Start here: what AudioCortex is, and how to find your way around

AudioCortex 2 is a sound library, a studio and a set of instruments for the Mac. It also has a cybernetic assistant, Oscilla, that can work the app alongside you. This note is the short version. The complete help is in the app under the Help menu, and Help ▸ Save as PDF saves it as a book.

What it is

AudioCortex started as a way to find sounds by what they sound like instead of what they’re called. It still does that: it listens to your library, names what each sound is, and lets you search by describing it. Around the library it now has rooms for playing, building and watching music:

• Find material: the Library, Sounds and the MIDI Library.
• Play: the Arranger, the synth and drum machine, and two DJ decks.
• Build: Tracks (lanes, a mixer and your plug-ins) and Nodes (a patchable canvas of engines and effects).
• Watch: the pitch Spiral, and Phylo, your library laid out by likeness.

Oscilla is the assistant. Ask it in plain words and it runs the same tools you would, step by step, where you can see them. It’s an extra pair of hands, never a requirement: the library, every room and every engine work with no assistant, no account and no sign-in.

AudioCortex doesn’t generate music. Every sound comes from your recordings or from the synthesizers and effects you control, and your audio stays on your Mac. Read our promise.

What makes it different

AudioCortex has grown into a big app, and a lot of what it does isn’t in other music software. Worth knowing about on day one:

• Search by ear. Every sound you analyze is read on your Mac and named as one of 454 categories. Type ? deep bass and sounds are ranked by how much they sound like that, whatever the files are called. How search by ear works.
• An assistant that works the app, and doesn’t make the music. Oscilla presses the same buttons you would, in front of you. You can leave it a note on a Tracks lane, on the Song Map or from your phone, and it picks the note up and answers.
• Sing an idea into your phone. The phone remote’s Sing button records you humming in the car or anywhere, and your Mac writes the melody down as notes. All about the phone remote.
• Every song remembers. Checkpoints, Moments and a History that records who made each change: you, Oscilla or the phone. Tick Agent patches wait for my OK and Oscilla’s patches wait for you to accept them.
• Engines for sound design. XXL Stretch turns seconds into minutes, Mosaic rebuilds one sound out of another, convolution makes any sound the room, and there’s a whole spectral suite. In Nodes, the Paula card plays your sound through the Amiga’s sound chip, Sing makes a spoken voice sing, and the Ear card shows what is masking a part. Sound design in Nodes.
• Reinforce. Point it at a stem pack and it plays new bass, drum, hook or pad parts under it, following the tempo, the pattern and the chords. How to use Reinforce.
• Sample your hardware. The Synthesizer Sampler plays a hardware synth note by note and builds a playable sample library from it.
• Your library as a map. Phylo lays your sounds out by likeness, kicks beside kicks and pads beside pads.

Getting started

1. Download and install. Download AudioCortex 2, open the zip and move AudioCortex into Applications. If you open it from Downloads, it offers to move itself, because updates can only install once it lives in Applications. It needs macOS 15 or later, on Apple Silicon or Intel.
2. If macOS hesitates the first time, open System Settings ▸ Privacy & Security, click Open Anyway, and open AudioCortex again. You only do this once.
3. Fourteen days free. The first launch tells you the trial has begun and when it ends. Every room, every engine and Oscilla are yours for two weeks, and if you need longer, the app offers one more week when the trial ends.
4. Activate. After you buy, paste the code from your purchase email into the activation window and press Activate. One code covers up to three of your Macs, and Deactivate This Mac frees one up.
5. Point it at your sounds. In the Library, browse to a folder of samples and click a sound to hear it. Make a scan set (+ ▸ New Scan Set in the sidebar) for the folders you use most, and press Analyze so you can search them by sound.
6. Give Oscilla a model (optional). The Meet Oscilla window offers Oscilla Local, Iced Audio’s own model: a free download that runs entirely on your Mac with no key or account. You can also use a Claude, Gemini or OpenAI key you already have, your own model server, or Apple’s on-device model. Choose in Settings ▸ AI.
7. Listen on wired headphones, your Mac’s speakers or an audio interface when you play or record. Bluetooth delays sound by about a fifth to a third of a second, so beats you play will feel late; Settings ▸ Audio tells you when your output is Bluetooth.

Updates arrive in the app: AudioCortex ▸ Check for Updates… It’s a public beta: new builds arrive constantly, and Help ▸ Report a Bug… is there when something isn’t right.

Getting around

• The dock down the side holds the rooms. Click one to switch. ⌘1–⌘9 picks the first nine, and Control-Tab and Control-Shift-Tab step through them.
• Option-click a room to open it in its own window.
• A green dot on a room means it’s making sound, so you can tell where music is coming from after you leave it. A blue dot means it has its own window open.
• Settings ▸ Appearance ▸ Text size makes the words in every room Larger or Largest.
• ⌥⌘L shows or hides Oscilla’s pane beside the room.
• The question mark opens all of Help, with its own search. The info button opens help for the room you’re in.
• A MIDI keyboard plays the room in front of you: the selected sound in the Library, the sound selected in Sounds, the synth in Instruments, and the drum machine on channel 10.
• MIDI controllers: right-click a knob and choose MIDI Learn, then move a control on your device. Settings ▸ Controllers maps the transport, sends clock to your gear and has a MIDI Monitor.
• Settings ▸ Phone turns on the phone remote. Scan the code and your phone gets the transport, the Tracks faders, the Knob Panel and a box for notes to Oscilla, with nothing to install.

The rooms

• Library: browse every folder on your Mac, your collections and scan sets, and click a sound to hear it. See it as a waveform or spectrogram, or read its notes and chords, loudness, stereo width and tonal balance. Start a search with ? to describe a sound (”? deep bass”), or with * to search every sound you’ve analyzed. Double-click a sound to open it in the editor.
• Oscilla: open its pane beside any room and ask: find a sound, build a patch, start a song, mix a lane.
• Arranger: ask for a style, key and tempo, look at the plan, then Play it live on the built-in instruments or Record a take as a project.
• Instruments: the synth and the drum machine, with an arpeggiator. Drop a SoundFont (.sf2) on the room and the synth plays it.
• Sounds: every wavetable, analog and FM patch and drum kit, ready to audition, load or put on one of the Arranger’s voices.
• DJ: two decks, a crossfader and a crate for each deck. Tempo and key are read for you, and SYNC lines up the beats.
• Tracks: lanes and a mixer, with sends, effects, your Audio Unit plug-ins and a master limiter. Move, trim, fade and split clips, draw gain and pan lines, and record from your audio input. Reinforce adds synthesized parts beside separate stems, and Ableton Live sets import.
• Nodes: wire source cards through effect cards to an output, then Render. Every engine and effect is a card. Presets in the toolbar holds thirty-three ready chains.
• MIDI Library: scan folders of MIDI files and filter by key, tempo, role, feel or density.
• Spiral: a picture of the pitches in whatever is playing. Each direction is a note, and each turn outward is an octave higher.
• Phylo: your sounds laid out by likeness, as a category tree or in orbit around a sound you pick.
• Synthesizer Sampler: turn a hardware synth into a sample library, every note and velocity saved as 24-bit WAVs with an SFZ map.
• BPM Tap, Tone Finder and Delay Finder: small tools for tempo, pitch and delay times.
• Finder Selection (Window menu): a small panel that plays whatever you select in the Finder.

For a longer look at each one, read A tour of the eleven rooms.

Songs, recordings and history

Recordings is the bench. A render from Nodes, a bounce of a loose set in Tracks or a drum bounce lands in Documents ▸ AudioCortex ▸ Recordings, and the folder item at the foot of the dock opens it.

A song is what you keep. In Tracks, choose ⋯ ▸ Save as Song… and the set becomes a package that carries its lanes, stems, every bounce as a numbered version, its Nodes patch, knobs and Song Map, and its history. Your own sound files stay where they are.

• File ▸ Checkpoint… (⌥⌘S) keeps the whole song as it is right now. A checkpoint is also made when you quit with changes, and once a day while you work.
• File ▸ Moments… lists your checkpoints. Play one, compare two, or restore one. A restore keeps what you had first, so it can be undone.
• File ▸ History… shows every change, newest first, and who made it: you, Oscilla, or the phone remote.

Words you’ll see

• List: what the Library shows right now, whether that’s a folder, a collection, a scan set or a search.
• Collection: a saved list of sounds you chose, kept in the sidebar. It stays when folders change.
• Scan set: a named set of folders (and single sounds) listed together, with everything underneath them.
• Crate: a holding area for the session. Right-click a sound ▸ Add to Crate, then send the crate to Tracks, DJ, Phylo or Nodes together.
• Analyze: reading a sound for its tempo, key, level and category, on your Mac. Results are remembered, so nothing is read twice.
• Classify: the part of analysis that names what a sound is, as one of 454 categories (kick, pad, vocal…).
• Deep scan: walking a whole folder tree in the background so every sound under it can be found.

Coming from AudioFinder

AudioCortex 2 is the app that follows AudioFinder. Here’s where things went:

• The Device Browser and Finder views became the Library’s column browser.
• Saved Lists became collections, and the Bin became the Crate.
• The Sample Tool became the editor: right-click a sound ▸ Open in Editor.
• Guess Key and Tap became the Tone Finder and BPM Tap, and every analyzed sound carries its key and tempo.
• AI Classify became Analyze, done on your Mac. Search with ? to find sounds by how they sound.
• SynchroFinder became Finder Selection, under the Window menu.

Bought AudioFinder in 2020 or later? AudioCortex 2 is included: press Request Code in the activation window. AudioFinder itself still runs and is on the Classic page.

More help

• In the app: the Help menu covers every room, tool and setting, with its own search.
• Something wrong? Help ▸ Report a Bug… sends a report straight to us and gives you a report number.
• Questions: write to support@icedaudio.com. Answers come from the person who writes the code.
• What’s new: the Notes explain new features as they ship.