM Studio, Ollama, llama.cpp or anything OpenAI-compatible); or Apple’s on-device model on macOS 26. Everything else in the app works with no assistant at all.
Do you supply a Claude or Gemini key?
No. We don’t supply or resell assistant keys, and there’s never a usage bill from us. If you already have a key from Anthropic, Google or OpenAI, Oscilla can use it, billed to your account with them. If you don’t, Oscilla Local and Apple’s on-device model cost nothing and need no key.
Can I use OpenRouter or another OpenAI-compatible service with Oscilla?
Yes. In Settings, on Oscilla’s tab (labelled “AI”), under “Your own model server”, enter the server https://openrouter.ai/api/v1, the model name exactly as OpenRouter lists it (for example anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.5 or google/gemini-2.5-flash) and your OpenRouter key. Then choose that option, or leave Oscilla on Automatic with no Claude or Gemini key set. Your key stays in the macOS Keychain and goes only to the server you entered. Oscilla works the app through tools, so pick a model that supports tool calling. The same option takes LM Studio or Ollama on your own Mac (Ollama: http://localhost:11434/v1) or any OpenAI-style server on your network.
I own AudioFinder. What now?
Bought it in 2020 or later? AudioCortex 2 is yours free: paste your AudioFinder code into AudioCortex 2’s activation window and it migrates. Bought it earlier? Thank you for the years — the intro price is for you too. AudioFinder itself stays available to download on the Classic page and your code keeps working.
Why isn’t this AudioFinder 7?
AudioFinder was built for Intel Macs that Apple no longer makes, and Apple has since replaced almost everything underneath it. Rather than rebuild a twenty-year-old design on shifting foundations, we started fresh: AudioCortex keeps what AudioFinder did best and is built natively for Apple Silicon. Why AudioCortex is a new app →
Isn’t AudioCortex already inside AudioFinder?
Older AudioFinder versions came with the 2021 AudioCortex built in. AudioFinder 6.0.7 and later remove it: its AudioCortex menu now opens AudioCortex 2. AudioCortex 2 is a separate app: download it from this page and install it next to AudioFinder, not inside it.
How do updates arrive?
In the app. AudioCortex ▸ Check for Updates… — betas arrive as they ship, with notes.
Subscription?
No. Never. One purchase, one code, your Macs.
AudioCortex 2 is a sound library that listens, an effects rack that dreams, and cybernetic assistance that does the work — in one native Mac app.
↓ Download the beta Buy · $99 intro

Open the disk image and drag AudioCortex into Applications. If macOS says it can’t verify AudioCortex: open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, scroll down and click Open Anyway.

2.5 Beta 39 · macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later · Help (PDF) · support@icedaudio.com