Search by ear: find a sound without knowing its name

A filename can tell you where a sound came from without telling you what it sounds like. The Library can search both ways. Type a name to filter the list, or begin with ? and describe a sound. AudioCortex ranks analyzed sounds by their sound categories, on your Mac.

Start with Analyze

Open the Library and browse to a folder of sounds. Click a file to hear it. Folders analyze as they list; the Analyze button runs analysis on the sounds in the current list. Results are remembered, and analysis does not change the recording.

Analyze reads the sound’s tempo, key, level and category. Classify is the part that names what the sound is: one of 454 categories, such as kick, pad or vocal, with a confidence. These are judgments about the sound, so listen before deciding that a category fits.

A sound that has never been analyzed cannot rank in a describe-a-sound search. If something seems missing, browse its folder and let it analyze, or run Analyze on the list. An unanalyzed file can still be found by name in the list in front of you.

Describe what you want

In the title-bar search, type ? deep bass. The words are matched to sound categories, and the analyzed sounds are ranked by how strongly they match. This works without Oscilla: the Library does the matching itself.

Try a clear sound description first: bass, kick, pad, vocal or bell. Then click the results and listen. The search gives you candidates even when the filenames say little about them; it does not make the final choice for you.

Without a prefix, the title-bar search filters names, categories and embedded descriptions. The prefix changes what you are asking the Library to do.

Search beyond the open folder

Begin with * to search every analyzed sound on this Mac, across folders, collections and scan sets. The results open as a list of their own.

• kick filters the list in front of you.
• ? deep bass ranks analyzed sounds in that list by sound.
• * kick searches across the analyzed library.
• *? deep bass combines the wider search with a sound description.

The wider search covers what the app has analyzed. It is useful to prepare the folders you return to often, so the next search has more to work with.

Keep folders together with a scan set

In the sidebar, choose + ▸ New Scan Set. A scan set is a named set of folders and individual sounds. Drop them onto the set in the sidebar or into its list. Open the set to see the sounds under all of its folders, including their subfolders.

For a whole folder tree, use Deep Scan. It walks the tree in the background and keeps what it finds for next time. You can pause it. Once the sounds are analyzed, the * search can find them by name or by sound.

Look at what you found

The preview strip under the list shows one scope at a time. Choose it from the pop-up on the strip’s bar; your choice is kept across launches.

• Chroma shows notes over time, the chord per bar, key and tuning. Use it when you want to inspect the pitched content of a candidate.
• Loudness shows short-term and momentary loudness, true peak, crest and sections. Look here to see how the level changes through a recording.
• Stereo shows width, correlation, a goniometer and a low-end mono check. It helps you inspect how the left and right channels relate.
• Balance compares the average spectrum with a track you choose using Reference…. The comparison brings the files to the same loudness first.

Waveform and Spectrogram are there too. A playhead follows playback on the time pictures. Listen, look, then drag the chosen sound onto Tracks, DJ, Phylo or Nodes in the sidebar to carry it into the next part of your work.

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