Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ 4/5 Stars
For those yet unfamiliar with Audiomodern’s Soundbox Player, it is a sample playback engine that can host and blend four sample‑based presets. A free version is available, and it runs inside iOS, macOS or Windows DAWs as a plug‑in. A paid version is available with additional editing features, such as a sample and mapping editor. Most of the available sound packs are very attractively priced and, once installed, samples from any of the packs may be combined to create new user presets. Soundbox Player has separate envelope controls for each sample, modulation families, transpose options, arpeggiators and a dynamic blend panel that creates movement by applying a choice of geometrical shapes to a blend cursor. It supports MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) and is also multi‑touch enabled, making it one of the few samplers that offer both MPE and full multi‑touch support on iPad.
There are a couple of free sound packs that are worth exploring, but the focus of this review is the new Sonora Cinematic Aethervox, a pack that provides, as the name suggests, vocals of an ethereal nature. Sonora Cinematic have produced some wonderful vocal sound libraries and while Aethervox may only comprise 15 presets, up to four presets may be combined to create vocal textures that shift and evolve in a very emotive way. Apparently Aethervox’s source sounds are in the spirit of Sonora Cinematic’s respected Aria Vocalscapes and Emma Legato Kontakt libraries (I can’t say whether the samples used here have been taken from those libraries or not), and then formatted to produce this set of cinematic‑style vocal textures designed specifically to run in Soundbox. The whole library occupies only 350MB of drive space too.
There are pads, evolving textures, drones and haunting mini phrases (non‑tempo‑sync’ed vocal improvisations over suspended chords) that are well suited to film/TV scoring, ambient production and experimental electronic music. Some of the sounds are fixed notes, albeit very expressive ones with some lovely natural vibrato creeping in as the notes evolve. Others comprise a series of perhaps three notes that sound wonderfully evocative when played individually. There are some lovely hums and also sibilant whispered S to Ahh and S to Ooh sounds. There’s a lot of scope for building up vocal layers and I also managed to create some very useful ambient pads by combining Aethervox sounds with some of the free sound pack presets.
The sound design is well balanced between full‑sounding timbres and more airy layers, and can add a genuine sense of magic and mystery to a composition.
Some sounds can be played as you would a choir pad, others with the ability to conjure up emotion by holding down a single note and letting the sounds evolve. The sound design is well balanced between full‑sounding timbres and more airy layers, and can add a genuine sense of magic and mystery to a composition. Soundbox Player’s controls provide the means to blend textures and adjust dynamics without the user having to get bogged down in complexities, while the ability to add automatic movement really helps keep things interesting. This may be a relatively small library and one that falls at the lower end of the price bracket at that, but it really is capable of some beautiful‑sounding results.