AUDIOMAP MINI Review
Audiomap sent me a copy of their sample browser/ expressive instrument Mini. Right away, the name is a bit confusing, at first I thought this was a sort of “light” version of a tool called “Audiomap”. The company is Audiomap, and the plugin is “Mini”. It is confusing only because “audio map” would be such a great name for this plugin, as it creates a sort of star-map of all the samples you load into it. I’ve covered Atlas in the past (also a map themed name) and you are probably familiar with other alternatives like Audiostellar, XO, and Concatenator. Perhaps I’ll do a full shootout of all these tools at some point in the future.
What makes Audiomap Mini special is the emphasis on expression and playability. This tool is designed to scrub through the node cluster and play it like an instrument where Atlas and XO are more about selecting sounds for a drum sequencer. This one allows you to draw a path across the nodes which you can play back via the mod-wheel. It also has a keyboard shift mode allowing you to transpose everything up and down via midi notes. There’s even attack, release, and randomized controls to give some variation to the sound as it scrubs through the nodes.
There’s a few more unique aspects, for example the X and Y axis’s can be set to various detection modes giving you a lot of control over the node distribution. I also like how the sample folder system works, which lets you “mute” or “solo” different folders, meaning you can just throw everything into one bit cluster then sort between things later. Finally, there’s a cool capture tab, that lets you record Mini’s output, sure you can do this in your DAW, but it just seems a bit faster here with less setup. I do find having too wide of a variety of sounds kinda makes the distribution feel a bit random, it’s nice to load up a library of ver similar sounds with variety to explore.
It’s a pretty simple concept, just take the most fun aspect of this type of tool, and turn it into an instrument. I still think there’s room to expand this type of tool into something more useful for sound design, but this is also already a creative tool worth exploring. Being able to just swipe through a cloud of sounds can be great for generating glitches when fed into a multi-effect, or you can load a variety of similar samples, and scrub through them to produce expressive motions. There’s already a lot that can be played around with here. I should also mention that it seemed to gather and load my samples fast. I have no clue how this thing handles memory, I don’t think I’d want it on a full project, but as a playful tool it is perfect. I think I’d love to just have a tablet with all my samples loaded and Mini running at all times as a general audio source.