Beta
Remember every track you've ever made.
We believe that your creative work should never die in darkness — whether the darkness is between you and your past self, or between your work and the person who needs it.
MusicCat catalogues the music you've already written — full DAW projects, voice memos, chord sketches, finished mixes — and listens to the audio to surface what's in it: tempo, key, mood, transcribed lyrics, even the music theory under your fingers. AI describes what you've done so a song you wrote at 2 AM three years ago can find its way back to you. Built for anyone who writes music — in a DAW, on a guitar, or with a melody on the bus.
MusicCat is in beta — usage is currently free of charge. Help shape it: .
Works with your DAW
- Ableton Live .als
- Cubase .cpr
- Bitwig .bwproject
- Akai MPC .xpj
- Reaper .rpp
- FL Studio .flp
- GarageBand .band
- Logic Pro .logicx
- DAWproject .dawproject
How it works
Scan
The client watches the folders you pick and notices every project file — Ableton, Cubase, Bitwig, MPC, Reaper, dawproject — plus standalone audio: voice-memo melodies and finished mixes.
Describe
An LLM reads the stems, parses the DAW file, and writes a searchable description — genre, mood, BPM, key, instrumentation.
Browse
Filter, sort, and preview. Jump back to the session in your DAW when you find the track you half-remember.
Share
Invite a trusted collaborator by email. They get their own "Shared with me" view and can leave timestamped comments.
Your MPC work outlives the card
Standalone gear keeps your projects on removable media — and cards fail, get reformatted, or travel to a session and never come back. Plug your MPC into the computer running MusicCat: the client notices the drive the moment it appears, asks once whether it may look, and preserves what it finds. No export step, no dragging folders, nothing to remember.
Plug in
Connect the MPC over USB — internal drive or SD card. The client recognises MPC-shaped storage the moment it mounts.
Answer once
MusicCat asks before it reads anything: always, just this time, or never for this drive. It remembers what you said, per drive.
Preserved
Your sequences land in the same catalogue as your DAW projects — described, searchable, and safe if the card isn’t.
The first time this ran on a real MPC Live, it noticed the card and started preserving 1.6 seconds after it was plugged in — 43 projects, three of which existed nowhere else.
Privacy
You own what you upload
Your projects and audio remain yours. We don’t sell your data or share your catalogue with third parties.
No training on your audio
We never use your uploads to train or fine-tune any model.
Honest analytics
Anonymous usage events only — no third-party trackers, no session recording, no audio leaving your machine for anything other than the catalogue you asked us to build.
What it looks like
Informative project cards
Every project at a glance — BPM, key, duration, time signature, AQ score, mood and genre tags, mixdown preview, lock state, and a one-click jump back into the DAW.
Dynamic search and filtering
Filter by DAW, genre, mood, key, BPM range, heaviness, and project status. Sort by what you actually look for — last worked on, most recently described, AQ score.
DAW and audio analysis
The catalogue surfaces what the DAW file knows (tempo, key, time signature, plugins) alongside librosa-derived audio features (energy, brightness, danceability, harmonic vs. percussive, loudness, rolloff) — both feed the AI description.
Song Seeds
Not every idea starts in a DAW. Hum a melody into your phone, jot down a chord loop, capture a chorus on the bus — Song Seeds are first-class catalogue entries with full audio analysis (BPM, key, energy) and Whisper-transcribed lyrics. The song doesn’t die between voice memo and DAW.
Audio Notes
Spoken thoughts about other tracks, mixing reference recordings, lyric ideas you sing to yourself — Audio Notes capture audio that isn’t a song idea on its own. Whisper transcribes them so you can search the words you said weeks ago.
Lyrics from your mixdowns
If there are vocals in the mix, MusicCat transcribes them automatically with Whisper and stores the lyrics alongside the track. Edit the transcript when you want the real released lyrics instead. Lyrics become searchable text — "the song with ‘midnight train’ in the second verse" becomes a one-second lookup.
Workshop · Explorer
A music-theory IDE built into the catalogue. Plug a MIDI keyboard in, play any chord, and Explorer names it, shows every inversion, every scale it lives in, every reasonable next chord, and every modulation it opens up. Passive reference, not generative AI — it explains what you’re hearing, you stay the composer.
Feedback from people you trust
Share a project with a collaborator and ask for their ears. They hear the actual mixdown and comment at the moment that matters — at 0:45, the low end gets crowded — replies quote the point they answer, and the whole exchange lives with the track. Conversations across all your projects read in one place, so feedback never gets lost in a chat app.
Download the client
The desktop client is what scans your DAW folders and syncs to your server. Current release: v0.6.1.