Producers pay for three or four of these and still lose work.
Producers who want to search samples by sound, move projects between DAWs and keep projects backed up usually run three or four separate tools: a sample organizer, a converter service and a backup app. Yerk covers all three on macOS in one app, with the classifier running locally. Here is how it compares, tool by tool.
| Yerk | Sample organizers | Splice | Jukeblocks | Backblaze | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organizes the samples you already own | ● | ● | ○ | ○ | ○ |
| Result visible in Finder and every DAW browser | ● | ◐ | ○ | ○ | ○ |
| Converts projects between DAWs | ● | ○ | ○ | ● | ○ |
| Backs up DAW projects so they still open | ● | ○ | ○ | ○ | ◐ |
| Runs entirely on your machine | ● | ● | ○ | ○ | ○ |
● does this · ◐ partly · ○ not what it is for. “Sample organizers” covers Sononym, XO, Atlas and Waves Cosmos, which differ from each other. See below.
A standalone sample browser that analyses your library locally and lets you search by similarity to a reference sound. Strong at “find me more like this one.” The organization lives in Sononym's own browser; your folders on disk stay as they were, so the result is only visible inside Sononym.
Both are plugins built around a visual map of drum samples: XO by XLN Audio, Atlas by Algonaut. Excellent for building a drum kit from a large collection of one-shots. Both are drum-focused, and both live inside the plugin window: the map exists in the plugin, not in your file system.
A free plugin from Waves that tags samples by instrument, key and tempo and lets you browse them inside the plugin. Wide format support and a very low barrier to entry. Like the others, the tags are Cosmos's, not your folders'.
Where Yerk differs: it organizes the files themselves. The tags become folder names, so the result shows up in Finder, in Logic's browser, in Live's browser, on a friend's Mac, anywhere the drive goes, with no plugin open. It also covers the whole library, not only drums. What it does not do is give you a visual similarity map inside a plugin; if that is the workflow you want, XO or Atlas is built for it.
Splice is a subscription library of new sounds with a desktop app for browsing and downloading them. It is where you go for a sample you do not have yet. Yerk is for the samples you already own: the packs, the field recordings, the bounces from old sessions, which Splice does not touch. Most producers who use Yerk also use a marketplace; the two are not competing for the same job.
An online service that converts projects between DAW formats. You upload a project file and download the converted one. Yerk's FL Studio to Ableton conversion does the same job on your Mac: the project is read and written locally, nothing is uploaded, and the conversion sits next to the organizer and the backups rather than being a separate account. If you need a DAW pair Yerk does not support yet, an online converter is the right tool today.
General-purpose backup copies files. That is not quite the same as keeping a DAW project safe. A Logic Pro project, for instance, is a folder that macOS treats as a single document purely because of its name; copy it in the wrong way and it stops being a project. Yerk backs up the project bundle as a bundle, verifies every copied file against its checksum, keeps recent versions, and does it on a schedule to Dropbox, Google Drive or an external drive, even when the app is not open. Backblaze is a fine last line of defence for the whole machine. It is not a versioned, verified backup of the session you are working on right now.
No single app covers organization, backup and DAW transfer. Each of the tools above is good at its slice, and the sensible producer ends up with three subscriptions, three logins and three places where the same library is described three different ways. Yerk is one app for the file layer, on the machine where the files are.
More detail on each piece: sample organization, DAW transfer, and the FAQ for backups.