Playbox Future Updates

Plight

To those in the know...

Playbox is the most exciting production tool I've laid my hands on to-date. The tool is a fantastic concept, the preset stacks are impeccably designed and trigger so many ideas for me. The tool has helped me appreciate some of the subtleties of layering, as well as exploring progressions. The sound design and thought process that has gone into the underlying samples is brilliant. I'd love to learn more about that process as @Nadine Raihani said it took 1-1.5 years and I can see why! The ability to import custom samples is brilliant. The presets are so evocative.

The tool was released a couple of years ago now and I'd love to know if there will ever be an update or expansion. It seems it was popular on release and a number of users covered off what they'd love to see in the FAQ at that time.

It would be just amazing to see:

• Melody mode come to life! You can already achieve this with some work, but being able to run one of these brilliant samples or a set of unison samples up and down single keys across a few octaves instead of chords would be great.
• Similar to above, splitting each of the five sound elements across five octaves on the keyboard with each tied to its corresponding note. This would make composing with multiple sample elements (i.e. in piano roll) much faster. For Playbox inception, you could assign unison chord sets to each of these five octaves to get the best of chord layering + melody composition.
• A quick way to extract stems of desired elements. At present, I will turn down the volume of each unwanted layer and turn off the relevant parts of FX so I can get the dry sound into my workflow.
• Allowing the FX engine to operate with an external input. It is so good and could be a successful plugin in its own right! Paired with the above, this simplifies the final mix and managing sends/returns.
• A loop function in the sample editor to add sustain.
• Would love to see some sound expansion packs!

Some more mundane suggestions which would nevertheless be hugely valuable:

• Undo/Redo buttons on each page, especially to back out a dice roll that didn't go as intended.
• Ability to quickly mute or solo a sample, as well as a row.
• Ability to add or remove a note to a chord using a + or - instead of having to re-record the whole chord.
• Others have asked for a dark mode.

My final thought is if you developed an algorithm like XO's XLN Audio for sorting/categorisation of similar sounds, you could create a tool to bulk ingest a wide variety of sounds in each category to really blow the randomisation wide-open.

Thanks for this tool, I've enjoyed it immensely.

Cheers

Plight

Jeremy_NI

@Plight I'm forwarding your feature requests to the team. Thanks for the love and input!

Kymeia

It's just so disappointing that it is only mapped to 8 keys - I want to be able to actually play it across the keyboard like an instrument. It's hardly being used, at most it's fun to generate new sounds with, which is a pity as it can sound great.

Plight

Thanks @Jeremy_NI, appreciate it!