A sample organizer for Mac that understands the audio

It reads the names you gave your samples, and listens to the ones whose names say nothing.

Yerk is a sample organizer for macOS. It reads the name a producer already gave each file, listens to the audio when the name says nothing, then files every sample into folders searchable in Finder by BPM, key, genre, instrument and mood. It runs on your Mac, uploads nothing, and never moves your originals.

Why a folder full of samples stays unsearchable

A working producer owns tens of thousands of samples, spread across a laptop, two external drives and a folder called “new” from 2021. Some of it is named well. JC Snap 03.wav tells you exactly what it is. Plenty of it is not: Audio 07.wav, bounce_final_v3.wav, the export you made at 3am. And none of it is in one place, under one convention, in an order anyone could search.

Tagging by hand fixes this for about a week. Nobody keeps it up, because the tagging takes longer than the music.

What Yerk does with a library

Point it at the folders and drives where your samples live. Then:

  1. Scan. Yerk walks every folder, including external drives, and finds the audio. Anything it cannot read gets listed with a count, whether that is an unsupported format, an alias, or a folder macOS will not let it open. You know exactly what was skipped and why.
  2. Read the name first. A producer who called a file snr or 808 or vox already knew what it was, and that is a stronger signal than any model. Yerk reads the name before it reads the audio, but only answers from a name when the name is unambiguous. Anything vague is passed on rather than guessed at.
  3. Listen to the rest. Files whose names say nothing go to the audio analysis: tempo, key, genre, instrument and mood, worked out from the sound itself. This happens entirely on your Mac. Nothing is sent anywhere, which also means it works on a plane and on unreleased material you would never upload.
  4. Organize. Files are placed into an organized library whose folder names carry the tags. That is the whole trick: Finder already knows how to search folder names, so a 140 BPM F minor melody loop is a Finder search away, with Yerk closed, in any DAW's file browser.

Your originals stay exactly where they were. Yerk never renames or moves the files you started with, so nothing you have already dragged into a project breaks.

What the tags are

  • BPM, tempo, so loops line up with the project before you drag them in.
  • Key, root and mode, so melodic samples land in tune.
  • Instrument, meaning kick, snare, hat, bass, keys, vocal, and so on.
  • Genre and mood, the words you would actually use to describe the sound to another producer.

Because these live in folder names rather than in a database inside one app, they survive. Switch DAWs, switch machines, open the drive on a friend's laptop. The organization is still there.

Local, not cloud, on purpose

Most sample tools that promise search by sound either live inside a plugin window or run their analysis in the cloud. Yerk does neither. It is a standalone Mac app, the model ships inside it, and your audio never leaves the machine. There is no account required to organize a library, no upload queue, and no dependence on a service staying online for your folders to keep making sense.

Who this is for

Producers on macOS with a library too big to know by heart, typically ten thousand samples and up across more than one drive, who work in Logic Pro, Ableton Live, FL Studio or Pro Tools and want the organization to show up in all of them. Windows is not supported.

If your main problem is moving a whole project between DAWs rather than finding a sound, read about FL Studio to Ableton transfer. For how Yerk compares with Sononym, XO, Atlas, Waves Cosmos and Splice, see alternatives.

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