For twenty years, sample browsers have known your files by name. AudioCortex 2 knows them by ear. It listens, organizes, transforms — and it has an AI collaborator living inside it that can do all of that for you. A creative instrument that happens to have perfect memory.
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
Rainawave · made with AudioCortex 2
Rainawave · made with AudioCortex 2 · visuals made with AI video tools
The sidebar is the order of the work: find material, play, build, watch. A green dot says where the sound is coming from.
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.
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 your own Claude or Gemini key, your own model server, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 pitch spiral listens to everything the app plays. Chords bloom as constellations, drones burn as a single spoke, detuning smears off-axis.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Time-stretch 2× to 200×. Transients dissolve; a guitar strum becomes a twenty-minute glacier. The engine behind the Monolith and Aquaphoria pieces.
The layered stretch measured from the records we love — a few seconds of guitar becomes a slow, wide cloud that keeps its chords.
Rebuild any sound out of grains of another sound. Paint a melody in whale song.
The impulse response can be a bell, a choir, a mosaic — so your material rings inside other material. The library becomes the room.
Crossing, Freeze, Morph, Veil, Sediment, Wavesets, Ascension, Widen, Resonate. Clean-room spectral processing from the electroacoustic canon, rebuilt in fast native Swift.
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.
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
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.
AudioCortex 2 is a sound library that listens, an effects rack that dreams, and an AI collaborator that does the work — in one native Mac app.
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.
2.0 Beta 19 · macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later · support@icedaudio.com
Iced