Clip workshop - what do you think?
I've been trying to find an easy way to import and organise spoken word clips for use in the tracks I'm making (something along the lines of Public Service Broadcasting), but I couldn't find a single app which did everything in one place.
I've vibe coded a workshop app for audio clips. I selected a bunch of reels on Facebook and created a playlist, and then used Claude to help me extract the URLs into a list.
The app then retrieves all of the clips, takes the audio and transcribes it. Each clip is summarised in the pane on the left. You'll see there's also a "meaning" tab. Select this and type in something like "religion" and it will display all clips with religion as a theme (it uses AI sentiment analysis to create a database for this).
It can also do a similar thing with reels from YouTube (and presumably Insta and TikTok - I just haven't tried those yet).
You can then select parts of the audio waveform for each clip (either using the words it has transcribed, or just selecting the waveform directly), and export them to a wav file, which you can then import into Kong or Mimic (or anything else). It generates a sensible name for the wav file from the clip.
It also normalises the amplitude of the clip, and applies some noise reduction.
There's a bunch of other features: some effects, zero-crossing detection for preventing clicks and pops, and an experimental bpm detection feature so you can map the transients of the spoken word to a specific tempo, with a visual guide (who knew that Desmond Tutu and Neil Kinnock both speak in a way which aligns almost exactly with 120bpm?).
It also has the facility to correct the transcripts directly from the UI.
At the moment, it all runs locally (except for the sentiment analysis, which Claude handles when requested in the cloud, and downloads the database), and the UI is a local HTML file, with some python in the background doing all the processing. I'm working on a collaborative version which lets you put the clips and the databases on a cloud drive somewhere, and work on stuff with colleagues.
If you're interested, let me know, and I'll bung it all on GitHub for your delight and delectation.
I only really use Reason, so if you think this might be of interest to other music makers, please do repost to other subs.
Comments please!
EDITED TO ADD: As one commenter wisely pointed out, any tool like this must still be used in accordance with appropriate copyright law. In my case, I'm using it in compliance with UK Fair Dealing exemptions for research and private study. If I put any code on GitHub, that will likely be under Apache-2.0, but I will not be incorporating any of the sample materials or outputs.