Show HN: Clutter-free, powerful Mac-native sample manager
kickspro.appDoes this do any analysis of the sample files themselves or just auto tagging and searching based on the sample file name?
Is it using a local LLM or ChatGPT?
Hi, maker of Kicks here.
I don't like the trend where people put language models into everything, contributing to global warming. Samples from sound packs usually have most of the data in the names, it is just very unstructured. I have tons of regexps to figure out different info (like scale) from names.
That said, I'm working on actually analyzing files themselves with Apple Neural engine and pretrained local ML model with some spectral analysis. This will be a huge lift, but this project is a marathon for me until I'm somewhere where the price is well justified
As an extra data point, my sample library is an absolute mess with regards to filenames even though 99% of it is from professional packs. I'd love to see some analysis built in, BPM / key / notes etc. For instance, I've got one folder where everything in it is named `STAB 0001` etc. and there's about a thousand of them. Kicks hasn't renamed any of them, but has tagged them with some not so useful tags: `0001`, `1030`, `sample`, `stab` and `stabs` - the first is the latter part of the filename, I've no idea where the `1030` came from but that's on everything from that folder now.
As for the price, it's maybe a little steep for this launch version, but if you get some good results going with the local ML it'll be cheap.
One last thing, it would be amazing if this was a universal app so I could use it on my iPad where I do the vast majority of my music making. Good luck, I like it so far!
Wow, thanks a lot for the feedback. I'd love to keep iterating on tags.
1030 is clearly an attempt to pick up BPM. I try to find a number that's bigger than a simple sample number (like Kick_1 and Kick_2), but have completely forgotten to set an upper limit, will fix that!
What would be your ideal workflow for universal app? Would you like to selectively synchronize your sample library between devices? I've been thinking about it but wasn't sure if someone would use that.
> Does this do any analysis of the sample files themselves or just auto-tagging and searching based on the sample file name?
The site suggests the latter: "Kicks Pro figures instrument names, genres, BPM, scales and more from sample names." The lack of subscription pricing is also a signal that they're not using a paid API.
The privacy policy is not helpful in this regard. It's effectively, "We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer your information to outside parties, except when we do". https://www.kickspro.app/privacy-policy
Thanks for pointing out. TBH, I set myself a hard deadline to release until the end of 2023, so that privacy policy turned out to be very generic. I'll improve that
think fancy Finder window
Yes! Kinda the only one that supports j,k for navigation haha. VIM bindings are not yet implemented to the level I want it to be, so it is a bit of hidden feature
This is barely useful over vanilla file management in OS or DAW, but asking 50$ is just insulting.
This is so good, that I gonna put it on Kicks website as testimonial with your permission!
I replied earlier, that I'm committed to improve and add more stuff until the price is well justified. I wish I had 48 hours a day tho, haha
So this is just a wrapper thrown around ChatGPT? Inconsistency in punctuation leads me to believe it was done quickly, without a lot of thought and as money grab?
Not a money grab for sure, but you are actually right - landing was done very quickly (I'd even say extremely quickly), because I was missing a hard deadline I set for myself. You never know when something is good enough, I usually release fast and then improve over time. Thank you for pointing out to punctuation, I'll double check that.
PS: I'm actually offering to try it out for free on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LogicPro/comments/18xisdn/im_buildi...