The Assistant Manager

Sononym is a sample browser that offers a fresh perspective on how sounds can be explored and organized. The software is available for Windows, Linux, and MacOS. Sononym extracts a great deal of information from your samples and puts this information at your fingertips, including 'exotic' properties that you might not find elsewhere, perceived brightness, crest factor, and timbre, to name a few. Combine this with powerful tools for searching, filtering, and sorting samples, and you might just fall in love with your sample collection all over again. Similarity search enables you to find similar-sounding samples in your sample collection. Basically, pick any sound as input and "see where it takes you", finding variations has never been this easy. The software can even record live audio and use these recordings to find new samples. Duplicate detection identifies duplicate samples across your libraries.

When it comes to managing the samples in your labs Excel can allow you to quickly and easily record your samples, the data associated, and where they are stored and is commonly used. You set up either a Freezer spreadsheet defining the structure of the freezer with samples in the position of the boxes (which often gets taped to your freezer!) or a sample template that stores the specific sample information of interest to your lab and which box they are in (or were in!). With the use of pivot tables, you can perform some basic searching capacity on these to help you manage those samples. However, keeping this up to date if you ever need to find or use the samples isn’t simple and it’s easy to introduce errors. Equally as the number of samples increases the sheets become unwieldy and more difficult. Eventually, this leads to them no longer being used and freezers becoming disorganized.