AudioScout is a free desktop app that helps you catalog, search, browse, and explore your audio plugins. Currently in pre-alpha development.
For music producers and audio engineers
Watch the teaser video
AudioScout is a desktop application that helps music producers and audio engineers catalog, search, browse, and explore the audio plugins and standalone audio applications already installed on their systems. In the modern age of digital audio, and the explosion in popularity of VST plugins, it is very easy to accumulate hundreds or even thousands of plugins. AudioScout can be useful with any sized plugin collection, but it can be a real game changer when dealing with enormous collections.
Maximizing Creative Flow
When in a creative flow or on a deadline, AudioScout helps you quickly and painlessly find the right tool for the job, all from the set of tools that are already immediately available. Sometimes it helps to rediscover useful gems that may have done wonders in the past. Maybe you’re ready to roll the dice on something unexpected. Maybe you just have too many great plugins to remember all of their names. Whatever the reason, when every second counts, and you don’t have time to wade through clunky expandable text lists, AudioScout saves time by providing a rich and intuitive filter and browse experience that effectively helps you hone in on the one plugin you need in that exact moment.
The result is less time dealing with unmanageable lists and more time dialing in your sound. Choose your tool and move on.
Informative
It’s also a useful learning tool. Each plugin selection contains screenshots, user manuals, tutorial videos, and audio samples where available, so you don’t have to search the web to get relevant info about a given plugin. It’s all right there.
Advanced Search/Filter Experience
It has an advanced tag filtering system that makes generating a short list of highly relevant matches very fast and low-effort.
I made it for myself.
AudioScout was born out of a need I had to keep track of my growing plugin collection. I started listing all my plugins in a spreadsheet with helpful links to thinks like user manual, product page, etc. I also started listing the category of effect or instrument.
I soon outgrew the spreadsheet as my collection rose from dozens to hundreds of plugins. I thought it would be neat to be able to filter my plugin list quickly by multiple keywords, so I built a quick prototype app around the data I had collected. Two years on, the tool I started building that has evolved into what I am now calling AudioScout has become an indispensable part of my production workflow. It saves me so much time and mental energy during technical tasks that I spend more time cruising in the creative and inspired zone. Which is the best place to be.
At some point I thought others might find this tool useful as well, so I started thinking of ways to make the tool more general-use, and less ad-hoc.
Of those besides myself who have used AudioScout (as of this writing still not that many), the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and in at least one case has become an indispensable tool in their workflow as well.
As of this writing, AudioScout is only available as a custom, ad-hoc installation. A public beta is not yet available, but that is the first milestone on the development roadmap.
The functional prototype I have built over the past couple of years is in a state where it serves my needs, but some key modules still need to be built in order to generalize it for other users.
Cost & Licensing
Currently looking at free/open-source licenses as possible release frameworks. A lot of decisions will be made after gauging community interest, but if AudioScout is free and open then a crowdfunding effort (e.g. Patreon) would be likely to fund ongoing development and maintenance. I’m about at the threshold of what I can do myself. If AudioScout is to gain users then I would need to start finding teammates to take the project to the next level.
Thinking ahead, should AudioScout happen to become a hit (wouldn’t that be awesome??), I could see there being some opportunities to bring in commercial revenue from licensing deals with DAW developers for integrating the technology. But good ol’ fashioned begging people for money on the internet might suffice. Still too early to tell.
In any case, I really like the idea of this tool being free for end users. I can’t imagine paying for the privilege of looking at things I already paid a small fortune for. So why should anyone else?
I’m also not down with “free” meaning mining personal user data. Not on my watch.
I’m particularly inspired by projects like Wikipedia and Blender.
Built with Electron and React. Currently Mac-only, but Windows support is on the roadmap. Electron was chosen in part because of its deployment on multiple operating systems. Code is hosted on GitHub. As of this writing, the repository is private, but if AudioScout is open-sourced then it will be made public.
Hi, I’m Aaron. :)
AudioScout was designed and built by me. I’m a UX designer and front-end web developer by trade. I’ve been making music my entire life. The passion goes way beyond hobby and is a core part of who I am. In more recent years I got into audio engineering and DAW-based production. I’m still learning, but I absolutely love this world. AudioScout is at the nexus of everything I just mentioned.
You can find some of my tracks on SoundCloud if you’re interested: