Sing it once.
Find it
forever.
L–1 is a free app for Mac, iPhone and iPad. Point it at your samples, your voice memos, your half-finished songs — it listens to every file, learns its key, its tempo and the words you sang, and turns the pile into a library you can search.
Try it — press SCAN, then search a word you sang.
Point it at the pile
Four hundred voice memos named MEMO 214. A drum loop nine folders deep. A take whose key you forgot. You own all of it and you can't get to any of it — sessions don't end on hard creative decisions, they end on looking.
- POINT At the sample drive, the memos, the project folders. Nothing moves and nothing is imported — L–1 reads your files where they already live.
- IT LISTENS To the audio itself, not the file name: the key, the tempo, what's playing, and the words — transcribed, so a line you sang once is something you can type into a search box.
- YOU SEARCH Type the lyric. Filter by key and tempo. Tap play. What you were looking for is a search instead of an afternoon, and the night goes on creating.
The card lives in the file
What L–1 learns isn't kept in a database beside your files — it's written into each file's own metadata, where Serato has kept cue points for twenty years. The audio is never touched.
Rename it, move it, mail it to somebody — it still knows its key, its tempo and its words. And if L–1 vanished tomorrow, every file would still be where you left it, still carrying everything it learned.
The machine writes in pencil — a guess with its work shown, and a re-scan may correct it. You write in ink — the title, the tags, a corrected key — and the machine never writes there. Not on a re-scan, not on an upgrade, not ever.
Disagree with the reading and you win.
Every scan runs on your device, offline. Nothing is uploaded and nothing you own trains anything — there is no network path to switch off, because none was ever built.
A library, not a lock
FERRIC LIBRARY in your own iCloud Drive — plain folders, plain files, no database, no proprietary container. Rename or refile in Finder and L–1 reads it as it stands.
One shelf on Mac, iPhone and iPad. The desk is the librarian; the phone is the digger on the couch. Apple carries the folder — L–1 never syncs anything itself.
Your Ableton library and your hardware synths appear in the same room — read, searched, auditioned, and never moved or renamed. What another program owns, L–1 never touches.
No account, no lock, nothing to subscribe to. The code will be open source — a room that can outlive its maker.
Make hardware or software instruments? One JSON file puts your machine in the room — the Ferric SDK, for instrument makers →
Free. The kit's front room.
The shelf is yours, not ours — plain files in your own iCloud, readable with or without us.
Free at release. It is on the bench now — leave your email and I'll send word the day it opens.
Hear about it first.
This one is still being built — there is no build to hand you yet, and I would rather say so than take your address under a promise.
Bench notes while it's made, and the day it opens for testing. Nothing else, ever.
The bench is the desk these are made on. The regulars hear what comes off it first — what got built, what broke, and what ships next.
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