Once upon a time, maybe 15 years ago? there was a mac program/database that could index audio files with assorted metadata including keywords. Not really for music tracks, but other types of audio such as bird/bug/bat calls, audio loops, and such. The essential feature was that it produced summary waveforms so you could visually scan through a list of them to find things of interest, and quickly jump in to listen to the relevant part without having to listen though a lot of dreck before the potentially good bits, and it was possible to trim in the program. I think it might also have be able to produce sonograms, which would be extremely useful. When I saw it I wanted it, but it was kind of expensive and I didn’t have an immediate need so I didn’t get it.
Now I’m starting to try recording bird calls and am getting a bat detector for the summer, so I really want it or something similar, but can’t find anything, either in my bookmarks or search. I’m not willing to glue one together myself–life’s too short and getting shorter…
Any ideas, either for apps or useful search terms?
That’s a really interesting looking app, but unfortunately it’s quite focussed on musical sounds, and it doesn’t keep waveforms in the database but generates them when selected.
I still haven’t found just what I want. I found an old quick look generator, QLWaveForm.qlgenerator, but it’s quite slow. It also stops working at Catalina which isn’t a problem for me since I still primarily use Sierra. Oddly, I had to download it from catalina since on Sierra that github pages fails to fully load in safari.
More interestingly, I stumbled on Audio Ease Snapper, which activates when you click on an audio file in Finder. It not only generates very nice waveforms which you can manipulate and listen to right there, but also has a plethora of useful audio tools, including selecting a clip and dropping that into anything that accepts audio, conversions etc. Though it’s not a database of waveforms, it’s pretty fast, and it caches recently seen waveforms so it’s pretty quick to scan back and forth through a folder of sounds once they’re cached, and you can increase the cache size. As a bonus it works on Sierra up, so I can use it on my primary mac without file sharing slowness. Since I can drop clips right into Amadeus Pro, it’s fairly painless to get a quick look at a sonogram or spectrum, and maybe that can be streamlined via keyboard maestro. There’s a 100 day non-crippled demo period, and I’ll be buying it unless I find bad bugs with further use (haven’t found any yet). It’s only 60 euros, no subscriptions. There’s no manual, but the few short videos were useful enough. One snippet in a video briefly shows it working inside of iTunes too, presumably an older version before apple starting removing as many as possible opportunities for delightful 3rd party improvements.