Tags: posts polarity-music Sampling VST-Plugin

Mini by AudioMap Sample Browser Plugin

Tutorial | Feb 13, 2026

Mini by AudioMap is a newly released sample browser plugin that uses an intuitive XY coordinate system to organize and visualize samples based on characteristics like brightness, noisiness, and percussiveness. It offers features such as customizable axes, keyboard mapping for quick playback, and the ability to scan entire directories, but currently lacks persistent folder scanning and a text-based search function. While it has some limitations like automatic sample playback on hover and missing quantization features, it is affordably priced and shows promise for rapid sample exploration and creative use.

You can watch the Video on Youtube

Short Overview

I recently picked up Mini by AudioMap, a sample browser that organizes your sounds on an XY grid, making it easy to explore and filter samples by attributes like brightness and noisiness. You can instantly audition samples just by hovering, although I wish there was an option to toggle that off. The plugin lets you add entire folders, map samples to your keyboard, and record quick ideas with handy shortcuts. While it's missing persistent folder saving and search features, it's affordable and promising, and I look forward to seeing more updates.

Introduction to Mini by AudioMap

Today, I want to share a tip about a new plugin I just purchased called Mini by AudioMap. It's a sample browser and viewer that offers a fresh approach to organizing and previewing your audio samples, which I think could be quite interesting for a lot of people working with samples.

The XY Coordinate System for Sample Navigation

One of the most distinctive features of Mini is its XY coordinate system. You can map sample properties to the axes, such as percussiveness, brightness, and noisiness. The X and Y axes can be freely assigned, letting you explore your sample collection visually and interactively.

Visual Clarity Through Color

Samples are also color-coded based on a property you select, like brightness, where blue means less brightness and red means more. This visual layer makes it easy to spot the character of your samples at a glance.

Instant Preview with Mouse Hover

Whenever you hover over any of the sample dots, that sample is played back automatically. While this provides instant feedback, it can get annoying if you just want to browse silently; there currently isn’t a way to toggle this playback feature off, which I hope is addressed in a future update.

Customizing and Managing Directories

On the right side of the plugin, you have the directory browser. You can add your own directories, either specific folders or parent directories containing subfolders of samples. The plugin will automatically scan and list all subfolders, which makes for easy management.

Directory Controls

You can solo, mute, or remove directories as needed, giving you flexibility over which samples are shown in your browser at any time.

Current Limitations and Bugs

A key issue right now is that when you remove or close the plugin from your DAW session, you lose your scanned folders, meaning you have to redo the scan every time. This lack of persistence is either a bug or a missing feature, but I hope the developer addresses it soon.

Filtering and Searching Samples

A notable absence is a dedicated search box for filtering samples by file name. I often rely on this feature in similar tools, like XO, which allows me to quickly find specific sounds, such as snares. A more advanced feature would allow searching by sample content, not just the file name, but even a simple search box would be a significant usability improvement.

Additional Features

Resizable Interface and Flexible Mapping

The XY browser can be resized as needed. At the top, there is a flexible keyboard mapping feature: you can draw and bend a line across the sample field to map those samples to specific keys on your MIDI keyboard. This is especially handy if you want to quickly load and play samples chromatically on your keyboard or in a drum sampler.

Sample Length Filtering

Length sliders allow you to filter samples by their duration, so you can quickly zero in on just short or long samples.

Mouse Gestures and Shortcut Integration

The plugin incorporates mouse gestures for speedy workflow enhancements. For instance, hitting R on your keyboard lets you record a gesture that selects and triggers samples as you browse, which is useful for automating or capturing creative sample sequences.

Desired Improvements

Quantization and Beat Grid Features

One missing workflow option is quantization. It would be helpful if Mini could quantize sample playback or triggering to a musical beat grid in real time, much like other DAW-native samplers. Currently, to achieve this, you have to resample your session and then manually quantize slices, which isn’t as flexible as real-time MIDI quantization.

Playback Toggle

A simple but much-requested feature is the ability to turn off automatic playback when hovering over samples. This could be a button or keyboard shortcut to make browsing less distracting.

Price and Availability

Mini by AudioMap is affordably priced at twenty five dollars and, being a recent release, may still be in active development with more features and bug fixes on the way.

Platform Compatibility

I am not sure about the compatibility with Linux, as I have not tested it on that platform. It’s worth experimenting if you’re a Linux user.

Conclusion

Mini by AudioMap is a promising and affordable sample browser with an intuitive visual interface and innovative mapping and gesture features. While it already has a solid foundation, I hope future updates will address persistence, add advanced search and filtering, and provide better playback controls. For those who work extensively with large sample libraries, it’s definitely worth a try.

Full Video Transcription

This is what im talking about in this video. The text is transcribed by Whisper, so it might not be perfect. If you find any mistakes, please let me know.
You can also click on the timestamps to jump to the right part of the video, which should be helpful.

Click to expand Transcription

[00:00:00] So just a quick tip for a plug-in on this Friday. It's called Mini by AudioMap. I just bought this
[00:00:05] yesterday and I thought it's maybe an interesting plug-in for you because it's a sample browser,
[00:00:09] sample viewer and a lot of people are interested in that. It gives you this kind of
[00:00:14] XY coordinate system for your samples. You can define what's on the X-axis, also what's on the
[00:00:20] Y-axis and how it's colored. It's noisiness, brightness. I guess everything that's blue
[00:00:26] is less and everything that's red is more. So blue is, in this case, you're not so bright and red is
[00:00:32] very bright. Every time you hover over some of these dots, it gets played back. Maybe it's not
[00:00:41] ideal for all cases. I wish there would be some kind of button where you can switch this off
[00:00:46] because every time you go over these dots, it plays back the sample. I guess it's okay.
[00:00:54] Then you can define it on the X-axis, for instance, percussiveness. So this is here, this axis,
[00:01:00] brightness. So here, everything here is not so bright. This is very bright. Then you go the Y-axis,
[00:01:06] which is very noisy and not so noisy. So which means I have a lot of bright, noisy samples and not
[00:01:19] many bright, not so noisy samples for some reason. I guess that's normal. You can also put this here
[00:01:26] on a diagonal line when you say brightness and brightness. You get something like this. So this
[00:01:32] is not bright. This is very bright. Then we also have down here length sliders. We can kind of filter
[00:01:46] for how long the samples. These are very short samples here.
[00:01:50] On the right side, we have all the directories. You can add, of course, your own directories.
[00:02:04] That's the whole point of it. You can solo certain directories here or just mute
[00:02:12] or just kick them out. You can also add parent directories. It's not like you have to define
[00:02:18] directories where you have samples directly in it. You can also just select parent directories
[00:02:23] and it scans all the sub directories in it. At the moment, I guess it's a bug, but if you close
[00:02:30] or if you remove the plug-in from your session, everything's gone. You have to scan these folders
[00:02:36] again so it's not persistent at the moment. Maybe there's a fix coming. I don't know. Maybe this
[00:02:40] is intended, but I guess it's not. Yeah, so this is a problem at the moment. I also miss here for
[00:02:48] the filtering some kind of search box, for instance, here in XO, which is kind of similar. So it's
[00:02:54] basically like mini but without the sequencer stuff here. Also here, when you hover over these
[00:03:01] samples, nothing happens. Here you have to click and drag and then if you want to drag something
[00:03:07] out, you have to hold down, I guess, here, control. Then it works exactly similar. Here it's a bit
[00:03:13] different, but it would be nice if you can just switch off the playback feature. So here I use
[00:03:20] the search box a lot. So I search for snare, for instance, and just filter for the file name.
[00:03:25] Yeah, this would be nice to have also in here just the text filtering. I guess it's not that hard.
[00:03:37] Even better would be if you could search for the real content. So if you type in snare and it also
[00:03:43] finds samples that are really snares, even though the file name says something completely different.
[00:03:50] But it's probably harder to do. Anyway, so this is the sampling and also here the XY coordinate
[00:03:58] system. You can also resize this. This is also no problem. There are something on the top here,
[00:04:04] right? So it gives you this kind of line that you can twist and bend.
[00:04:09] So this is the keyboard mapping, more or less. So these are now here, the low keys on my keyboard
[00:04:16] and these are the high keys on my keyboard. So I can put this line on top of my samples and then
[00:04:23] play it on my keyboard. So if you have a lot of samples and you just put this in random places,
[00:04:34] it could be really nice to have to just quickly load up samples onto your keyboard or fire it up
[00:04:42] in some kind of drum sampler instead of just dragging this out into a drum sampler and then
[00:04:48] triggering it differently. So yeah, nice to have. This is this feature here. You can also put this
[00:04:54] in all kinds of positions and bend it or twist it. No problem at all. Then there's here this record
[00:05:01] feature. I use most of the time see the keyboard shortcut which is just hitting R on the keyboard
[00:05:07] and then you can go through your samples like this and then you hit R again to stop recording.
[00:05:17] So this is called mouse gestures and then you can go into the plug in here and call or search for
[00:05:24] gestures, gesture position. Then you can automate this here of course in a bitwig or in a bar.
[00:05:35] Just draw in here some automation.
[00:05:40] What I miss here is something like a quantizer, a clock quantizer, what we have in the grid.
[00:05:53] So you can say only playback samples exactly in a 16-note grid or an 8-note grid or something
[00:05:59] dynamic. Maybe there is something like this already in there but usually what I had to do now or what
[00:06:07] I need to do is I need to resample this here and say bounce for instance postfader. Then you have
[00:06:15] like a lot of samples like this and then you right-click and you need to quantize it to a
[00:06:23] 16-note grid for instance. But this is like an audio. It would be nice if we could do this already
[00:06:28] with MIDI or with notes. So you can define the beat grid and then it quantizes all the triggers
[00:06:34] to this beat grid. It would be nice to have I would say. Then you can delete it here with this
[00:06:42] X and there is also a help menu here. You can see R is the shortcut for recording,
[00:06:46] control and drag and draw a MIDI line. This is what I showed you so you can say here
[00:06:52] or this is a multi-select shift, this multi-select.
[00:06:56] You can do something like this or sit on this. And you can multi-select if you want to track out
[00:07:05] multiple samples. Everything possible. This is the help. It's also not very expensive. I show you
[00:07:13] this here on the website. 25 bucks. I think this came out just a while ago, a few days ago. So it's
[00:07:21] not that old. I hope he brings in some fixes for the persistence of the samples and maybe add some
[00:07:31] small little features. Could be really nice to have. I don't know if it works within Linux.
[00:07:36] I have no idea. Try it out. Give it a try. I put the link in the description below and I think
[00:07:45] it's worth a try. Also playback here needs some kind of button that you can try it off at least
[00:07:54] or maybe P on the keyboard play or something like this. It would be nice. It's a bit annoying. Every
[00:08:02] time you go over these dots, you play it back basically. Anyway, that's the plugin called Mini
[00:08:09] by Audiomap. Link is in the description below. Let me know what you think. Leave a like, leave a
[00:08:14] subscription and see you next video. Bye.

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