Browse and Audition

Wavecrate is designed for fast listening passes. Select a sample, hear it, move on, and make lightweight decisions before the creative thread disappears.

Main Browsing Surface

The main surface has three working areas:

• Sources and folders: add local sources, choose folders, and narrow the current browser scope.
• Waveform: inspect the selected sample, seek, loop, mark regions, and perform waveform edits.
• Sample browser: sort, filter, rate, tag, and move through visible samples.

Audition Quickly

• Space toggles playback.
• Shift-Space replays from the last start point.
• Option-Space plays a random sample section.
• Up and Down move through the visible rows.
• Shift-Up and Shift-Down extend the sample selection.
• Esc stops playback, closes transient UI, or clears selection depending on context.
• The random controls can audition random sections or random listed samples when you want to break out of row order.

Narrow the List

Use the browser tools together:

• Folder selection limits the visible list to the chosen source area.
• Search filters by fuzzy text matching.
• Tag filters help separate keepers, trash, and untagged material.
• Playback-age filters surface never-played or stale sounds.
• Collections are temporary working buckets for the current session.
• Similarity search can focus the list around sounds related to the current sample.
• Starmap shows the same scoped results as a spatial similarity view when map data is available.

DAW Companion Loop

Wavecrate is meant to sit beside your DAW:

1. Keep the track playing in the DAW.
2. Audition candidate samples in Wavecrate.
3. Mark the region that starts to fit.
4. Copy or drag the selected clip into the DAW.
5. Return to browsing without reorganizing folders mid-session.