Tamber 2.0 评测：这套音乐创作工具套件正是我们期待已久的东西

$9.99 per month or $99 annually, tamber.music

I have to admit, the backstory of Tamber is hard to resist. Small teams of music lovers making slightly odd, quite specific, but genuinely powerful tools? Sign me up.

The brainchild of musician and developer Zoe Wrenn, this eclectic software suite started life as a solo project during COVID. Originally intended for use in her own work, some viral attention online helped convince Wrenn that these tools had wider appeal, and in 2024 Tamber was christened as a company.

Since then the suite has grown to five creative applications covering workflow, instrumentation, performance, and sound discovery. I set out to see if this start-up can measure up.

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First up is Librarian – the amuse-bouche of the Tamber suite. The company bills it as the ‘ultimate sample organiser’, which, considering there is plenty of strong competition from paid options like Waves’ COSMOS Sample Finder and Sononym, is a bold claim to make. However, Librarian stands out for two persuasive reasons – its zero-dollar price tag, and its buzzy synaesthetic tagging system.

Beyond standard search tags such as genre, instrumentation, and BPM, users can also navigate using descriptions based on feel or colour. The company says artists with synaesthesia helped to create the labelling system, and so these tags aren’t just arbitrary designations. Exactly how these descriptive labels are mapped to a user’s sample library is fairly mysterious, but the results deliver. Searching for a ‘spongy’ sound does in fact give me a selection of samples that do feel, well, sort of spongy.

You can also search via sample, either by uploading audio or recording directly into Librarian, and the favourite sounds can be added to a user bank, or ‘crate’ in Tamber’s terminology, for quick access once you’ve jumped into a session.

Alongside organising samples, Tamber offers a selection of their own. City Packs, the culmination of a global crowdsourcing effort, is made up of field recordings provided by Tamber’s users. These recordings were handed over to producers who selected the best bits and processed them into usable percussion, melodic, and atmospheric samples. The resulting library is full of unique and odd found sounds, non-western instrumentation, and evocative ambiences.

Alas, these samples don’t appear to be searchable via Librarian, but this is apparently coming later this year. Nevertheless, City Packs are a great resource for anyone looking to expand their musical palette – something that is also true of Tamber’s Sonic Atlas.

Sonic Atlas is a fascinating curio that serves as a music discovery application rather than a direct source of raw material. Set the date range, spin the globe, and let your ears wander. It’s a great source of inspiration, but be aware that it links up with Apple Music – so if you don’t use that streaming service, then you’ll only be able to listen to a few seconds of each song.

Next up is an AI-powered assistant named Tamby. Currently available only for Ableton Live versions 11 and 12, Tamby can create tracks, add stock or third-party plugins to that track, enable recordings from specific bars within the session, toggle loop recording and more. All of this can be controlled via a text interface or through voice commands.

In practice, I find Tamby works more consistently and offers deeper functionality than the voice control included in Universal Audio’s LUNA (and that one is literally built into the software by the company). Of course, it’s still not perfect and does sometimes get confused. You need to think out your instructions carefully, especially in the case of adding plugins, to avoid errors. For example, I want to add Ableton Live’s Hybrid Reverb to a track. I ask Tamby to add ‘a hybrid reverb plugin’ and instead get a random one – once I repeat my instruction with clearer language, all is well.

Despite those growing pains, Tamby still feels genuinely useful, and work is already underway to expand compatibility to Logic Pro, and FL Studio after that. This is definitely one to watch.

Last but not least is Gestures: a synthesiser/MIDI controller that uses your webcam as its interface. Both hands can be tracked at once, and you can designate one to trigger notes or chords, and one to perform modulation. The tracking is incredibly solid and works for me even in low light – making it a possible candidate for live performance.

The synth itself is solid if not mind-blowing, and there’s also a nifty vocoder which allows you to combine singing and hand gestures for all kinds of fun. But, for anyone who already has a few go-to synths in their collection, Gestures can be mapped to control any other instrument or audio plugin in your toolkit. Anyone who’s been intrigued by the possibilities offered by dedicated hardware units such as the Audima Sway or Roli’s Airwave should strongly consider Gestures, as it manages to offer comparable functionality at a bare fraction of the cost.

Taken as a whole, it’s hard to pin down exactly who Tamber is made for. It hits a number of different use cases, and this could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on your creative approach. I suspect there will be some who would prefer this suite be ‘un-bundled’ and offered as individual items – and as single purchases rather than as a subscription.

However, the quality of what’s on offer makes a strong case that a monthly fee of $9.99, or $99 for the year, can be justified. Rather than gimmicks, there’s genuine depth to each of these tools, and for people who believe that AI does have real potential amidst the hype, this suite is exactly the kind of thing we’ve been waiting to see.

Key features

• 5 applications included in the subscription
• Free to use sample organiser, Librarian
• Access to 21 City Packs recorded around the world
• Hands-free DAW control using Tamby
• Ableton Live 11 and 12 integration for Tamby, with planned expansion to Logic Pro and FL Studio
• Gestural synth and vocoder (also available as a separate plugin)

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